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Who's more likely to dominate the future of technology, Apple or Google?

Like the tagline in that movie, Casino - Nothing stays on top forever.

Once Steve Jobs is gone, the vision is lost. A myopic and controlled vision at best. Right now, I gotta say Apple is the best. Maybe for the next 5 years, it could still be the best. But technology, especially in the cell phone market can be fickle. People like change. Apple will still have a cult following, Steve Jobs or not. But once their legendary pitchman is gone, the domino effect is waiting. The luster is gone. Steve Jobs is Apple's Willy Wonka.

New kings get named. A torch gets passed. Staying on top isn't forever. Google may eventually win once they planted all the multiple seeds onto multiple carriers. At this point, I am not crazy about Android's polish. In time, I will eventually like it and tolerate it enough. Their hardware will always evolve faster while Apple is stuck with theirs for another year. Once Google gets their software right, they are dangerous. I'm just trying to enjoy my iPhone 4 for as long as I can. By 2012, who knows if I own an Android device by then? Variety is the spice of life and maybe I want change just as much as LeBron James. Android has made some leaps and bounds in a span of less than two years. Credit Google who are inexperienced and at least two decades younger than Apple.
 
buggsy2 said:
Apple depends on Steve Jobs, one person, to make things happen. When he goes, the company returns to mediocrity.
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You have brought up an excellent point. Apple is the hi-tech sectors version of the Greatful Dead. A rock band with an identical cult like following. When their much revered leader Gerry Garcia died, the band faded away. History will repeat itself when Apple loses Jobs. He knows this, it's the reason he lied to everyone when he dissapeared for the organ transplant. Leaving what was essentially a rudderless ship behind. Next time Apple may not be so lucky if he fails to return to form. You know what they say about a house of cards.
 
I don't think Steve Jobs is the only person at Apple with the vision of easy to use, polished, high quality, stable, attractive looking devices, or the vision to innovate how we interact with computers.

It may have started off as his vision but I think by now, it has seeped entirely into most of Apple's upper management. I hope so atleast.

Ive is already in place to take over Steve Jobs role when he leaves and they actually seem quite similar philosophically.

Or better yet, the person who helped design webOS and then returned to Apple, he seems to have adopted the same core philosophy as Jobs well enough.
 
Who ever has the most money! Look at Microsoft...They come out with software that is more likely to fail at some point so you have to buy the next. Apple will follow in big brothers foot steps, and there will be another garage company to go against them too.
 
Ryeno said:
Which means very little because (non-kinect) Mircosoft and Google have no vision.
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Just because you don't agreed with their vision it doesn't mean they don't have one, those companies have very clear way of thinking approaching the same matter:

MS: Physical Software, Google: cloud computing, Apple: ripoff customer (just kidding, love :apple:) - close hardware/software iteration, full control.
 
Opstech said:
Who ever has the most money!
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Money means jack if you lack vision.

At the start of this decade right as smartphones took off, Microsoft was sitting on 40 billion dollars in capital. They build the Windows Mobile brand, well before anyone else.

However, they completely lacked vision and made a piece of crap. I've used Windows Mobile phones and it's the dumbest most unintuitive garbage I've ever come across since Windows Me.

Apple hopped into the mobile market with a fraction of the capital, no prior experience with mobile OSs, but lots of vision about where to take mobile OSs and came to dominate it.

Microsoft half asses everything. It took them like 15 iterations of Windows before they finally made a great one (Windows 7). PowerPoint is still complete garbage. And despite their enormous capital and investment opportunity, the only projects they have ever made money on their whole lives were Windows and Office. Every other project, they took a loss on.

Google does have creative people with cool ideas. But they lack the vision to really put the resources into getting those cool ideas implemented the way they should be, so they are usable. This is why the only area where they have ever made any money is on internet search.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

This question is, as you can imagine, complicated.

If you want to know who will "win" the battle over mobile OS's, then I'd say eventually Android. IMHO, the walled garden of iOS and the AppStore helped the iPhone break out of the Apple loyalist/fanboy market and gain acceptance as the first sucsessful smartphone for the "regular" consumers. But the sheer number of Android-based phones being produced combined with the power Android gives to the carriers to decide features (here in the subsidized market of the States), will lead to an eventual tipping point where the Android OS becomes for mobile what Microsoft Windows became for the PC. Apple may regress back to licensing software and stagnate (like pre-Steve Jobs return) when Steve isn't there one day, but maybe not.

If Apple has learned anything over the last few years, it should be that they are extremely profitable as a premium-priced all-in-one hardware maker, producing software and offering services ONLY as it fits within their business ecosystem.

Assuming Apple keeps doing that, then they will likely "lose" the battle for mobile OS marketshare, but "win" the war of profitshare. (sound kinda familiar?)
 
wikoogle said:
Money means jack if you lack vision.

At the start of this decade right as smartphones took off, Microsoft was sitting on 40 billion dollars in capital. They build the Windows Mobile brand, well before anyone else.

However, they completely lacked vision and made a piece of crap. I've used Windows Mobile phones and it's the dumbest most unintuitive garbage I've ever come across since Windows Me.

Apple hopped into the mobile market with a fraction of the capital, no prior experience with mobile OSs, but lots of vision about where to take mobile OSs and came to dominate it.

Microsoft half asses everything. It took them like 15 iterations of Windows before they finally made a great one (Windows 7). PowerPoint is still complete garbage. And despite their enormous capital and investment opportunity, the only projects they have ever made money on their whole lives were Windows and Office. Every other project, they took a loss on.

Google does have creative people with cool ideas. But they lack the vision to really put the resources into getting those cool ideas implemented the way they should be, so they are usable. This is why the only area where they have ever made any money is on internet search.
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You are leaving out one important vision. Steve himself said that in order for Apple to survive, we need partners, circa 1997. Steve's vision didn't save apple. Microsoft bailed them out big time. I'm no Microsoft lover but I keep up with visions of survival. They gave them money to rebuild apple.
Check this video out,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxOp5mBY9IY
 
maturola said:
Now...i think you should remove "NeXT step" from your Bad ideas list,.,...NeXT step is the foundation os OSX and fundamental predecessor to the whole Objective-C + mobile Cocoa currently use in IOS.
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I rest my case :p

I absolutely hate objective-c and cocoa. It is seriously 10 years behind currently programming trends and technologies and XCode is one of the worst development environments available today. I never want to go back to c/c++ coding.

I'm old enough to have used a NeXT Step while (legally) drinking beer. It was ahead of it's time, but a failure :eek:. I also owned a Newton, never bothered with a lisa. I was a apple authorized service rep for 5 years, back when a good mac was a MAC IIci.
 
hariustrk said:
I rest my case :p

I absolutely hate objective-c and cocoa. It is seriously 10 years behind currently programming trends and technologies and XCode is one of the worst development environments available today. I never want to go back to c/c++ coding.

I'm old enough to have used a NeXT Step while (legally) drinking beer. It was ahead of it's time, but a failure :eek:. I also owned a Newton, never bothered with a lisa. I was a apple authorized service rep for 5 years, back when a good mac was a MAC IIci.
Click to expand...

While I don't disagree with you, the millions and millions of developers, application and devices running IOS make it a success even when you and I hate it.
 
wikoogle said:
Microsoft half asses everything. It took them like 15 iterations of Windows before they finally made a great one (Windows 7). PowerPoint is still complete garbage. And despite their enormous capital and investment opportunity, the only projects they have ever made money on their whole lives were Windows and Office. Every other project, they took a loss on.

Google does have creative people with cool ideas. But they lack the vision to really put the resources into getting those cool ideas implemented the way they should be, so they are usable. This is why the only area where they have ever made any money is on internet search.
Click to expand...

Hey hey Windows 2000 was a rock and XP as well (after service pack 2). Windows 3.1 also changed the landscape ALOT.

Microsoft does pretty well with thier XBOX brand and a number of successful game titles.

Google and Microsoft have alot of money to experiment and so they take alot of risks in alot of directions hoping to stumble onto something big. Google especially embodies this with thier 20% time contcept. Engineers are allowed to spend 20% of thier time working on any old thing that interests them, in an attempt to foster creativity and maybe a cool new product. The "vision" is spread out, which can be a good thing. More people, more chances at a good vision.

This has paid off in some places (XBOX, Gmail, android) and not in others (zune, wave, Bob).

Apple seems to do this alot less and focuses on one product/style and really throws all thier eggs in that basket. It's worked out for them so far, but there's a danger. If someone one ups them enough, thier whole product line could get dropped like a bad habit.

A good example of this is Palm. They were poised to rule the PDA and smart phone world, but they didn't innovate and diversify thier product line. They thought they had THE perfect device, no need for change, just more memory. Now probably half of you are saying "Who's Palm?".

Do alittle research, history teachs many lessons, the most important of which is: "The big players change often"
 
Like I said "Google does have creative people with cool ideas. But they lack the vision to really put the resources into getting those cool ideas implemented the way they should be, so they are usable."

Google has a history of overpromising and underdelivering. They come out with grand ideas and pronouncements are rarely actually implement them as promised. And they abandon their projects left and right, instead of putting the resources into making them useful. Everything from Google Scholar to Okrut to Google Wave to free wifi to thousands of other google projects that they opted to abandon rather than develop prove this point. If the iPhone hadn't come along to show them where to go, Andriod would've likely been another half assed underfunded project that was basically a Blackberry clone and it probably would have been abandoned faster than the Microsoft Kin was.

Windows XP wasn't innovation, neither was 2000, or 7 for that matter. They were all very small steps forward that took far longer than they should have. Each subsequent version of windows made the mildest tiniest of improvements over the previous version, and took 2-3 years to do so, which is inexecusable considering the absurd amounts of capital and resources that Microsoft had to develop their platform. And even 3.1 was pretty much a direct a rip off of existing GUI OSs.

The Xbox wasnt exactly innovation either. It was a pc thrown together to connect to the tv. And it was pretty much based on the Dreamcast and Playstation 2 in terms of execution. The original NES, or Atari, or even the original Playstation, those are examples of innovation, not the Xbox. All the Xbox did was follow their blueprints.

Opstech said:
You are leaving out one important vision. Steve himself said that in order for Apple to survive, we need partners, circa 1997. Steve's vision didn't save apple.
Click to expand...

Yes it absolutely did. Steve had nothing to do with Apple facing near bankrupcy in 1997, and his vision has a lot to do with why it worked out of that hole and become the company that it is today. Steve was fired back when Apple was a huge successful company in the 1980s. After he was fired, Apple slowly withered away, while Steve made helped make neXt OS and Pixar, the former forming the basis of OSX later and the latter revolutionizing film making.

It wasn't until Steve returned to Apple in 1997 that they started on the path to recovery. He cut out a lot of projects that weren't working and looked for partners to raise capital, yes. Microsoft invested in Apple yes. But even without Microsoft, Steve probably would've found other investors in the company. Microsoft may have helped Apple recover faster, but it was Steve's vision that saved the company
 
maturola said:
While I don't disagree with you, the millions and millions of developers, application and devices running IOS make it a success even when you and I hate it.
Click to expand...

With around 200k applications in the app store today, I don't think it's millions and millions of devs. At an avg of 3 devs per app, your well under a million. The majority of apps are going to be single dev projects.

I will grant you there are millions of devices, but that doesn't speak to the quality or popularity of Xcode/objective-c/cocoa.

I spoke to a guy at tech-ed last month who claimed inside knowledge to silverlight coming to iOS. I dont' know if thats truth, but if that happened, you would get millions of devs, and a flood of quality apps like no other. I coudl crank out quality Silverlight Apps weekly.

Love em or hate em, Microsoft treats thier devs much better then Apple does and offers much more elgant development solutions (Silverlight being one of them).
 
hariustrk said:
With around 200k applications in the app store today, I don't think it's millions and millions of devs. At an avg of 3 devs per app, your well under a million. The majority of apps are going to be single dev projects..
Click to expand...

once again, I don't disagree with your statement, however that do not make Objective-C a bad or NeXTstep a bad idea either.

You are also missing to count the enterprise apps that are not distributed by the app store (on my company only we have 3 and 2 more in development), also all the app in development or in queue.

I do disagree with you on Silverlight, I have the same opinion that you have for Objetive-c, I think is the worst ever I would never use it. (once again that doesn't make the language itself bad), HTML5 will eventually take over and cloud computer will kill those implementations.
 
How can anybody possibly say that apple will dominate the future of technology?

Granted, it's a hugely profitable company, but its products are still relatively niche. It's never going to have an OS marketshare like microsoft's, it's never going to have a mobile market share to rival nokia, it's never going to dominate the advertising realm in the way google does, and macs are never going to be as common as PCs...

It's not even their goal to be that way.

Their m.o. of carving out a relatively small slice of each market and milking it for every penny has been pretty successful... Can't imagine them changing it.

With regards google, who knows? They're still every bit as unpredictable as they were back at the beginning. Hard to guess where they'll be in ten years.
 
In their current positions, I don't think either will dominate the future of technology, but I would say Google is more likely than Apple. Google's search engine technologies are of greater value than anything Apple makes. Just my opinion. Good software seems to have greater value over hardware.
I see Microsoft being around for a really long time. Too much of world's economy and digital infrastructure runs on Microsoft software, and that continues to grow every year...well generally speaking.
 
wikoogle said:
It wasn't until Steve returned to Apple in 1997 that they started on the path to recovery. He cut out a lot of projects that weren't working and looked for partners to raise capital, yes. Microsoft invested in Apple yes. But even without Microsoft, Steve probably would've found other investors in the company. Microsoft may have helped Apple recover faster, but it was Steve's vision that saved the company
Click to expand...

Based on what I've just read in this post, Jobs is more magical & revolutionary than any other human. Apparently once he's no longer the CEO of Apple, the industry as we know it will collapse. ... :)

Fascinating
 
wikoogle said:
Windows XP wasn't innovation, neither was 2000, or 7 for that matter. They were all very small steps forward that took far longer than they should have. Each subsequent version of windows made the mildest tiniest of improvements over the previous version, and took 2-3 years to do so, which is inexecusable considering the absurd amounts of capital and resources that Microsoft had to develop their platform. And even 3.1 was pretty much a direct a rip off of existing GUI OSs.

The Xbox wasnt exactly innovation either. It was a pc thrown together to connect to the tv. And it was pretty much based on the Dreamcast and Playstation 2 in terms of execution. The original NES, or Atari, or even the original Playstation, those are examples of innovation, not the Xbox. All the Xbox did was follow their blueprints.
Click to expand...

Not all innovation is in your face. Microsoft does alot of innovation you never see. It's under the hood. Windows 3.0 changed how memory was used in PCs, it broke the 640KB barrier, destroyed it with some pretty clever code. Lots of money is spent on improving graphics libraries, improving compatibility with a billion differnt printers. Do you know what the Hardware Abstraction layer is in windows? It's what holds back Linux from broader acceptance.

XBOX blazed the trail for online services via a console box, others tried and did poorly. They also blazed the trail in creating a generic media center in the living room. You can call it a glorified PC, OR you can look at it as a great idea to leverage a VERY large existing developer base. Unlike SONY who made the learning curve VERY steep for PS3's, which stifled game development on the PS3 slowing aceptance.

Using your logic, everyone after the original Atari is a copier. The NES was an atari with better graphics. Coleco did that way before nintendo.
 
Google's problem is fragmentation:

A few G1s are running Android 1.0.
Some Android phones are running 1.5 and will not see an upgrade ever.
Some are running 1.6 and may see an upgrade, may not.
Some are running 2.0 or 2.1.
A few are running 2.2
And, Android 3.0 will require a whole line of hardware specs.

The problem? As an app designer, you have a choice: Write for the latest platform and cut off a significant part of your would-be customer base, or write for multiple platforms. Someone with an oddball phone finds your app force closes? Your app's rank goes down as he will slap a 1 star, "force closes on my blahblah" on your page, uninstall, and move on. Your app needs to deal with multiple orientations, but hardware versus virtual keyboards, trackballs versus arrows, versus trackpads, presence/absence of LEDs, and so on.

The iPhone, you have four models and a consistent (for the most part) API. This makes QA and testing a lot easier. Of course the downside is that apps have to be approved and there are limitations, but there are always trade-offs.

The problem is that since programming on each platform is so different, there is no easy way to have a codebase that can span Android or iOS, so you have to essentially pick one or the other.
 
mlts22 said:
The problem is that since programming on each platform is so different, there is no easy way to have a codebase that can span Android or iOS, so you have to essentially pick one or the other.
Click to expand...

Unless you allow things like java, flash, and silverlight to run on your platform. But then you lose the "power". All this bull about flash killing battery life is deflection. Running dragons lair on my iPhone kills the battery and it got through fine. What it's really about is control. Jobs thinks he needs to steward the devices, some would stay that stiffles innovation.
 
maturola said:
I do disagree with you on Silverlight, I have the same opinion that you have for Objetive-c, I think is the worst ever I would never use it. (once again that doesn't make the language itself bad), HTML5 will eventually take over and cloud computer will kill those implementations.
Click to expand...

Silverlight is just a subset of .NET. And I love .NET. Smart libraries, common objects for the heavy lifting, powerful string manipulation. RIA and Web services connect you to the cloud.

HTML5 is nice, but not all apps lend themselves to web apps. There are limitations that require you to run in the OS instead of the browser. Plus everyones implementation of HTML is always alittle differnt, so you end up with all these If..Thens for each browser. I hate that.
 
Neither will dominate, it's very similar to Mac vs PC.

Note that like Mac, iPhone is both hardware and OS. Android, is a mobile platform and can be implemented in many different configurations on many different hardware configurations as well, not unlike PC and Windows.

The big difference is that apple has always held a rather small portion of market share in computers, but much more in the smartphone market.
 
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