Quote:
Originally Posted by
mdriftmeyer 
My bet is on Cuil.
My bet is that no search provider with a name nobody can pronounce or spell will ever succeed in the market.
Any takers?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
guinness
Really, Google wants to control information, and how to deliver it.
I don't think so. Google is an advertising company. Everything else they've ever done has
lost money in significant amounts. It's kinda like how Apple keeps the iTunes store going to sell iPods and iPhones. Though I don't think iTunes loses very much; I think I read that it's more or less a break-even proposition. Still, Apple does it to enable one of their two core businesses, just as Google does everything it does to enable its core business.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DaveGee
Then again... what is that data-center in NC gonna be used for?
I don't think one should underestimate just how much data Apple has to churn through on a day-to-day basis. There's the movie trailer site (which serves up a jaw-dropping number of bytes, and extremely quickly), there's obviously iTunes, there's Mobile Me and all its bits and pieces, there's the Apple online store (which is admittedly probably weak tea by comparison). Apple has several really amazingly reliable online services, and I wouldn't be surprised if their data centers exist to support those, rather than to do anything new and dramatic.
Though I could be wrong. I think it'd be really neat if, for example, a future upgrade to Mobile Me included Time Machine backups over the Internet. The challenge there is the last-mile problem, though. It takes long enough to do a fresh backup of my MacBook Pro to my AirDisk over wireless; I can't imagine how many days it would take to shove all those bytes up my Internet connection.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Gazoobee
If Google someday found a good way to sensibly offer their services to the average non-techie consumer
Yeah, and if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon. Seriously, Apple's position in the market is secure for the foreseeable future. I know those are famous last words, but Apple's got an
easy five-year head start. Not only does Apple build devices that work for the average person in ways nobody else does, but they've also got this massive degree of brand recognition in the public. There are Apple retail stores all over the place, "iPhone" is fast becoming synonymous with "handheld communications device" the way "iPod" did with "portable music device," and the iPad announcement made the front pages of the New York Times, LA Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. That's not the sort of thing that can be lost overnight to an advertising company that wants to break into the gadget business.
The next big sea change in technology in general is the opening up of the market to the general consumer. For the better part of thirty years, computers and the Internet were the exclusive domain of the hobbyist. It started at the Homebrew Computer Club and grew, but the core remained highly technical and simply beyond the reach of the average person not because you had to be a super-genius to get into it, but because it required an investment of time that most people simply weren't interested in making. It's only been in the past decade (more or less) that that's begun to change, and now we're starting to see a push toward selling technology to people who have no interest in technology at all. The iPad's just the beginning; I bet Apple has some
really interesting things locked up in their R&D labs that well, that would bore the hell out of the average computer geek. Because they're not meant for them.
I'd argue and I'm not 100-percent sure I'm right about this, but I think I am *that Apple has a bigger lead over the rest of the industry now than it's ever had before, going all the way back to the beginning. The Macintosh was clearly ahead of its time, a quantum leap beyond anything else. They didn't maintain that lead, though, and paid the price for it in the early 90s. Mac OS X is, technologically, a quantum leap beyond either Windows or (ha) Linux, but the pace of advancement there is slowing as the product becomes more, for lack of a better word, perfected. The iPhone was a quantum leap ahead of what we once quaintly called "smartphones" but now just call "phones," and what Apple doesn't want to happen is for their competitors to stomp all over Apple's patents in an effort to close that gap.
The Times story makes it sound personal, and that's fair. We are talking about people after all, Jobs chief among them. But at the same time, this isn't Don Quixote out there tilting at windmills. Apple has a quantitative and qualitative head start on the rest of the industry. They're the first ones to break into the fourth wave of information technology (computing in general, business computing, personal computing and now transparent computing), and no, I really don't think that head start is a fragile thing that Google can surmount by the concerted application of brainpower. It requires a different kind of thinking than what Google is experienced at. And sure, maybe they'll adapt, in five or ten years. Or maybe they'll pull a Microsoft and make attempt after attempt to crack the broader market, failing catastrophically every single time, but sustained by their core business so they can stay alive and keep trying.
Jobs was famously quoted as saying, back in the 90s I think it was, that Microsoft has no taste. He wasn't being insulting when he said it; he was just stating the fact as he saw it. Microsoft has technical acumen and business acumen but no taste. No ability to distinguish between something that's revolutionary and something that sucks. Google is largely in the same place. They're brilliant, and their sheer size and momentum have allowed them to accomplish a lot in a very short time remember, Google only became a publicly traded company in
2004! But as a company, as a
brand, they have no taste. Google Wave and Google Buzz aren't the kind of missteps that a company like Apple would make. Apple's corporate culture is such that half-baked ideas like those would never make it out of the lab, much less out of the building.
The difference, culturally, between Google and Microsoft, though, is going to be defined by what happens in the next four or five years. By the end of its first decade, will Google have found a sense of taste? Or will they still be pouring money onto their research efforts like a backyard chef pouring lighter fluid onto his barbecue, hoping something catches fire?
I dunno. All I do know is this: In four or five years, Apple will have released at least one product that will make the iPod, iPhone and iPad look quaint. Apple's not gonna stand still while the company's lawyers fight like bulldogs over who infringed on whose intellectual property. They're going to continue to surge ahead, building on that five-year headstart.
I for one am pretty interested to see what they come up with.
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