Google compares Apple to 'Big Brother' from iconic 1984 ad - Page 4

It seems to me that the logical conclusion is that Apple's vertically integrated model is deficient, if market share is a priority.

Google is "open" only when it wishes to lure the open source community into its service to undermine competitors. Well, that and as a blatant marketing ploy, of course: "We're all about openness." Sounds a lot like the Adobe Flash mantra, doesn't it? And we all know how open Flash is.

It's been used on several internal networks (not connected to the WWW) that I've worked on.

I thought everybody knew that you could do this?

You are absolutely correct -- it's the classic "S" curve, with three phases: early adoption, penetration, saturation.

Everybody does. But since the response sidesteps the issue, and not very cleverly, it's irrelevant to the discussion.

Your original statement was "Oh, please, there's nothing open about Android or Google. "

But please keep going.

as a Mac user, and iphone owner, my thoughts on this are that:

1- Apple needs to open up their products more
2- iphone ought to be able to install programs/apps NOT distributed via itunes
3- apple ought not have to approve each and every app for the phone, stop being the gatekeeper and censorer!
4- apple ought to embrace tons more cellular providers, stop tying their service to carriers who they get income from. start focusing on allowing consumers to pick their own provider, not get bogged down with horrible service from AT&T

Apple also needs to open up

Apple TV - allow companies like netflix, sirius/xm, slingbox client, pandora and more to have programs work on it.

Ipad - just like on the iphone, Apple needs to open this up.

Sorry, but consumers are starting to feel what apple is doing. restricting users to their approved world view. yes 1984 in part. The hard problem here is that software can be opened up, Apple can become more friendly.

Apple ought to embrace Blu-Ray in desktops and definitely the Macbook Pro line.

Apple needs to stop its 1984 ... possibly evil tendencies.

Both Apple and Google have exactly the same driver and exactly the same goal:

Both want to maximize total profits.

Free apps are great. Surely they are well worth offshoring our Privacy concerns to the Google and Facebook of this LaLaLand of ours. Let them handle it. They know money doesn't grow on trees and People's lives are so much better managed by thee.

An open and free market place is the way to go.

Regulations and constraints are so 'Obama' and 'Jobs', so socialist and paternalist, so anti-free-enterprise and anti-geeks; why don't we cut them to size and let Hell break loose for a while. After all, Wealth costs money and Poverty is free.

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Oh, my. Is Google being as bad as Adobe?

This is all tongue in cheek, right??!!

Add tons more carriers? Apple would jump at the chance if they were able. They needed an exclusive contract with AT&T to get the iPhone going. If they added another carrier now, they would be breaking the law.

Blu-ray? Apple is just waiting. They love Blu-ray, they're just not ready.

And about opening up their products, who cares? If Apple allowed non-App Store applications, I would seriously consider switching to another company if I didn't love the iPhone so much. Not many people care if it's closed. Normal people don't even understand the difference.

You said "Oh, please, there's nothing open about Android or Google."

Is it still "nothing"?

You are welcome to say that your original statement was overbroad, and that what you really should have said was covered in subsequent posts.

But I don't really know, and I'm interested in what you really meant, and as of now, guessing seems to be my best alternative.

I LOL'd.

Steve Job's does this kind of stuff in keynotes all the time.

It was funny then. It's funny now.

He's changed the subject to whether or not Google has released its source code and a free license, and whether or not Google gives it away to people for free so they can repackage it for sale. Maybe that is what he meant in the first place. I find it harder and harder to tell.

Or just reading through the posts, if you were really "interested", as you claim. Yes, I still maintain that Android is not open but is, for all intents and purposes, entirely under Google's control, and Google as a whole is not open in any meaningful sense of the word. By any definition that Google is open, one could likewise claim that Apple is open, or pretty much anyone who's ever released anything as open source. Only a fool would accept that Google and Android are open.

Oh, I see, you're confused about 'free' and 'open'. It's a common mistake.

I find it laughable when people suggest that business is "good" vs "evil".

Google entered the mobile market because they saw that they were being shutout of mobile advertising not because they wanted to be a super hero.

Someone should write a "brick my Nexus One" Android App and submit it to their app store.
I wonder if it will get approved.......

Yes.. I believe they fall into the catagory of Government figures. Good expansion of my original comment though.. Thank you.

No, they would be breaking their contract. They'd pay the appropriate penalties and that's it. They are maintaining exclusivity for their own benefit/profit. Not yours. And that's fine. But it does leave the consumer worse off, if the iPhone is tied to one network in the US. There's no denying that.


Didn't Jobs say that he thought physical media was going to be irrelevant soon? If that's his take, I could see Apple bypassing Blu-ray altogether. Just look at the MacBook Air. And look at the iPad. Not even a USB port.


What would you think if Apple required all software running on Macs to be Apple approved and sold at the Apple store? Why can't there be a happy medium? I'd envision something like an Apple App Store (as today) which has Apple approved content and the ability to install applications from elsewhere if you wish, but at your peril. A simple warning, reminding the user that it's not an Apple approved application and that the user faces additional risk in installing this app. They can even offer options for parental control that limit the phone to only App store apps. I just don't understand the need for an absolute prohibition on non-Apple sourced apps with Apple as the perpetual gatekeeper for the App store.

Same for iTunes. Why is synching with iTunes a must? Why can't Apple just go OTA for everything? You should not ever need a computer to maintain a smartphone.

I'm where mitchelljd is right now. I love Apple products. But the restrictions can keep me from buying more Apple stuff. For example, there's a new carrier I really want to use. And here in Canada, where we have high cellular rates, the new carriers offer substantial savings. They don't support the iPhone, however, since they run on AWS (same as T-Mobile USA). So I have to choose between saving $20 per month on this new carrier or an iPhone.

Nobody says Apple has to completely ditch its highly integrated product line/service model. But I can't see how opening up a little wouldn't benefit them. The iPod took off after iTunes showed up on Windows. Similarly, the iPhone would do better if it was offered on more carriers.

He was referring to why "Google made Android."

...It was a purely defensive move to prevent Apple from dominating the smartphone market. Unfortunately, he got the timeline wrong!

I posted this to another thread:

My, weren't they prescient!

"In July 2005, Google acquired Android, Inc., a small startup company based in Palo Alto, California, USA."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)


Yeah, right!

Dick Applebaum

clearly, this is to deflect the dismal press they're getting regarding vp8 webm codec.

classic tactic of deflectionwhen you're getting beaten up in the press, put the focus on the other guy.

In a down moment for them, at least Google knows how to push Apple's buttons, which is more than Adobe can say.

The greatest danger to personal privacy in the world.
Truly Orwellian to see them refer to 1984.

I wonder what the anti trust implications are for them leveraging their complete dominance of the search market (with a totally closed and closely guarded proprietary search engine) to give away an OS in order to help further grow that search dominance.

Or maybe to deflect from the bad press they are getting from, once again, violating the law with their illegal WiFi data collection program. Programming error? Yeah, right.

+1....

I just can't get on board with this comment.

Yes these things would be nice to alot of people, but almost all of them involve apple spending money with no real gaurentee of making money.

We all need to rememeber Apple is a business.. weather your a fan of big business or not, you can't honestly expect them to spend time, money and resources on something that will give them little or no gaurentee for return. And I know the best common arguement is "well if they did these things, alot more people would want these products" but the reality is all of these things, in large part, only really make a difference to techy geeks like you and I who love to tweak, hack, unlock and expand anything we can get our hands on with a circuit. This seems over powering in here because we take up the vast majority of blogs, but in reality we are an extremely small fraction of the market.

Apple must first approach all of these things from a business perspective and ask themselves "is this in our best interests as a profitable successful company?" It seems so nice to just say "screw money, I'm just gonna do what the people want!!", and I know alot of company's try and slogan themselves like that but it just isn't how the world works.

I mean come on... all of you work for a living. Would you really go work all day for free?

Except that's a largely useless comparison.

If you're an application vendor or an advertiser, the iPod Touches out there are essentially equivalent to iPhones. They're the same size, similar in price, and are used almost interchangeably. So who would be interested in iPhones but not iPod Touches?

No one but Wireless carriers - and they have better information than this self-selecting survey that all the Android fans are bragging about.

Google's intentions with Android aren't "openness". What Google wants is access to data and faces for its advertising. To Google that equates to profits.

Capitalism 101

The goal of business is to make a profit at the risk of a loss.

Where in that do you find "openness"?

.

Good Sir, you are HILARIOUS.

I agree, Steve. That's why their ringing the bells of freedom don't ring quite true.

I agree, Steve. That's why their ringing the bells of freedom don't ring quite true to me.

Damn!!! Oh no they did't. Damn so now Google is comparing apple to MS and IBM. This is a classic debate between unabashed freedom to do whatever you want in terms of UI, stability, applications, content (like porn) on one hand and quality, unified UI, filtered content, quality control and aggressive push for adoption of new standards to move the internet forward.

Google's OS is a lot more messy, splintered and unfiltered, much like Windows was/is in 84. Apple's software/hardware integration and tight quality and content control, and push for innovation are also unchanged. The only difference is that Google is also dead set on innovation, in a Microsoft sort of way.

I prefer Apple's way of managing an ecosystem and I think iOS is still better then Android in many aspects, however I would probably be a big fan of Google TV and possibly Chrome App Store. One fear I have is that Adobe will win the HTML5 war if Google lets it, and we will be stuck with flash once again, but who knows if Adobe can make flash really good and not battery intensive maybe it will turn out for the better (rather then supporting multiple video formats for different browsers.

Maybe it depends on the locality but just like parsing the main issue of business, when politicians say bipartisanship it's more often than not little more than an optimistic thing they like to say. Though they do want to get rid of the smaller parties, in practice any meaningful behind the scenes cooperation is still less likely than them preparing a dirt file.

Its been shown the primary reason the Droid is doing well on Verizon is because the iPhone is not available. Most people on Verizon would much more prefer the iPhone. Android is the closest option.

The Flash war is already over and Adobe has lost. For Google, the Flash thing is just an opportunity to poke Apple in the eye.

Good point.. as well these are sales figures from a time from when a vast majority of the market is well aware that a brand new iPhone is right around the corner.

You are not the first to say these things. People have been saying it for many years now. Apple doesn't follow this advice and only continues to be increasingly successful. Especially while other tech companies come and go.


What consumers are you speaking of? The phenomenal growth Apple is having and the increasing sales of its products do not indicate any problem from consumers.

Apple haters unite!

Big Brother is an apt reference to Google - not Apple.

And if this guy is complaining that Apple exerts too much control, does not give choice to user etc., I wonder if he has seen GMail - I am tired of GMail's conversational style and was looking for ways to change to the regular mailbox style more common in MSN, Yahoo, etc. - guess what - Google decided for me, that conversational style was better - and did not give me the choice to see my mails in any other format. It was Google's way or the highway - not very different from what this complaining about Apple, is it?

Have blogged about this at -
http://prastalk.blogspot.com/2010/05...tle-black.html