Google glass is just a bluetooth headset with a display and camera, combined with a SIRI like service.
People seem to think it's a competitor to the iPhone, but it's an ACCESSORY that needs and iPhone to connect to the network.
Worse, it has no technology (other than miniturization) that hasn't been done many times before-- I first saw a "glass" type system in the 1980s.... and that one actually had a computer on board!
I personally don't think it's a competitor to the iPhone, and I haven't seen this opinion around as well, so maybe it's an opinion shared just by Apple evangelists?
I've seen mp3 players, laptops, software stores and smartphones way before Apple did them, so should we blame Apple for being a copycat? Let's wait and see if it reveals itself as useful or not.
Innovation is not just about being different, its about being different successfully.
I give credit to MSFT for ... finally, after 2 decades... trying to innovate. I don't think they will be successful with these products, but possibly they can iterate on them until they are successful.
This is a lot more than google has done, and you're right, people should make the comparison to 1990s Microsoft which used FUD to kill innovation in the industry.
Fortunately, Balmer seems to have killed that ability in 2007 when he said there was no chance the iPhone would be successful.
Maybe MSFT has turned a corner. And unlike google and everyone else, they actually have a license from Apple to use multi-touch, etc, so they're actually legitimate competitors.
Let's be clear about this, Google's really been in the hardware business for about what.. a year, maybe 1.5? Any product pre that was developer oriented. I don't think you can expect a company to be shipping 10 million units when it has really only started to tackle general market hardware, let alone compare them to a 30+ year old manufacturer. For starters the market adoption has barely begun in the public eye.
That said though, they are starting to do what matters most, build great products... and that is what is the start to market acceptance. Guaranteed success? No... but certainly looking like they are figuring it out.
Forget specs, lets talk about software: The MacBook air is a real computer. You can compile your code on it. IT has an operating system. You can play games.
The pixel is just a web browser.
The correct thing to make the comparison to is the iPad, but even the iPad is more functional, since it can run apps that aren't browsers.
From a usability viewpoint, the pixel is kinda laughable... it's so arbitrarily limited, it isn't even really usable unless you're on a network.
Apple is vastly more efficient at R&D than google is, in part because Apple's products are so profitable, that it's R&D as a proportion of sales is "small".
Meanwhile, Apple is investing $10B this year in CapEx, and while a couple billion of that are for server farms, the new HQ and store upgrades, many billions are going into the equipment and tooling necessary to make Apple products.
People seem to think you just call fox con and say "I want 100 million mobile phones by monday!"
Apple's "R&D" includes the investment in being able to scale a manufacturing business to the point where it can sell twice as many devices as the previous year, for several years running.
This is under appreciated by people who look at no-sales devices like the google Nexus and claim that google is in the lead by some arbitrary criteria.
That is a false comparison. Google's business is to make money on ads, not hardware sales. The R&D at Google is for a completely different purpose and much harder to measure in terms of efficiency for an outsider.
It's also a pretty blatant copy of the Macbook. Given the history you outline (which I agree with) I think the huge leap for the pixel came from Apple. Just like the huge leap from a blackberry clone to an iPhone clone that android took over the course of 2007-2008.
Your link to patrik gibson's twitter shows how silly the original hypothesis is.
For instance, Apple's stores are still powered by WebObjects because WebObject is still one of the best web frameworks in the world.
Do people say that Amazon is "bad at the web" because obidos and gurupa were designed in the 1990s? They're worse than WebObjects by a wide margin. How about all the companies whose web services are from the 1990s?
Including google!
The rest of his examples are cheap shots or simply based on ignorance.
For instance, Game Center having trouble under heavy load is an exceptional event not a daily occurence, and lets not forget the weeks of cummulative time that google has had gmail down because of issues over the years, and all the mail people have lost and the fact that google will just blackhole people's accounts for no reasons and then when it happens you have no way to get your data back.
The rest of it is misunderstanding or misrepresentation.
In other words, this is just more propaganda in the endless google good, apple bad, ideological war that was started to try and cover the fact that android is a blatant ripoff of iOS.
How is iTunes match a "scam"? It accepts my music downloaded from the pirate bay as proof of purchase then gives me access to it on all my devices.
The hugest advantage is not having to manage all of that music on all the machines in our house. We just have one backup somewhere in case we need it, and then everyone syncs with iTunes Match just the music they want on their personal device.
'Scam' was a bad choice of words, but its ridiculously buggy (it accepts your music downloaded from TPB, but will only take half of an album which I legally bought and ripped to disk) and iOS playback is horrendous (both on and off WiFi.)
Interesting. I'm using ~24,800 of my 25,000 available tracks. About %90 of that is actually CDs that I ripped (I'm not really much of a pirate). I had a problem where it wouldn't accept one of them at all, and I ended up pirating that one to get it to work. The rest I was able to import ok, so my CD collection going back to the 1980s when I first started buying them I was able to import.
I have no trouble with playback on iOS. But I don't tend to stream, I tend to sync the songs I want to the device and then play them.
The one time I did have problems with iTunes match was a period where we rented a house in rural mexico. We were using some sort of fly-by-nite mexican ISP, and iTunes match had a lot of difficulty. It was really inconsistent and it sounds like this is what you experienced.
I suspect the issue there is that certain ports were being blocked, or that the ISP couldn't keep a consistent connection (Though loading web pages was fine, longer streaming connections like watching video were not.) I think iTunes match is probably sensitive to needing specific ports open and isn't great at falling back when they are blocked, or isn't great at handling frequent interruptions in the net connection (even if they are short.)
This is an area where we can do direct comparison.
Mail- Google has gmail, Apple has iCloud mail. Both have "web 2.0" UI's. I think here Apple wins hands down. Apple's support of sproutcore (what became ember.js) has given it a great lead in the ability to do great web apps. And apple's iCloud.com mail app is a good example of this.
Google "Office" vs. Apple Works - Apple wins again here in my opinion. Numbers, Pages and Keynote are much better experiences than using google's products thru the web, simply because they are native and can take advantage of better APIs. Both products provide ubiquitous storage of your data, so you can access your documents from your iPhone or your laptop. I wouldn't say Google is ahead on services there, but before Apple released iCloud they were.
I really don't think Apple has done a bad job with online services. Certainly not when compared to google. IF you look at iTunes Store-- which is actually an web service-- it is larger than anything google has, except maybe google search, depending on what metrics you use.
It's been stable and robust and usable with great UI since the store was first launched. It's certainly sold more goods than google and made more profit than amazon, I bet.
Apple took the lead with web development way back when it was NeXT with webobjects which was the first modern web development framework. They again have had the best product with sproutcore, dashcode, etc, though they've been a bit inconsistent. Its only recently that google's really tried to produce web development tech, and while go is a good attempt at a language it is written by people who felt comfortable enforcing a religious design choice on every programmer! (namely where the brackets go. I'm fine with people putting them in the "wrong place", I can still read their code. Let them do as they like, but forcing me, at the language level, to do as the language designers like? Well, that's just being assholes, and I won't use the language because of that (not to mention its crap design in some key areas.)
Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.
> Where google's clearly winning? Ideological propaganda. The whole "open vs. closed" campaign has people actually believing that
Google is good and Apple is evil. Apple which has never spied on its users or sold them out to advertisers.
People seem to think it's a competitor to the iPhone, but it's an ACCESSORY that needs and iPhone to connect to the network.
Worse, it has no technology (other than miniturization) that hasn't been done many times before-- I first saw a "glass" type system in the 1980s.... and that one actually had a computer on board!