I remember Altavista. And Windows smartphones

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1773689]

Inspiration.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I voted the way I did because Altavista->Google seems larger (and more useful) to me than N80->iPhone. But I know that some people will feel entirely the other way around.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The iPhone is a glorified Blackberry with shackles added. The iPad is a Blackberry with a larger screen, and shackles. iTunes is "Napster with a way to pay the artist". The iPod itself is "a walkman with a hard drive".

Apple hasn't done anything original, or unique. They've made incremental improvements, to the point where iTunes was briefly the first-and-only usable service in the paying-for-downloads market, but in every case they've been rapidly eclipsed by other companies not suffering from their ideological blinders and their obsessive need to prevent the user from doing anything *useful*.

[andrewducker]

In Apple's defence I'd say that they've been excellent at making things polished to the point where they appeal to the mass market.

I used several MP3 players before the iPod came out, and none were as usable as it was. Same with Blackberries and the iPhone - the touch interface is better than anything I've seen from RIM (although personally I prefer various things about Android, arguably you wouldn't have seen those changes to the smarphone market if Apple hadn't dragged it forward).

[tobyaw]

Useful? Apple has long had strengths in education, with writers, in music production, graphic design, and in publishing. All areas where the quality and attention-to-detail that characterise Apple products are appreciated.

[skington.livejournal.com]

"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." ?

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

after reading your post, I'm going to add to my "google is the best improvement in the past 10 years" to saying that Apple may well be the best improvement for the next 10, simply because it pays the artist.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Steve Jobs broke the forty-year grip of the WIMP interface. That's incredibly important: now we can start to make progress in user interface.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

I agree - and there's also the point that Google is still the most used search engine by far. But for phones? Nokia themselves continued to produce improved phones since the N80 (Symbian alone actually continued to outsell Apple's phones, until Nokia themselves said they were phasing it out). And the number one high end phone platform today is, of course, from Google (with Nokia still leading at the low end).

The market that Apple lead in is mp3 players - but being the biggest doesn't mean you did anything revolutionary (as Mac OS fans have always being saying regarding Windows!) I got an 8GB mp3 player from Sandisk for £40 - the similarly priced Apple offering had 2GB, no memory card slot, no user interface at all, unless you count the awkward one on the custom headphones... and I presume would have required the use of ITunes, rather than just presenting itself as a removable drive and just working :)

Also consider how (IIRC) Google got to be number one in search with virtually zero marketing whatsoever, basically through word of mouth, when they were a small company. In the same timeframe, Apple are a massive company, and the media are hyping their products even before they are announced.

[calum]

Invisible innovation maybe? But there would be no iPhone, no smartphones at all, without 3G network technology, which really arises out of Qualcomm innovation. I guess that all builds on Nokia innovation, but that's older than 10 years ago..

[andrewducker]

Yeah, everything builds on previous things. I blame Samuel Morse, myself.

[matgb]

there would be no iPhone, no smartphones at all, without 3G network technology

The first two iPhones didn't have 3G, in fact when the iPhone2 was released Nokia were launching the 5800 which had 3G and was better in many respects.

3G is a lot less important to modern phones (or indeed modern computing) than, for example, ARM chips. For which we can thank the BBC Micro. Well, sorta, anyway.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also: It is virtually impossible to imagine any product from the last 10 years that has changed the world more than Microsoft Windows XP.

[andrewducker]

I liked XP, but it felt like Win2k with the corners rounded off to make it a bit more usable. Somewhat better, but not much of a revolution.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

As of this posting, a complete wipe-out in Google's favour... and justifiably so. Apple may make pretty consumer electronics, even more usable ones with greater esthetics, but they're not in the business of saving lives or reinventing business. Google, however, has done both... in multiple fields, no less.

-- Steve hates the reality distortion field surrounding Apple, more than the company or its products.

[tobyaw]

Google gave people access to content and services for free. They gain advertising revenue from offering access to other people’s content. I find myself suspicious of the motivations of advertising-funded businesses — Google’s users are, in the large part, not their customers. They are just information-generating assets, to be sold to advertisers. There is something unpleasant about that.

Apple’s greatest gift to us is that it made it acceptable to pay for content online. The iTunes store, and the hardware devices that interact with its content, are Apple’s most important contribution to our culture. Without iTunes, the masses wouldn’t buy music online, and the music industry would be much less healthy than it is now. Without Apple’s strong negotiating position, mainstream music would still have DRM. And without people being conditioned to pay for music online, I don't think we would have the current mainstream acceptance of paying for television, films, and books in downloadable form.

So my vote goes to Apple, for giving artists and creators an income in a world where their content can be accessed through Google for free.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

When I bought an mp3 a few years ago, I was surprised about how many different places were offering them for sale. I got it from Tesco, without DRM, I believe.

I'm also not sure what you mean about being conditioned to pay for it? Lots of people are still happily downloading for free.

Regarding reading - Apple's view of a future where you can only read something on their platform and hardware is not one I like. "Get the website app for your IPad/IPhone" is the new "Best Viewed In Internet Explorer" - except worse, as at least sites usually worked somewhat on other browsers.

[skington.livejournal.com]

Altavista was already outmoded in 1995 - Hotbot had better results. Google happened to be a couple of steps ahead of the rest of the market, rather than the expected one, so once large numbers of people started using the Internet, Google was the only choice, and they hired plenty of smart people to make sure they carried on being number one. And they've done plenty of clever things since then. But nothing as brave or trend-setting, or as unexpected, as what Apple have done.

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

Both of the companies you cite rely entirely on the infrastructure that makes their products work. I'd say the most important 'thing' in the last ten years has been the expansion of broadband and cellular broadband. Without either of those there is nothing that Apple or Google have made that would function as intended.

[danmilburn.livejournal.com]

The defining feature of Google was that it was the cleanest, fastest-loading website around. That's less true these days, but it worked better than anything else on dial-up.

It's all symbiotic though innit? The infrastructure is important, but without the devices and apps to utilise it, people wouldn't have been interested in broadband.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

I'm answering the poll a bit selfishly because Google's had a huge impact on my own life and Apple hasn't really. I've had a smartphone since 2005, and the one I have now is fairly similar to that one and I'm still perfectly happy with it; and I mostly buy music from Amazon or Spotify or even physical CDs.

But still. Google: unequalled search (including Images etc); webmail with some very clever interface features (especially over the last year or two) and unlimited free storage (back when its competitors gave you a measly couple of meg); maps (remember Streetmap and Multimap?) and Streetview (not just for navigation - we've used it to read phone numbers off shop fronts and read parking restrictions on signs before setting out); Google Docs (office suite probably comparable to Microsoft's ten years ago, but free, accessible anywhere, and real-time collaborative - do even the serious enterprise document-sharing tools do that yet?); Adwords (pretty much defined a new business model); Picasa (I'm not aware of anything else that's both an online photo-sharing site and an offline photo manager and editor, plus it has the facial recognition); Chrome; Andriod.

Apple make shiny things that are irritatingly closed and incompatible with other things.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think I'm too biased to count my opinion as accurate, but it seems like iPods, etc, were very well done, but that surely it was only a matter of time before someone stumbled onto a portable music player or a portable phone that wasn't awful, if only by chance. Whereas it seemed everyone accepted that search and email were supposed to be non-functional, and people proposed pie-in-the-sky ideas, but google search or gmail might never have arrived if google didn't do them. I don't know.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

In the context of google vs apple, I put microsoft because vast amounts of the things that both Apple and Google have done, have been done as a reaction to Microsoft. They both, in some different and some similar ways, have spent chunks of time defining themselves as not being MS.

[andrewducker]

Microsoft have been damned awesome, but I'd put their biggest decade* as being 92-2001, from Windows 3.11 to XP.

They haven't dominated the last ten years in the same way.

[emarkienna.livejournal.com]

(Followed a link here.)

I agree with the article - although even that's overstating the IPhone; the original model was actually lacking basic features that even bog standard feature phones had had for years. Internet and apps were novel around 2002, and standard by 2005. I believe Apple were the first with multitouch, and some people think it had the best browser at the time, but it was just yet another phone in an industry that was going through continual, inevitable and rapid advancement, both before and after 2007. By today's standards, the original IPhone is very dated, and I don't see how the later models are revolutionary over anything else. Some people like Apple phones, plenty more like other phones.

Most of the things said in praise about Apple come down to opinion - nothing wrong with that, I love a good OS/computer flamewar :) - but it shouldn't be conflated with factual claims about who did what first, or what effect things had on the market. (Personally I disagree with claims that they make good UIs, for example. And even for looks, I think my shiny black Nokia 5800 looks far cooler than anything that has a corporate logo plastered over the front of it.)

For me, I use Google's search every day, and Apple have no impact on me (other than the hype I read about them in the media... - I find a lot of tech news of limited use these days, the way everything is spun to be all about Apple). For people in general, I suspect that more people use something from Google, than something from Apple.

I can see some argument that Apple win because phones and mp3 players and computers are more useful to people than a search engine - but that argument would put many other companies ahead of Google too.

[andrewducker]

I do think that the ability to take a technology and make it mass-market is not to be sniffed at. I am impressed by Apple's usability achievements.

But yes, Google's definitely more useful to me.

Oh, and hi. We have some interesting people in common, I'd generally take that as a recommendation, not that you seem to update any more.