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.
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andrewducker) wrote2011-08-28 09:58 pm
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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.