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.

[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..

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.