> I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except themselves and advertisers.
You think Apple has your interests at heart? Or Microsoft?
Like Google, they have your cash at heart. Not a thing more.
You think Apple has your interests at heart? Or Microsoft?
Like Google, they have your cash at heart. Not a thing more.
We can argue over which model is preferable to users, with may preferring to pay and others preferring the sponsored option, but you can't really say that Apple and Google are equivalent.
People like to frame the Apple vs Google battle as one of openness vs closed-ness, of an ecosystem with many participants vs a walled garden with just Apple. But I see it far more as a battle over how we choose to pay for technology...directly or indirectly.
For one, they could get the same or even more cash with far more crappier products (marketed more, altered to satisfy pundits, relax design and build requirements to cash-in on the Apple brand, etc). Nobody would have taken offense if they built a heavier, bulkier, plastic MacBook Air, with a DVD drive even and VGA ports and visible seams -- but they wanted to do things their was.
Second, wanting my cash is good. Because I get to be the judge when to give my cash, and I give it when I see things I want and like ("shut up and take my money"). Google, on the other hand, wants the advertisers' cash, which means they could not care less about me in lots of areas (except the area of seeing their ads).
So Apple might not have "my interests" at heart, but they are allowed by their management to take more pride in what they build than other companies, where the bottom line dictates more decisions.
There is a reason Dell bought Quest for billions of dollars. It is not because they see a bright future for the consumer pc market.
I believe that too. However, I think that's generally true. You could replace Apple by Google or Microsoft there.
People on a whole are generally good (or at least I believe so).
If what you meant to say was "Apple cares about people and wouldn't let profit motives let them make questionable decisions, like including ads or adding DRM to software " then carry on.
If you indeed said what you meant to in your second sentence, then I think it was essentially meaningless since it's so generally true.
Apple makes money by making toys for the wealthy. You have to be middle-class or higher in an advanced economy to use their system, in real terms. In comparison, Google lets anyone use basically all of their stuff for free. As long as you can get online in some form, Google welcomes you, no matter how poor you are or where in the world you might be or what hardware you use. Google also doesn't force you to relinquish control of your environment, whereas Apple has a big ruler it smacks your knuckles with if you don't do things The Apple Way.
Microsoft doesn't deserve to continue existing? Perhaps you should talk to large businesses, then. What are they going to use, because it's only Microsoft that's talking to them. Unix has a love affair with the backend in business, but it's really only Microsoft that's giving them what they want in the full stack. Compare to Apple, who points at the laptops and says "Hey everyone, look how cool we are", at which point business says "oo, cool. So what enterprise tools do you have?"... at which point Apple runs off into traffic, giggling like a mad four-year-old.
True for Apple PCs (except for the Mac Mini, but most people don't buy those.) Especially true for MacBooks.
Not true at all for iPhones which are available on very affordable plans in all developed countries, and are ubiquitous, even for users who are nowhere near middle class.
Microsoft is in transition. The idiocy that was Windows 8 all-but killed the Wintel desktop PC market. The server side is healthy, but desktop Windows is looking very shaky indeed.
For better or worse, Jobs deliberately moved Apple out of Enterprise. We can argue about why, and we can argue whether or not it was a good decision. But Apple decided to focus on consumer computing - which strengthened the consumer brand and freed up development resources, if nothing else.
MS is still trying to slide into all kinds of niches. It's succeeding in a few, but failing and flailing in many.
Nadella will likely be more focused than spaghetti-at-the-wall Ballmer, so we'll have to see how that works out.
Azure isn't solid enough as a cloud service yet - too many outages. Server is looking good. Office is kind of old and boring now, but still does what it does.
So what can MS offer modern startups that they can't get better and/or cheaper elsewhere?
How much of the internet is served up by OS X?
Not other companies looking to get my "attention"