Which both look in great shape for the Post-PC future having control of the 2 most dominant mobile platforms.
What does that mean in this context?
I've plugged my phone into my computer 2 or 3 times in the last year.
When I was doing mobile device I'd do it more often of course, but using that as some kind of line is like saying that computers haven't taken over cars because you can't program you car in your car.
I'm still not convinced.
They meet anyone's definition of a personal computer. You can draw a straight line from the first Macintosh to the iPhone. The fact that they evolved out of the phone form-factor and are called "smartphones" may be confusing but it's also irrelevant.
As a bonus, on my last trip, my laptop's hard drive had a corruption issue which I couldn't easily fix without wiping the drive. I should have had a backup laptop with me. Luckily I was able to borrow my wife's Windows Surface Pro & was flying back the next day after my laptop broke. But from my fear of working on laptops I really think the people who mention doing all their work from the phone are either crazy or they are thinking far into the future or they count chats / meetings at coffee shops as encompassing most of their work. :)
Granted, cell phones might eventually might get much better with keyboard and display hookups, but even the frequent moving them around (and the smaller size causing hot components to be closer together) makes them more likely to eventually run into some sort of issue than a desktop computer which just sits there & has more space to dissipate heat and such.
It's also confusing where Google is going with some of their acquisitions e.g. Nest was expensive and arugably unnecessary and the self driving car is solid technology with very poor product positioning i.e. existing car manufacturers have their own technologies and don't want to bet their business on Apple/Google.
It seems like Google desperately wants to be a consumer company like Apple when in fact they would be much better servicing business and diversifying their revenue stream. AWS and Azure Cortana for example both should have been available from Google years ago.
I also don't think Apple is in particularly great shape. They are still overly reliant on the iPhone. What's going to happen when people stop buying iPhones? What is Apple going to do? Apple is also desperately looking for that next big thing.
>their hold over the Android platform isn't particularly strong (only via Google Play Services)
It's never been stronger. An Android phone released without Google Play Services and the Play Store, outside of China, is as good as dead in the water. Google is also the steward of Android contributing nearly all of source code and doing all of the R&D. Without the stewardship of Google, the gaggle of OEM clusterfucks would be releasing incompatible smartphones to lock customers into their ecosystems.
>It's also confusing where Google is going with some of their acquisitions e.g. Nest was expensive and arugably unnecessary and the self driving car is solid technology with very poor product positioning i.e. existing car manufacturers have their own technologies and don't want to bet their business on Apple/Google.
Nest is going to be Google's IoT company, I believe, and they're going to play an integral role in defining their vision of IoT. As for their self driving cars - the same could be said about Tesla and look what happened there. It's all about disrupting industries, not trying to make deals with the players.
There are plenty of solid reasons to doubt Google given the points that parent-of-parent draws:
* Android was purchased and has plenty of product sharp edges. E.g. there are several ways to send texts. There's the issue of fragmentation. The new Google Photos has embarrassing auto-tags for African-Americans. Google has a solid whole product right now, but so did RIM. They will need to push really hard on projects like Tango and Project Fi to compete in future markets.
* Nest is garnering a reputation for being untrustworthy due to absurd bugs like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY
* Google is the most published self-driving car manufacturer, but w/out a shipping product they aren't clearly a leader. All early reviews of their car indicate that it's currently too conservative. There's also an issue: do people actually want the whole product? It looks like Tesla and Mercedes will very likely beat Google to market with core self-driving features.
I agree with parent-of-parent that Google appears to be trying to position itself more aggressively in many consumer product markets. Google is an excellent technology company, but most of their products have been niche hits. There's plenty of room for their competitors to leverage better customer relationships to own good chunks of the markets that Google seeks to own.
And how is this a sharp edge?
> There's the issue of fragmentation.
July 2015 and still talking about fragmentation? What problem do you think is fragmentation?
> The new Google Photos has embarrassing auto-tags for African-Americans.
ONE case and has nothing to do with Android
> Google has a solid whole product right now, but so did RIM.
And this can be said about Apple or Microsoft
It was purchased 10 years ago. What's left of the original purchase exists in name only.
>There's the issue of fragmentation
Speaking of fragmentation. How well do new iOS apps work on older iOS devices like the iPhone 4? I'm guessing not very well and probably not at all. App fragmentation on iOS is the real problem.
>The new Google Photos has embarrassing auto-tags for African-Americans.
It's an algorithm. It made a mistake and it learned from it.
>Nest is garnering a reputation for being untrustworthy.
Hasn't this been addressed by Nest?