And Here's The Secret Reason Apple Is Crushing Google...
It’s true, so true. Would I like to work for Google one day? You bet, but the environment has to change. Sure, there’s a place for engineering brilliance (that Wozniak delivered for Apple) that comes from Stanford, and MIT, and Yale, etc., but there’s something to be said for passion, drive and perfection - and it should never, ever, ever be discounted or undervalued.
Steve Jobs’s genius, in other words, was a sort of genius that Google places little or no value on.
Map Your @Foursquare Check-Ins to Google Maps
Cool to see where you’ve been!
I, Cringely » Prediction 7: A new Microsoft CEO - Cringely on technology
Fascinating predication. Ballmer’s way outta step, too 90’s of a guy IMHO. Schmidt is quite an interesting option.
Faith No More
Spot on about Google’s attempt to create iOS products, or let’s face it, most of their recent products.
My sources are very good. Unfortunately, they apparently do not have very good taste.
As I noted a couple days ago, Google was about to launch a native Gmail app for iOS. It came this morning. Unfortunately, while I had been told it was “pretty fantastic”, the app that got released is anything but. As a result, Google quickly became the laughing stock of the Internet for a few hours this morning. The app was so bad, that they had to pull it saying: “Sorry we messed up”.
Simply put: I should have known better.
Source: parislemon
Who Cares: A Native Gmail iPhone App. Finally.
Ever since I bought the original iPhone in 2007, there’s been one app above all others that I’ve been sorely missing: Gmail. Of course, back then, there were no native third-party apps. But a year later, when those came, Gmail was still nowhere to be found.
At first, the talk was that Apple wasn’t going to allow another mail app on their device. Then it was that Google was simply focusing on the mobile web (they’ve had a pretty good mobile web version of Gmail for a while). Then it was the strained (to put it mildly) relationship between Google and Apple. Still, other Google iPhone apps came. But never a Gmail one.
Until now.
Source: parislemon
Let’s Take This One With a Grain of Salt (Andy Rubin)
LOL! There’s NO WAY Andy Rubin REALLY believes this.
Ina Fried, covering some conference in Asia on some website:
Andy Rubin thinks there is a lot of potential for phones to be more useful companions, but says he is not interested in turning Android devices into personal assistants.
“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said in an interview on Wednesday just after appearing on stage at AsiaD. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”
What do you expect him to say about Siri, though? “Well, Apple really pulled ahead of us there”? Not going to happen. The truth is, Google has been working on voice-driven stuff for mobile devices for years. The primary interface to their Google for iPhone app is voice. The ante has been raised, and the correct play is for Google to downplay Siri’s relevance until they feel they’re competitive. This is like Steve Jobs dismissing video-playing iPods, claiming that no one wants to watch movies or TV shows on a handheld display, one year before Apple shipped video-playing iPods.
Google Requests Reexamination of Lodsys Patents
Groklaw: We have had a chance to review the reexamination requests, and after that review we believe Lodsys is in for a rough time. We have seen reexam requests before, but when we saw these, the above quote came to mind. Lodsys, you shouldn’t have brought a knife to a gunfight.
Google’s Motorola purchase: Something had to be done
Ever since I picked up a “T-Mobile G1″, they’ve been winding me up quietly. The fact my G1 couldn’t limp into mid-morning without the battery going to red was something that astounded many Nokia executives I know. How could they put something like this out to market?
The camera? Abysmal.
The voice quality? Robotic.
The user experience? Limited.
The best way of running my G1 — if I actually wanted to use it for a full day — was to actually switch everything off.
Google to Acquire Motorola
Larry Page:
This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.
★ Google: Patently Absurd, by John Gruber
Well said…
David Drummond, Google senior vice president and chief legal officer, “When Patents Attack Android”:
But Android’s success has yielded something else: a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents.
They’re doing this by banding together to acquire Novell’s old patents (the “CPTN” group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel’s old patents (the “Rockstar” group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn’t get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Mobile; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it.
So if Google had acquired the rights to these patents, that would have been OK. But when others acquired them, it’s a “hostile, organized campaign”. It’s OK for Google to undermine Microsoft’s for-pay OS licensing business by giving Android away for free, but it’s not OK for Microsoft to undermine Google’s attempts to give away for free an OS that violates patents belonging to Microsoft?
This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth. Microsoft and Apple’s winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop.
First, the “estimate” of $1 billion was partially set by Google itself.
Then when the auction actually started, it’s OK for Google to bid over $3.14 billion, but when Apple and Microsoft bid $4.5 billion, that’s “way beyond what they’re really worth”. And if these patents are “bogus”, why was Google willing to pay anything for them, let alone pi billion dollars?
No one other than Nathan Myhrvold and his cronies sees the U.S. patent system as functioning properly, but Google’s hypocrisy here is absurd. Google isn’t arguing against a handful of never-should-have-been-issued software patents. They’re not arguing against patent trolls like Myhrvold and his shell companies like Lodsys — companies that have no products of their own, no actual inventions, just patents for ideas for products. They’re effectively arguing against the idea of the patent system itself, simply because Android violates a bunch of patents held by Google’s competitors. It’s not “patents” that are attacking Android. It’s competing companies whose patents Google has violated — and whose business Android undermines — who are attacking Android.
Google supporters claim that Google only wants to use patents defensively. But what exactly does Google need to defend against, if not actual patents Android actually violates?
How is Google’s argument here different than simply demanding that Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, et al should simply sit back and let Google do whatever it wants with Android, regardless of the patents they hold? And, let’s not forget, give Android away for free.
The GMAIL Man!
Google Offers To Re-Write Your Webpages On The Fly, Promising 25% To 60% Speed Improvements
Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s arsenal to help speed up the web. This service is also their most ambitious yet. When you sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google, they’ll enable the tool which will fetch your content from your servers, rewrite your webpages, and serve them up from Google’s own servers around the world. Yes, you read all of that correctly.
Cocky.
More Evidence of Low Sales of Android Tablets
Breakdown by Google of Android devices in use by screen size. “Xlarge” is defined as any screen 7 inches or larger. By Google’s count, only 0.9% of activated in-use devices are tablets. Multiply that by the 135 million total Android “devices” that Larry Page announced last week during Google’s quarterly analyst call, and you get 1.21 million tablets. Compare that to the 28.73 million iPads Apple sold through the end of June.
(Thanks to DF reader Thomas Scrace.)
Steven Sande: Google iPhone app hands-on
Steven Sande:
I didn’t think I’d ever say this about a Google app, but the design of the Google+ app is clean, uncluttered, and incredibly usable.
Crazy talk. This is a rushed app. It’s one thing to be ‘simple’ but ‘rushed’ is unmistakable.
My name is Matt and I am a Product Manager specializing in Mobile at Thomson Reuters. I like my Family. I like Apple. I like Photography. I like Mobile Toys. I like Food. I like Golf. I'm big into all technology with major interests in mobile which fascinates the begeebees out of me. I like a lot of stuff so I thought I'd share along with the occasional light-bulb of insight too. All views expressed are mine alone.
