There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America’s leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.
Which is to say that Apple’s playing checkers while Google plays chess.
For better or worse, this is exactly why many people seem to hold Google in higher regard than they do Apple. Both Apple and Google are rich and wealthy beyond average-person-measure. Now, which company will be liked more: the one that uses said wealth to develop crazy may-or-may
-not-work technologies that can change the world at a massively substantial scale, or the one that stuffs $150 billion in shady bank accounts to avoid having to pay taxes?
The more wealth you hoard, the less sympathetic people will be towards you. Unless, of course, you use that wealth in a very public way.
Google is no better than Apple. Just because they move in different directions does not mean they are not any less shady than Apple.
Ha, I was thinking the same thing.
Honestly, I think the main difference at this point between Google and Apple is that Apple is ran more by hipsters and Google is ran more by nerds.
The hipsters are of the mindset that if it’s design is cool, than that’s better.
Nerds care more about functions and gadgets. This is why Google is the one who is experimenting with all the self-driving cars, and google glass stuff. Apple takes years of previous work, polishes it up a bit and releases. Which is why all of their new releases are evolutionary instead of revolutionary.
Name just one thing that Google has released that is revolutionary.
1GB great webmail
great webreader
great searchengine
youtube
etc.
Revolutionary is when your product changes the future direction.
IIRC, besides the search engine, all the other things were bought, not developed by Google itself….
And besides, none of what you’re listing is revolutionary, as any of those things did already exist, they just “improved” it, just like Apple did with the iPhone
That is why I explained how I use the word revolutionary. Youtube on my homepc is nothing. Youtube with millions of GB/s in storage and bandwidth with a lot of processing power for free for everyone is revolutionary. The iPhone changed how people use phones, computers and the internet.
Read the comment and then reply.
YouTube still existed a very long time before Google bought them, and pretty much worked in a very similar way. I’m not really clear what Google did. Other than find a way to actually monetise the service.
At least Gmail was an internal development, active for several years within Google before public launch.
Sure, except the claim is that Apple doesn’t do revolutionary tech. So are you claiming the iPod, iPad, and iPhone didn’t change the future direction of those markets? If you aren’t, then your missed the point of this thread.
Edited 2014-06-03 05:17 UTC
What Google released that was revolutionary?
1) GMail. It was first email, where you could have as much mail as you wanted and never had to delete anything. If you came from provider with 10-15 MB account size, it was a godsend. For the first time, you could have all your email on server, not that POP3 nonsense, where you were wondering on which device the email ended up. It was really the first one that was worry free. It literally changed user’s attitude towards email.
The labels instead of folders were just a cherry on the top.
2). Maps. Making available always-up-to-date geospatial data for free or low fee is huge. Before that, if you wanted ortofoto of a small city (about 300 km^2), you had to shell out about 12K EUR. No updates, of course, if you wanted newer data, you had to buy them again. The same for maps, landbase, geocoding… Now it is available on the web, for free. Many people still don’t realize, how huge this is.
I agree, except now apply the anti-apple logic to this paragraph. Email is not new, webmail is not new. Email with lots of space was not new, they just gave you a bit more space. For most people, the increased space was meaningless because they didn’t even use the space that Hotmail gave them. If anything, hotmail was the real innovation.
See? Same argument is used against the iPhone. It’s not real innovation because blah blah phone did it first. Never mind that every invention in the history of mankind is built on a previous one.
Right. This is some very nice cherry picking done by Thom. While Apple continues to eliminate one or two reasons why I won’t use iOS with every new release, Google hasn’t done much but piss me off over the last few years. First, they killed reader. Then, they left Voice out to rot. And then removed all ad-blocking software from the Play store. And starting with Android 4.2, they haven’t done a whole lot with Android, other than breaking things and removing features. And I read an article the other day that they’re about to make it even harder to unlock bootloaders. Google Plus continues to get worse and worse with every release. What started out as a mainly nimble, text-oriented social networking app has turned into a clusterf**k that is more a photo editor than anything else. With their ‘auto awesome’ type bullshit, they’re slowly but surely selling out to the iTards and making their ecosystem much less interesting to people like me.
Now, about the self-driving car thing:
Being visually impaired, trust me when I say that I want these self-driving cars more than anyone. That being said, as Steve Jobs once eloquently put it, real artists ship. Meaning, I will be impressed when they actually have something I can buy. Same with Google Glass. It’s one thing to talk about all of this cool stuff you’re working on, but it’s quite another to put it in the hands of the masses.
But if they DO release a self-driving car that works, and that I can actually afford, I will take back every bad thing I ever said about them
Edited 2014-06-01 22:07 UTC
Developing, building, and shipping a driverless car is about 3409548 orders of magnitude more complicated than shipping a phone or a new iOS release. You really cannot compare the two.
True, but I’m not giving them any credit for working on it until they actually ship one. Same for Google Glass.
See Thom, you’re missing the forest for the trees. Google is designing the self-driving car, and Apple is designing the CarPlay stereo for it!
So? When they ship it they will get credit for shipping it. Before that point, they get the same credit as the winners of the darpa challenge.
There are tons of groups doing autonomous vehicles. I’d rather have an autonomous car from probably most of them before I’d have one from Google.
Of course they do, that’s not the point. I’m talking about *perception*. People are more willing to let Google’s crap slide because Google has this crazy sci-fi stuff going on that’s very much in the public eye. It’s great PR.
Real people don’t care.
They don’t even care about audio quality in their arguably “high end” earphones.
Edited 2014-06-01 22:49 UTC
Yeah, with gold plated optical connectors for better signal transmission…
Kochise
Your article preface does not reflect what you meant, it comes off more, Apple is shady and doesn’t pay taxes, builds toys, Google pays it’s taxes and shoots for the moon.
and the next day, Apple unveils a new programming language at WWDC. As well as a version of iOS containing all the catch-up features people have requested over the years, along with cool APIs like HealthKit, HomeKit and Metal.
Next time, just don’t publish these sorts of opinion pieces ahead of keynotes.
Edited 2014-06-02 19:12 UTC
I thought that the changes to the TOS and trying to tie everything you do back to G+ would have been enough to convince folks that “don’t be evil” was just “think different” for the nerd set, guess I was wrong.
they are packagers, or in some cases re-packagers. Their most famous current employee is the head of their design dept, and their CEO is a supply-chain guy, period.
Furthermore, Google is really not “inventing” driverless cars either. They are mainly turning other people’s research into an advertisement vector, because audiences in transit are as captive audience as they come. Google in a sense is a mega ad agency.
People need to see corporations for what they are, not for whatever need for dramatization would like them to be.
Bingo. Every innovation ever produced is built on previous work. There are tens of thousands of teams out there working on autonomous vehicles. Google is trying to get them the last mile. Not entirely unlike Apple did for smartphones. Neither invented the idea, they are just making them work for the average person.
If there’s one thing we can be sure of, is people won’t give up their cars, even if it means wasting money, polluting and killing people. Actual lives means nothing compared to a principle.
People are losing interest in cars. It is now quite common in Australia for middle class people in their 20s to not have a car or even a drivers licence. They either use public transport or taxis.
Cars will slowly become so expensive to own and so regulated to use that many people will simply give up owning a car.
I was trying to avoid mentioning “Americans”.
I wonder how many people would be so desperate to keep their cars that they’ll try to get cars 2nd amendment protection because they can kill people.
Edited 2014-06-02 06:51 UTC
I’m sure that some Americans will argue that cars are a constitutionally protected ‘weapon’ necessary to prevent a Russian/Chinese/Cuban/British/New Zealand/etc invasion.
[Nearly 400,000 Americans have died in car crashes since 1899. This is more than those who died from combat in WW1 and WW2 combined.]
As for me I now find driving to be a total PITA. Bring on the driverless car.
Did a quick search on Australian car sales the last 2 years:
2012 sales: The Australian new-car market made a mockery of economic doomsayers last year, with sales climbing to record levels. Official sales figures for 2012 released by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries today showed that sales were up by 10.3 per cent to 1.112 million, driven by strong growth in SUVs and four-wheel-drive utes, and attractive deals from importers taking advantage of the strong Australian dollar.
2013 sales: 2013 will go down in history as the most successful for the industry as a whole, with sales reaching a new record high. A total of 1,136,227 new passenger cars, SUVs and commercial vehicles were sold in Australia in 2013, eclipsing the old record set the previous year by 24,195 vehicles or 2.2 per cent.
Wow, way to get your facts wrong. You probably extrapolated your own experience, and that of your friends, to the whole country. Common mistake.
Regarding all the talk below about the so-called US love affair with our cars, we don’t hold a candle next to Germany. They have a car-lobby with the political strength and deep pockets of the US gun lobby. Nothing will ever remove the Germans from their high powered cards or their right to drive them with no speed limit on most of the Autobahn system.
A very large proportion of private vehicles are purchased for business use and are tax deductible.
Fleet and government buyers are responsible for the majority of new vehicle purchases.
The Australian people who aren’t buying cars are the highly educated inner city professionals. These are the people who will be the future political and economic elite. In many cases they are actually hostile to car ownership.
The people most reliant on cars in Australia are the politically disenfranchised low income earners who live in the outer suburbs.
Car manufacturing ends in Australia in 2017. That will greatly weaken the lobbing power of the industry.
Most Germans don’t own Porsches or AMG Mercedes. They own modestly powered small sedans or hatchbacks. German manufacturers ‘voluntarily’ added a 250Km/h speed limiter in exchange for ‘unlimited’ autobahn speeds.
Principle? I just like driving. I’ll own a car as long as I can afford to own one. Thankfully, it will probably be decades before those soulless google shitboxes start rolling around where I live in any significant numbers.
Good for you.
I wasn’t talking about you.
I’m not worried, we don’t have even Google Books yet. Given the simplicity of this compared to self-driving car, I’m not sure if they will appear on our streets outside of testing during my lifetime
There are plenty of excellent automotive companies that make good cars out there, I don’t need Google stupid spying cars. Thank you!!
BTW Did you see how lame those Google cars look?!?! Mother of god… nobody can use that fugly piece of…
There are plenty of excellent headphone companies that make good headphones out there. I don’t need no stinking iBeats with distorted bass response!!
BTW Did you see how lame those Beats headphones look?!?! Mother of dog… I have no idea why teenagers buy those ugly pieces of….
Edited 2014-06-02 01:32 UTC
What does Google know about cars??!!? What cars have to do with their business?!? It’s all smoke, vapor, demagogy for nerds.
At least, headphones are related to Apple business, they sell music and music players and Beats will improve their products and customer experience.
I hate companies like Google that tries to conquer the world instead of focusing on their (faulty) products. Google must improve their _horrible_ stuff like Google+, Android or Youtube before trying to reinvent the wheel.
Driverless cars provide a perfect opportunity for bored occupants to use the internet during that dreary commute.
And ads relevant to where the car is and/or is going.
Oh, you mean just like Apple who instead of focusing on their core product (computers and operating systems) are expanding into unrelated businesses like audio/video players, phones and streaming audio and video?
Apple’s core product is the iPhone!
Well, that wasn’t always the case so according to OP they should never have ventured in that direction.
<double post>
Edited 2014-06-02 10:23 UTC
The facts are – the one company is doing things far from their core business (Google) while the other is buying solution to complement its core business (Apple).
The real problem is that Google continues to buy competition, it becoming very fast a dangerous monopoly not only in IT business, but in every business on the planet. Soon we all have Google food, Google medicine, Google airlines, Google defense services… Do we want to live in such a world? Esp. given the beta quality of many Google things?
About this is in reality Google only makes money on Ads and NOTHING else.
So while they make these moonshots, as with other things they start up, when it’s not profitable it will eventually be dropped like a hot potato.
And that’s the fact that everyone is over looking.
Just like the Nexus program, just like Moto etc. Can’t trust that Google will stick by anything.
Also Google has billions in shady accounts too! Lol.
Edited 2014-06-02 00:20 UTC
http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2014/05/all-the-world-a-t…
This is just an Amusement park ride. Google is going to map the earth over and over and over. Street view is one thing but this uses things like he height of signs and curbs etc. Any of that changes and you have issues.
The Google cars would constantly relay data back to base giving live updates of conditions. Major routes would be upgraded every few seconds.
That would be cool if they can learn as they go. As it stands now they use the street view cars to collect the data and then pass it back to base and then the data is sent to the driver-less car and uploaded before the car is used.
The question is not if it will work through, but if they will make money off it for it to be worth while to maintain all that infrastructure. If Ads are the way they are going to pay for all this, I don’t see it being sustainable in the long term. The project its self will need to make money.
This! Google’s self driving is not our idea of self driving. It would simply not function outside the areas they have mapped.
And even if they have the resources to map everything, the real question is how it works in places that have snow (which can reduce a 3 lane road to 1 lane), or ice, or really chaotic traffic, or on the narrow and winding roads of Europe.
Dude, it’s a research project that is far from completion. It’s not like they’re going to start selling these cars tomorrow.
So Google builds a themepark showcasing a future that would make Ayrton Senna grateful he’s already dead, and Apple buys a company that makes tacky horrible sounding headphones that make you look like a twat in public.
Both equally lame, imho.
Edited 2014-06-02 01:41 UTC
A car with minimalistic GUI and “I’m feeling lucky” button.
Google and Apple are both one trick ponies. Google sells ads; Apple sells phones. Both will be either out of business or minor players within 20 years time (IMHO much sooner).
Likely true. And the same applies to cars as to phones for me.
I like to use a phone made by a company that makes their money from selling phones.
I like to drive a car made by a company that makes their money from selling cars.
I really don’t want to use anything made by companies that make their money from selling ads, because that way I never stop paying.
Reminds me of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of old, or up there with IBM labs in terms of the crazy stuff they come up with.
Apple don’t seem to have anything genuinely “out of the lab” like since they stopped selling Apple II variants.
Xerox Parc and Bell Labs did make a lot of cool stuff. Unfortunately they didn’t make a lot of money for shareholders. Ultimately profits are what counts for businesses.
AFAIK Apple pays far more in taxes than Google. And both are as bad as each other when it comes to shoddy bank accounts.
The difference is that Google gets a lot of credit for vaporware (non-existent products, not the company). I’m all for Google’s initiatives in various fields but exactly zero of them exist in the real world. When they actually release these “crazy” products and services I will be sure to extend them the deserved credit and good will.
As if Apple doesn’t have stuff going on in its skunkworks, they just keep stum about it.
Sometimes these articles are so biased and border on fanaticism – is this really what OSAlert needs to generate traffic? Where is the objective analysis?
Taxes: all companies do this, including Google, and it is done to the same extent as by Apple; Apple just makes more money then anyone and so has more money offshore
Products: Google makes ALL of it’s money from advertising and always has. It sells YOU. YOU are being sold by Google to advertisers. Everything else it has made to date is just a way to get more of your data and sell it more effectively. Look at the licensing terms for any of their products, it’s what George Orwell imagined in a dystopian future manifested in a company. Apple makes shiny phones and shiny laptops which you may or may not like – lots of people do which is why it’s successful.
Research: Self driving cars are cool. These would be game changing and would help any people and society at large. Just now their nothing more then a hobby for google though. I’ve no idea what apple is researching, I am pretty sure it’s not headphones. I’ve read their going to release a wearable – this year – that will take health monitoring to a whole new level. I think that would help people. Apple also invests a ton in environment friendly materials, manufacturing methods and their aiming for a zero carbon footprint for their operations. That’s also a good thing.
Anyway, seriously now, these are companies that make products. Please look at them objectively and stop being a fanatic.
profit margin is the name of the game for these american companies.
google is an advertising company that uses it’s various “free” technology platforms and science experiments to shield the fact that they are an advertising and tracking mechanism. nothing’s free baby! gmail, android, docs, +, all of it “free” ^a‰ “free”.
apple is a company that makes actual products that are spread all over the globe doing all sorts of tasks, many not sharing any data or advertising to you at all*. at least apple asks a price and accepts payment.
i think the beats acquisition is style over substance too, but don’t be fooled by google’s science fairs.
goog holds more of our data and habits than apple, and they have no problem selling it to the highest bidder. that is google’s business model, not making anything. apple would make an actual car before google does, because apple makes actual things that people pay money to own.
also – i have seen google glass up close, watched a woman demo it for hours, it’s craptastic! i would have been laughing in her face if it wasn’t a business contact. i wouldn’t get in a google car considering the average quality of most google products.
*of course the new, huge apple does copycat stuff in these spaces too, like iAd and Twitter integration into OSX.
Edited 2014-06-02 16:37 UTC
The less time you have to spend watching the road as a driver, the more time you can spend as a passenger being spammed by advertising.
In all seriousness, research into autonomous cars is neither new nor exclusive to Google. However, wide-spread adoption of the technology is in the distant future at best. As another user already pointed out, people like to drive and they aren’t going to jump at the chance to give that up. People also like being in control. Aside of that, if and when the vehicles and support systems are ready for the public, the transition over is going to be a slow process. At least here, in America, where change comes at a snails pace and the only thing that isn’t debated and/or challenged for years before any (if any) progress is made, is declarations of war, congressional pay raises, and big business circle-jerking. If this is something for the good of the people, it’s low priority so don’t expect anything to come of it any time soon.
To be honest, there are plenty of other things that are more important and deserving of our attention than robot cars brought to you by Google ads.
The driverless car runs on a special route rack built into the Google campus. Its a fair ground ride and a PR stunt.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2014/05/all-the-world-a…
If you think the Beats acquisition was about headphones you are being myopic.
This guy gets the Beats acquisition.
https://medium.com/@mvakulenko/to-understand-beats-you-need-to-under…
The number of concept products shown by a company are almost always in inverse proportion to the actual product innovations produced by that company.
Apple doesn^aEURTMt do concept products. It announces actual products.
http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/