I don't really want to defend either company, and I feel filthy for writing this post.
Apple is the best at aesthetic design, and customer satisfaction. But the only truly innovative thing Apple has done is the iPhone. The iPhone does deserve to be considered a great innovation, but the rest of the article's claims to innovation don't really stand up. Every silicon valley company builds on the work of others, and Apple is no exception. Ahem, Xerox.
Google makes the vast majority of revenue and profits the old fashioned way– search engine advertising. Attempts to diversify the company’s revenue and profits have largely failed.
This is sort of true, although I would give Google more credit in its search engine business model than the author. Until Google came along, no one had really figured out how to make money on internet search, even Yahoo. They did it, and are still rolling in money because of it.
I would also rank Google Maps highly, that has affected people's lives as much as the author is solely reserving for Apple products.
Take the famed and fabled self-driving car that Google trots out from time to time. Can you buy one? Nope. Does Google sell the technology? Nope. Self driving vehicles may make great TV news and PR, and they may be the norm at some point in the distant future, but for now, it’s all Google vaporware.
True, but I kind of like that the current internet billionaires are spending money on trying to build the next big thing, rather than sports cars and big houses.
The money thrown around by Google may not pay off for Google, but they are driving innovation that will pay off someday somewhere. I think the world and the economy will be better off with self driving cars than from iTunes.
No doubt IBM is a “Patent Monster”, and your points are all well taken. I have no favorite dog in this hunt. It was just that the poster Henry Hnyellar threw down the “look it up”challenge, so l did.
And so did Xerox from Apple. They were both synergistically building off of each other. . . and both were building off of Doug Englbart's from years earlier at the Stanford Research institute at Stanford University. Apple developed MANY more of the GUI standards than did Xerox, developing for example the drag and drop windows, the dropdown menuing system, nested menus, active icons, etc. That was not at all Xerox's work or anywhere near Xerox's design. All apple.
This is sort of true, although I would give Google more credit in its search engine business model than the author. Until Google came along, no one had really figured out how to make money on internet search, even Yahoo. They did it, and are still rolling in money because of it.
Google's great inventions are the algorithms that power the web crawlers searching all the websites and cataloging the entire World Wide Web, and then the other algorithms that prioritize data for display to searchers. Those were brilliant.
I also agree on Google Maps.