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Redmond Yawning at Apple-Google Alliance?
Debra D'Agostino writes "Despite the media hype around Google CEO Eric Schmidt's appointment to Apple's board, CIO Insight Executive Editor Dan Briody says it's not that big a story. 'Apple and Google are already plenty tight,' he says. Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech, has been on both boards for years. And Al Gore and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell are both Apple board members and advisors to Google. 'While it's fun to speculate about what an Apple-Google alliance could produce (GoogleMacs? MacGoogle? GoogleTunes?) this move is far from an alliance,' Briody writes. 'And even if it were, it wouldn't be first time that two upstart powerhouses have joined forces in an attempt to unseat Microsoft. Remember AOL-Netscape? Boy, they just steamrolled the team from Redmond, didn't they?'"
I think a lot of people bought and listened to MS because they were the biggest and seemed to be leading the way, so you bought their stuff and did things their way because that was the easiest... Now with two giants providing a different path, MS will start to look far weaker and people will feel that they are now entitled to make non-MS decisions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What he said about AOL-Netscape may be true, but AOL-Netscape was a lame-ass alliance.
Seriously, I've known Apple fanboys to be zealous to the point of failed logic, but I've never known a mac user to be outright stupid (lookin' at you, AOL).
Meanwhile, Google is ubiquitous and powerful, with a number of good web-apps that are challenging to MS's model. And the pair of them are at the (to date) height of their power with very little overlaping in the finger-to-pie categories.
If there's a plan, I hope it's a good one.
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If we're lucky, we can all see the fiery explosion that will be the downfall of M$.
Where do you guys come from with all this venom and FUD? God, complete with a $. Your type really seem to think so much alike that I'd swear every one of you are the same person. It's so ironic, it's sad.
Anyway, getting to the point: Maybe I agree or disagree but you should provide some reasoning along with a statement.
Let me try: I don't think there is an alliance, and even Google and Apple together are not going to just "crush" Microsoft. MS' sheer size, marketshare along with its diverse involments in many more markets that Google nd Apple combined coupled with its admittedly dubious business practices are going to ensure they'll be around a *long* time.
why run from Vincenzo?
The key to beating Microsoft is to unseat Windows. Having a new board member at Apple isn't going to do that.
If Apple was serious about unseating Windows then they would copy Microsoft's strategies. Microsoft can see threats coming. The Playstation was a trojan horse into the living room. MS pumped a lot of money into putting a machine into people's living rooms that would stop them from needing to buy a Playstation. This is a long term strategy.
What Apple should do is buy Sun and put those hardware engineers to work on making the worlds best game console. That console should be a server with thin clients around the house, it should serve up great games and movies to the tv, and also let you wirelessly connect a Monitor and keyboard thin client and use Googles internet office suite for working on all your work like needs. TV and music on demand would be served up through Apples iTunes store. With this strategy Apple/Google/Sun could take over the entire household computing needs. And you know it would be cool because it comes from Apple.
Of course in the meantime I'm going to end up buying Vista, Office 2007, a Nintendo Wii and think about an Xbox 360.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
History does not agree with your premise. If ease of use was so important, Apple would be dominating the industry. MacOS had far superior "plug and play" support well before it came to any environment Windows ran on ("Microsoft" and "Apple" are not OSes). And even with the state that WinXP is in today, there is still a very large market for supporting end user desktops. It would seem that Windows (and even OSX) falls short of your ideal. Don't get me wrong - Linux (since you brought it up) as a desktop platform does have various short-comings. But I don't find "supportability" as much an issue as you make it out.
Apple lost in the early years because IBM lost. When IBM lost control of its "personal computer" architecture and it became a commodity platform, it set the stage for Microsoft's success and the demise for Apple who managed to "win" and keep control of its own platform. Tough break for Apple. They failed to bootstrap their own version of a commodity platform years later. And I'm not so sure any attempt today to support the x86 platform today would be successful (not that it wouldn't be interesting to see it attempted).
You're assuming that Microsoft has to be unseated at the OS level. I disagree. What has to be done is to remove the OS as the lynch-pin to any given strategy. Web apps would be one piece to that - although I'm not convinced that alone will do it.