Apple would love to get these injunctions, but really they have never behaved as though market share is their primary motivation. From the earliest days of the company they have opted for high-profit sales to a smaller niche audience. For iOS Apple could have easily (a) gone to multiple carriers much earlier than they did, and (b) produced cheaper models for the global market. But they didn't. Historically the high-margin strategy has worked for them.
What I think worries Apple now is that the high-margin strategy only works so long as there is a perceived quality premium. This time the competitor isn't MS-DOS. The best Android phones and tablets with Jellybean are genuinely good products, and in certain areas (LTE adoption, screen size, customizability) Apple is looking like a follower rather than leader. I think what they get from these injunctions isn't so much a market share boost, as it is a boost to their reputation as innovators.
I've worked with Marissa before and admire her product focus and attention to detail. She's very sharp. The challenge for her will be working in an environment without the depth of engineering talent that Google has; she has never experienced this in her working life.
Glad to see FTA made the list. Like Ultima III before it and Skyrim today, it was one of those games that just blew you away with scope and detail. Dramatically richer experience than anything that came before.
Lining up all the games it's also interesting to see how RPGs have evolved from being mostly about combat (Wizardry) to focus much more on exploration and problem-solving. Somewhere down the road somebody will make a fun RPG that doesn't involve killing anything at all.
At my company we have many thousands of employees using MacBook Pros/Airs as primary work machines. Overall it works pretty well, but there are a couple of annoying areas:
lack of full-disk encryption out of the box. FileVault is a half-hearted attempt, but it's not secure enough for corporate use. You basically have to find a third party to provide this, which enormously complicates the process of provisioning a new laptop and creates a lot of interaction and support issues.
lack of a port extender solution. We're always taking our laptops from our desk to meetings, which involves plugging/unplugging a crazy number of things: power, ethernet, and external monitor cable at a minimum (+USB if you have a keyboard or mouse). I can see why Apple doesn't want the size and ugliness of a dock connector in the bottom of their machines, but this is a big usability issue in a work environment. Thunderbolt seems like a good platform to provide port extension with little impact to the hardware.
I think Apple could look more at the corporate use case. There are a number of things that would improve their machines for the corporate environment, without sacrificing (or changing) anything about the consumer experience.
Spreadsheets are good, but for simple problems they can be unwieldy compared to a calculator. For example calculating the square root of 8 is three keypresses on an RPN calculator. On Excel it's one mouse-click into a cell, followed by nine keypresses ('=sqrt(8)' + return).
Here's my hierarchy of tools for solving numerical problems (putting symbolic math aside):
simple: RPN calculator
moderate: spreadsheet
complex: my own code, usually in C because a lot of standard libraries like LAPACK are available
Believe it or not Slashdot, the guys at the top are usually there for very good reasons. They are not stupid, they are not idiots, and most of them are pretty damn good at what they do.
I've worked directly with a lot of CEOs and other senior leaders at companies. My observation is that there is always a baseline of high personal drive and ambition, and usually a good amount of charisma and intelligence as well. The people who get to the top get there for a reason, and it isn't usually prep school or family connections. Many CEOs come from typical middle-class backgrounds.
That said, at the senior-most level it's hard in practice to determine just who is "pretty damn good at what they do". At a large company it can take five or more years to figure out whether a given strategy was brilliant or misguided. Contrast that with a line factory worker, whose contribution is easy to measure. Because it's so hard to measure the performance of a C-level leader, there gets to be this self-perpetuating aspect to the people in those roles: Once you attain that role (somehow), then wherever you go in the future will also be a C-level role. And if you're a corporate board looking to hire at that level, you go with someone that has prior experience because you don't really know how to measure them anyway, and you're pretty risk averse. In effect the pool of candidates is artificially restricted because of a lack of good information. Ironically C-level people end up making more money precisely because it is so difficult to measure how well they perform.
In net, I'd guess at least one person out of 100,000 has what takes to be a credible CEO of Goldman Sachs, if they were given the chance. Of course we'll never know.
This is interesting, given that Apple buys a lot of its flash and other important components from Samsung, by one estimate over $7B annually. Neither can afford to not do business with the other. Maybe this is the opening move in a components negotiation?
As a lawsuit this seems ineffective as a way of preventing competition. By the time this plods its way through the court, Samsung will be four product generations down the road. Maybe this is all just PR, a way for Apple to accuse Samsung of being "non-innovative" and spread general FUD about Android. But I don't think history has shown that to be a viable strategy. Moreover I have to say that as owner of both the iPhone and Galaxy S, the similarities between them are pretty superficial.
how much freaking faster than the blink of an eye, or electrical arc does the browser need to be?
Yeah, the 5+ second load times we still have on complex pages is totally acceptable. And on mobile devices, it's very relaxing to be able to pour a cup of coffee in the time it takes to load a page. I completely don't understand why every browser maker out there is working so hard to improve performance. I mean, what's the rush?
The rest of us don't really feel like being your crash test dummies or doing your work for you because you guys are in a rush to push something out...
But if you are running a locked-down corp environment you are not allowing auto-updating software like Chrome or Firefox in the first place, right? You're probably running IE, which gives you tight control over versions and upgrades. And so this entire discussion is irrelevant to you. Am I missing something?
I have never seen a computer that's close to fast enough, in any form factor. We get used to these delays inserted by machines throughout our lives, and phones are some of the worst offenders. Our expectations are too low. Every device should respond instantaneously. Every device should inspire that feeling you get driving a well-designed car, where the machine becomes an extension of your mind and body.
Here are some applications that could benefit from at least 10x more CPU than smartphones have today, and probably 100-1000x:
Real-time speech-to-speech translation -- doing what Google does in the cloud, only on the phone so it's much faster.
Real-time barcode, object, location, and facial recognition -- I want to be able to point my phone at something, and it quickly figures out what I'm looking at. I don't want to have to snap a picture and wait for the 10 second roundtrip to the cloud. Even simple things like QR codes are marginally unusable: You have to turn on your phone, open up the barcode app, center the camera on the code, and snap the picture -- at least 10 seconds. The camera should be always-on, and it should auto-detect items of interest (QR codes, recognizable objects, faces, popular landmarks, navigational landmarks), and on top of this it should overlay useful information (a name, a link to Amazon, a link to a Google Place page, a walking path). A tiny part of this is available in Word Lens already.
Web rendering -- here's an experiment: try loading page X on your phone. then (if you can) put your phone into tethering mode, and load the same page on your laptop using your phone's data connection. I promise the latter will be at least 3x faster than the former. Lesson: On a 3G or faster network, browsing is CPU-bound, not network-bound.
I agree, this sort of boasting is idiotic and serves no purpose other than to make your own side complacent, and the other side determined. A good leader doesn't talk smack like this to inflate his own ego. A good leader shuts the f--k up and makes his product better.
Michael Dell has become a laughingstock for his comments about Apple. Steve Balmer has become a laughingstock for his comments about the iPhone. You'd think people in the industry would learn.
Notably Mundie skates over the possibility of tablets replacing laptops. Fundamentally how is an iPad + bluetooth keyboard (on the occasions you need it) all that different from a MacBook Air?
I'm not saying a tablet could replace every laptop on the planet -- just as laptops didn't replace every desktop on the planet -- but it's shortsighted to think of the laptop as a fixed point in the technology landscape, forever unchanging. I'm seeing more and more people in a business context -- especially those who travel a lot -- using iPads for presentations, note-taking, email, and so on.
Myspace isn't really a tech company, neither is facebook. They are content companies. The tech is just a conduit, means to an end.
I see a lot of technology companies seduced by this false idea. Yahoo! is another shining example of a tech company run into the ground by a non-tech CEO with a vision to remake it into an "entertainment" business. It baffles me, since content and entertainment are pretty crummy businesses to be in objectively speaking.
You look well-run companies like Apple, Google, or Facebook and both technology and content play important roles in what they offer. The meaningful distinction is: Which is harder to get right? The fact is, it's much harder to design and build an iPad 2 than it is to negotiate the deals for the content that will go onto it. Likewise, it's harder to build and deploy the technology behind Google Maps than it is to acquire the mapping data. It was harder for Facebook to figure out how to enable 3rd parties to embed games etc. into their site in a scalable, secure way than it was to negotiate for the rights to those games. That's not to say the content partnerships aren't important, just that if you have non-technical people running these companies you have the tail wagging the dog.
I think you're missing the core issue. Google scanning a bunch of books and then not showing them to anybody is hard to make out as a crime against humanity. The crime against humanity is a copyright system that renders nearly all out-of-print books (i.e., 95% of books ever written) as orphans, protected against copying but with authors that are long-gone (in many cases long-dead). Everyone loses in this situation: Authors of out of print books cannot make money, readers can't get the books unless they live close to a good library, and publishers receive no revenue from this back-catalog of older material. The core question is, how do we get all of that content to be useful again? The judge's "solution" of opt-in is no solution, because by definition orphaned works have no rights holder to opt in for them.
The correct answer would be to change our copyright laws to accomodate for orphaned works. With this ruling I hope Congress finally grows the stones to take that on, however with the Hollywood lobby I'm not hopeful. In the end we will likely have millions of volumes of our culture simply vanish as at the library of Alexandria, all because nobody cares.
after he got some silicon valley type to pay for it
As a silicon valley type, I don't think you'd get a silicon valley type to pay for this. People will fund far-out stuff (e.g., SpaceX, the Allen Telescope Array), but there has to be some potential for interesting applications or knowledge.
This on the other hand is a pissing contest, pure and simple. It's like trying to build the loudest sound system possible into a Honda Civic. Some people get into it -- that's cool. But it's not useful R&D.
Clearly both Google's and Apple's programs have been in development for a long time, and from a practical standpoint are entering the market simultaneously. It's not clear that either is copying the other.
With regard to your broader point, the goal of any company isn't to "innovate" shiny new things. It's to solve real problems and make peoples' lives better. Every company, Apple and Google included, borrows heavily from others where it makes sense: Google didn't invent the search engine, and Apple didn't invent the GUI or the smartphone or the tablet computer. However both companies deliver products that are useful to me, and that's what I care about.
In this case the two competitors have quite different pricing structures and product visions, so as with iOS vs. Android it will be interesting to see how the marketplace responds.
Companies change their policies when they see consumers buying something else.
What if they see consumers buying products from Apple, who doesn't ship bloatware or ugly boxes? I think what we see with companies like HP and Dell is a failure of imagination: If you don't have any ideas about how to make the product or user experience great, you focus on cost. The whole thing becomes a race to the bottom, ultimately to be owned by some generic Asian firm with the lowest overhead on the planet.
The golden rule of tech is simple: You've got to love the product. Not developers, not market share, not a clever strategy, not the bottom line -- you've got to love the product. You must have a burning need to improve it, polish it, and then replace it with something better because you love that even more. I'm not convinced that Balmer has ever loved the product. They're a big company so it will take a long time for the world to pass them by, but the direction is unmistakeable.
I agree Schmidt's decision to lead Google probably wasn't about money, more likely a desire to leave a mark, change the world, beat the competition,... The reasons could be many, but as far as money goes he could have retired after Novell and lived out a nice comfortable life.
My hunch is that both Sun and Novell left Schmidt with a bad taste in his mouth. At both companies he had his ass handed to him by Microsoft. He can retire from day-to-day life at Google with satisfaction knowing that he's successfully built a great company. He isn't the product visionary like Jobs, who loves the process of building and honing great products and will do it for as long as he can. At this point Schmidt is probably feeling (perhaps correctly) that there's nothing left for him to prove.
This is very insightful. It's important for managers to understand the details, so they don't get snowed over by quick-fixers. Or if they do have quick-fixers -- because sometimes a quick fix is called for -- they also recognize and reward those who do the hard work later on to solve it the right way. Such "maintenance work" is too often underappreciated, but is crucial for the long-term health of the code base or process.
There is also the anti-quick-fixer who wants to redo everything from scratch, because they can't bear to compromise and create an imperfection. They would rather be 6 months late than offend their own design aesthetic. It takes a lot of maturity to find the right balance between these two extremes.
This ideal of executing what you want on your hardware in your property seems to be dying. And with it, privacy or any desire thereof.
This concept of treating content as a physical good to be owned is a fallacy. It's predicated on a notion of scarcity inherited from the physical world, which doesn't exist with digital goods that cost nothing to reproduce. If you free yourself of this fallacy, there are other usage models that make everyone happier. Like renting for example.
For myself I look at applications like Photoshop, Mathematica, or Solidworks. I would use these infrequently (maybe every 3 months?), but on those occasions they'd be very useful. I cannot justify buying full licenses, but what if I could rent them for, say, $3/day? I would benefit from (a) greater diversity of applications at my disposal, and (b) access to the latest versions of any software. Meanwhile software companies would get a source of revenue they don't have today. Better yet, could I pay $30/month to have unrestricted use of any software within a catalog of options, with the developers to get compensated based on my share of time spent (the ASCAP model)?
Yes there are privacy implications. Netflix knows more about me than they would if I only viewed DVDs purchased with cash from Best Buy. But that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
Obviously I have no idea if this is what Apple is working on, but I think software rentals would benefit everyone, and it's an area that would require leadership from Apple to really take off (providing a common framework for installations, usage monitoring, and billing for example).
A material factor here is that the data in question was collected from people not affiliated with Google, and may be potentially compromising. Especially so since it ties back to particular locations and MAC addresses. The worst case scenario for Google would be to willingly comply with a request like this, then some of the data leaks externally, and some sleuth figures out and publishes something compromising about a user at 345 Main Street in Canton Ohio. If this seems implausible, look at the AOL search data scandal. Let me guess, you aren't using AOL search any more, are you? Given the circumstances I can't blame Google for trying to limit the distribution of this data.
What makes you naive people believe that Google wasn't collecting this data at the behest of the NSA ?
The same thing that makes me believe (a) our government is not guarding extraterrestrial technology in Area 51, and (b) the Apollo landings on the moon could not have been fabricated. Conspiracies with more than 20 people never work. Although I admit life would be more interesting if they did.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple would love to get these injunctions, but really they have never behaved as though market share is their primary motivation. From the earliest days of the company they have opted for high-profit sales to a smaller niche audience. For iOS Apple could have easily (a) gone to multiple carriers much earlier than they did, and (b) produced cheaper models for the global market. But they didn't. Historically the high-margin strategy has worked for them.
What I think worries Apple now is that the high-margin strategy only works so long as there is a perceived quality premium. This time the competitor isn't MS-DOS. The best Android phones and tablets with Jellybean are genuinely good products, and in certain areas (LTE adoption, screen size, customizability) Apple is looking like a follower rather than leader. I think what they get from these injunctions isn't so much a market share boost, as it is a boost to their reputation as innovators.
I've worked with Marissa before and admire her product focus and attention to detail. She's very sharp. The challenge for her will be working in an environment without the depth of engineering talent that Google has; she has never experienced this in her working life.
Glad to see FTA made the list. Like Ultima III before it and Skyrim today, it was one of those games that just blew you away with scope and detail. Dramatically richer experience than anything that came before.
Lining up all the games it's also interesting to see how RPGs have evolved from being mostly about combat (Wizardry) to focus much more on exploration and problem-solving. Somewhere down the road somebody will make a fun RPG that doesn't involve killing anything at all.
Stallman's idea of computing is to cater to the programmer. That will always gain the most sympathy on /.
Jobs's idea of computing was to cater to the end user. That will always gain the most sympathy with the 99% of the world that isn't on /.
At my company we have many thousands of employees using MacBook Pros/Airs as primary work machines. Overall it works pretty well, but there are a couple of annoying areas:
I think Apple could look more at the corporate use case. There are a number of things that would improve their machines for the corporate environment, without sacrificing (or changing) anything about the consumer experience.
Spreadsheets are good, but for simple problems they can be unwieldy compared to a calculator. For example calculating the square root of 8 is three keypresses on an RPN calculator. On Excel it's one mouse-click into a cell, followed by nine keypresses ('=sqrt(8)' + return).
Here's my hierarchy of tools for solving numerical problems (putting symbolic math aside):
Believe it or not Slashdot, the guys at the top are usually there for very good reasons. They are not stupid, they are not idiots, and most of them are pretty damn good at what they do.
I've worked directly with a lot of CEOs and other senior leaders at companies. My observation is that there is always a baseline of high personal drive and ambition, and usually a good amount of charisma and intelligence as well. The people who get to the top get there for a reason, and it isn't usually prep school or family connections. Many CEOs come from typical middle-class backgrounds.
That said, at the senior-most level it's hard in practice to determine just who is "pretty damn good at what they do". At a large company it can take five or more years to figure out whether a given strategy was brilliant or misguided. Contrast that with a line factory worker, whose contribution is easy to measure. Because it's so hard to measure the performance of a C-level leader, there gets to be this self-perpetuating aspect to the people in those roles: Once you attain that role (somehow), then wherever you go in the future will also be a C-level role. And if you're a corporate board looking to hire at that level, you go with someone that has prior experience because you don't really know how to measure them anyway, and you're pretty risk averse. In effect the pool of candidates is artificially restricted because of a lack of good information. Ironically C-level people end up making more money precisely because it is so difficult to measure how well they perform.
In net, I'd guess at least one person out of 100,000 has what takes to be a credible CEO of Goldman Sachs, if they were given the chance. Of course we'll never know.
This is interesting, given that Apple buys a lot of its flash and other important components from Samsung, by one estimate over $7B annually. Neither can afford to not do business with the other. Maybe this is the opening move in a components negotiation?
As a lawsuit this seems ineffective as a way of preventing competition. By the time this plods its way through the court, Samsung will be four product generations down the road. Maybe this is all just PR, a way for Apple to accuse Samsung of being "non-innovative" and spread general FUD about Android. But I don't think history has shown that to be a viable strategy. Moreover I have to say that as owner of both the iPhone and Galaxy S, the similarities between them are pretty superficial.
how much freaking faster than the blink of an eye, or electrical arc does the browser need to be?
Yeah, the 5+ second load times we still have on complex pages is totally acceptable. And on mobile devices, it's very relaxing to be able to pour a cup of coffee in the time it takes to load a page. I completely don't understand why every browser maker out there is working so hard to improve performance. I mean, what's the rush?
The rest of us don't really feel like being your crash test dummies or doing your work for you because you guys are in a rush to push something out ...
But if you are running a locked-down corp environment you are not allowing auto-updating software like Chrome or Firefox in the first place, right? You're probably running IE, which gives you tight control over versions and upgrades. And so this entire discussion is irrelevant to you. Am I missing something?
I have never seen a computer that's close to fast enough, in any form factor. We get used to these delays inserted by machines throughout our lives, and phones are some of the worst offenders. Our expectations are too low. Every device should respond instantaneously. Every device should inspire that feeling you get driving a well-designed car, where the machine becomes an extension of your mind and body.
Here are some applications that could benefit from at least 10x more CPU than smartphones have today, and probably 100-1000x:
I agree, this sort of boasting is idiotic and serves no purpose other than to make your own side complacent, and the other side determined. A good leader doesn't talk smack like this to inflate his own ego. A good leader shuts the f--k up and makes his product better.
Michael Dell has become a laughingstock for his comments about Apple. Steve Balmer has become a laughingstock for his comments about the iPhone. You'd think people in the industry would learn.
Like a shining beacon they show the rest of the world just how destructive and arbitrary a bad justice system can be. Ditto for Brazil.
Notably Mundie skates over the possibility of tablets replacing laptops. Fundamentally how is an iPad + bluetooth keyboard (on the occasions you need it) all that different from a MacBook Air?
I'm not saying a tablet could replace every laptop on the planet -- just as laptops didn't replace every desktop on the planet -- but it's shortsighted to think of the laptop as a fixed point in the technology landscape, forever unchanging. I'm seeing more and more people in a business context -- especially those who travel a lot -- using iPads for presentations, note-taking, email, and so on.
Myspace isn't really a tech company, neither is facebook. They are content companies. The tech is just a conduit, means to an end.
I see a lot of technology companies seduced by this false idea. Yahoo! is another shining example of a tech company run into the ground by a non-tech CEO with a vision to remake it into an "entertainment" business. It baffles me, since content and entertainment are pretty crummy businesses to be in objectively speaking.
You look well-run companies like Apple, Google, or Facebook and both technology and content play important roles in what they offer. The meaningful distinction is: Which is harder to get right? The fact is, it's much harder to design and build an iPad 2 than it is to negotiate the deals for the content that will go onto it. Likewise, it's harder to build and deploy the technology behind Google Maps than it is to acquire the mapping data. It was harder for Facebook to figure out how to enable 3rd parties to embed games etc. into their site in a scalable, secure way than it was to negotiate for the rights to those games. That's not to say the content partnerships aren't important, just that if you have non-technical people running these companies you have the tail wagging the dog.
Their CEO has a background in international business and marketing. Talk about the kiss of death for a technology company.
Has there ever been a successful tech company run by a marketing person? This is an honest question.
I think you're missing the core issue. Google scanning a bunch of books and then not showing them to anybody is hard to make out as a crime against humanity. The crime against humanity is a copyright system that renders nearly all out-of-print books (i.e., 95% of books ever written) as orphans, protected against copying but with authors that are long-gone (in many cases long-dead). Everyone loses in this situation: Authors of out of print books cannot make money, readers can't get the books unless they live close to a good library, and publishers receive no revenue from this back-catalog of older material. The core question is, how do we get all of that content to be useful again? The judge's "solution" of opt-in is no solution, because by definition orphaned works have no rights holder to opt in for them.
The correct answer would be to change our copyright laws to accomodate for orphaned works. With this ruling I hope Congress finally grows the stones to take that on, however with the Hollywood lobby I'm not hopeful. In the end we will likely have millions of volumes of our culture simply vanish as at the library of Alexandria, all because nobody cares.
after he got some silicon valley type to pay for it
As a silicon valley type, I don't think you'd get a silicon valley type to pay for this. People will fund far-out stuff (e.g., SpaceX, the Allen Telescope Array), but there has to be some potential for interesting applications or knowledge.
This on the other hand is a pissing contest, pure and simple. It's like trying to build the loudest sound system possible into a Honda Civic. Some people get into it -- that's cool. But it's not useful R&D.
A day late and a dollar short.
Clearly both Google's and Apple's programs have been in development for a long time, and from a practical standpoint are entering the market simultaneously. It's not clear that either is copying the other.
With regard to your broader point, the goal of any company isn't to "innovate" shiny new things. It's to solve real problems and make peoples' lives better. Every company, Apple and Google included, borrows heavily from others where it makes sense: Google didn't invent the search engine, and Apple didn't invent the GUI or the smartphone or the tablet computer. However both companies deliver products that are useful to me, and that's what I care about.
In this case the two competitors have quite different pricing structures and product visions, so as with iOS vs. Android it will be interesting to see how the marketplace responds.
Companies change their policies when they see consumers buying something else.
What if they see consumers buying products from Apple, who doesn't ship bloatware or ugly boxes? I think what we see with companies like HP and Dell is a failure of imagination: If you don't have any ideas about how to make the product or user experience great, you focus on cost. The whole thing becomes a race to the bottom, ultimately to be owned by some generic Asian firm with the lowest overhead on the planet.
The golden rule of tech is simple: You've got to love the product. Not developers, not market share, not a clever strategy, not the bottom line -- you've got to love the product. You must have a burning need to improve it, polish it, and then replace it with something better because you love that even more. I'm not convinced that Balmer has ever loved the product. They're a big company so it will take a long time for the world to pass them by, but the direction is unmistakeable.
I agree Schmidt's decision to lead Google probably wasn't about money, more likely a desire to leave a mark, change the world, beat the competition, ... The reasons could be many, but as far as money goes he could have retired after Novell and lived out a nice comfortable life.
My hunch is that both Sun and Novell left Schmidt with a bad taste in his mouth. At both companies he had his ass handed to him by Microsoft. He can retire from day-to-day life at Google with satisfaction knowing that he's successfully built a great company. He isn't the product visionary like Jobs, who loves the process of building and honing great products and will do it for as long as he can. At this point Schmidt is probably feeling (perhaps correctly) that there's nothing left for him to prove.
This is very insightful. It's important for managers to understand the details, so they don't get snowed over by quick-fixers. Or if they do have quick-fixers -- because sometimes a quick fix is called for -- they also recognize and reward those who do the hard work later on to solve it the right way. Such "maintenance work" is too often underappreciated, but is crucial for the long-term health of the code base or process.
There is also the anti-quick-fixer who wants to redo everything from scratch, because they can't bear to compromise and create an imperfection. They would rather be 6 months late than offend their own design aesthetic. It takes a lot of maturity to find the right balance between these two extremes.
This ideal of executing what you want on your hardware in your property seems to be dying. And with it, privacy or any desire thereof.
This concept of treating content as a physical good to be owned is a fallacy. It's predicated on a notion of scarcity inherited from the physical world, which doesn't exist with digital goods that cost nothing to reproduce. If you free yourself of this fallacy, there are other usage models that make everyone happier. Like renting for example.
For myself I look at applications like Photoshop, Mathematica, or Solidworks. I would use these infrequently (maybe every 3 months?), but on those occasions they'd be very useful. I cannot justify buying full licenses, but what if I could rent them for, say, $3/day? I would benefit from (a) greater diversity of applications at my disposal, and (b) access to the latest versions of any software. Meanwhile software companies would get a source of revenue they don't have today. Better yet, could I pay $30/month to have unrestricted use of any software within a catalog of options, with the developers to get compensated based on my share of time spent (the ASCAP model)?
Yes there are privacy implications. Netflix knows more about me than they would if I only viewed DVDs purchased with cash from Best Buy. But that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
Obviously I have no idea if this is what Apple is working on, but I think software rentals would benefit everyone, and it's an area that would require leadership from Apple to really take off (providing a common framework for installations, usage monitoring, and billing for example).
A material factor here is that the data in question was collected from people not affiliated with Google, and may be potentially compromising. Especially so since it ties back to particular locations and MAC addresses. The worst case scenario for Google would be to willingly comply with a request like this, then some of the data leaks externally, and some sleuth figures out and publishes something compromising about a user at 345 Main Street in Canton Ohio. If this seems implausible, look at the AOL search data scandal. Let me guess, you aren't using AOL search any more, are you? Given the circumstances I can't blame Google for trying to limit the distribution of this data.
What makes you naive people believe that Google wasn't collecting this data at the behest of the NSA ?
The same thing that makes me believe (a) our government is not guarding extraterrestrial technology in Area 51, and (b) the Apollo landings on the moon could not have been fabricated. Conspiracies with more than 20 people never work. Although I admit life would be more interesting if they did.