“It’s always been interesting to me how differently Apple, Google and Microsoft express their ambitions. Google’s and Microsoft’s ambitions have always been global in nature. On the one hand, organizing the world’s information and on the other hand, putting a computer on every desk,” Jan Dawson writes for Tech.pinions. “Whereas Apple’s mission has been decidedly more localized: creating great products, used by individual people. This also seems to have driven these companies to create very different kinds of products, with Google and Microsoft creating operating systems that enable other companies to create the products end users actually engage with and Apple tightly integrating hardware and software to create the end-user products itself.”
“But I sense a shift in these companies’ ambitions, to the extent they’re almost switching places in some respects. Google, which has always trumpeted the open nature of Android, has now done a dramatic about face in the last several years, purchasing smartphone and thermostat makers, creating Google Glass and driverless cars, and even creating a far more limited, less open version of Android for wearables in the form of Android Wear,” Dawson writes. “Google, the evangelist of ‘open,’ is becoming a lot more integrated and controlled in these areas, even as its ambitions remain impossibly broad, either because it fears losing control of the opportunities its created or because it simply believes others won’t do the job as well (or possibly for both reasons).”
“Microsoft on the other hand has shifted its focus to the more parochial level of Apple’s ambitions, having largely achieved its goal of getting a computer on every desk (and now witnessing the related outcome of a computer in every hand),” Dawson writes. “Apple’s ambitions have also expanded beyond computing to areas such as health, which have a far more fundamental meaning in most people’s lives. Interestingly, the HomeKit, HealthKit and Swift initiatives have all likely been underway for some time, but Apple has kept them under wraps. I think all of them bespeak an ambition on the part of Tim Cook which we haven’t been aware of until last week.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.