Apple vs Google (vs Facebook)

A friend of mine @thomas_wagner  tweeted this:

"Yes, I get what Apple is doing.  But no, I don't like their vision of the web and content consumption and its implications for our culture."

When I asked him to elaborate he pointed me to the manifesto from Google "The meaning of open" 

And went on to argue: 
1) Apple are building an ecosystem that is obviously brilliant to use, simple and aesthetic. It will be a success.
2) It is based on locking people in and "the internet" out. They aim at controlling content, distribution and consumption.

And tops it off with:
3) To me, this implicates a culture that dismisses complexity (the good sort of it). Radically spoken: http://bit.ly/9Nc3Bn

Stating that "Google is only open when it is convenient for them. Google will never open up the source code to its search algorithms or its advertising system, or share the core data which gives it a competitive advantage in those areas because that is where it makes all of its money."

Jeff Chausse enters with " How Apple Will Destroy The Web"

Stating that "Everyday people do not give a crap about the Web. Now, don’t get me wrong – they care about the information found there, but Google famously demonstrated that the average Joe doesn’t know the difference between a browser, a web site, and a search engine. People want to tell their computer what they want, and then get an answer. They don’t care one bit if that answer is streamed via HTTP and rendered in a web browser via HTML. They just want an answer. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt if they get that answer fastand in a fun, engaging way. You know, like, via a 99 cent app on your phone.

"Deep down, Apple doesn’t believe in Social Networking. They believe in enabling real human interaction."

Let´s bring in Facebook to the discussion...

What´s your view?
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1 response
Hey Joakim!
Thanks for picking this up.

For me, the key is in point 2. Apple is trying to break their share out of "the internet" to build an ecosystem that they can monetize on their terms. From content to distribution to consumption. Fair enough.

Google, meanwhile doesn't try to control any of this because - and that may also be criticized - they are kind of trying to monetize the long tail of everything everybody does on the internet for free. I think, however, that their argument regarding their search, advertising system and data is valid. Their search algorithm isn't that (!) different anymore. There was this experiment where you could get unbranded search results from Google, Bing and Yahoo and should chose the "best" one. You could hardly tell the difference. So the Google Brand is already influencing search engine result perception. Their advertising system also has competition - from a technical standpoint. It's just that they have ridiculously high economies of scale. So for them "open" means open distribution, open consumption and open content because that's what makes them money. Fair enough.

I just think that thought to the end, the Google version of the web has more diversity built into it.

As far as facebook is concerned, I think they'd like to be the additional (social) layer of the internet. They are, somehow sitting between the chairs. Apple won't let them into their distribution or consumption ecosystem. Google has no interest to have web content solely distributed inside the closed walls of facebook. Once facebook starts to build an advertising system that allows distribution of ads on websites based on the content and the context of the social graph, then it'd get even more interesting.

Complex topic.

— Thomas Wagner