How is Apple a threat to the open web? They don't even DO web... At worst they make it possible to write (walled in) native clients that perform better than a browser for specific tasks.
1. Most of those native clients use public Web-APIs
2. The iOS platform was one of the kick-starters to get rid of the closed Flash environment
3. And one of the kick-starters for better video standards, h264
Maybe Brin mentioned Apple to generate more headlines.
Still if they really wanted to support an open web, they'd support WebM.
A codec which no single party controls and is free for anyone to include in their video decoders.
> not in terms of "openness"
I'm not claiming Apple is "open" and nor is Apple. The one who is claiming to be open is Google, or Brin to be more specific.
> they'd support WebM.
At the time of writing, WebM is still not an option for mobile devices as it lacks support for hardware acceleration. Playing a WebM video on a mobile device would drain the battery at an unacceptable rate.
The only party claiming to be "open" is Google. And to the untrained eye Google looks very "open" with all its open-source projects. While both Facebook and Apple have their own open-source projects.
But these open-source projects don't necessarily make a company any more open than its competitors as long as their main asset stays closed:
- Google's main asset is search, closed - Apple's main asset is the iOS platform, closed - Facebook's main asset are the user profiles, closed
And now Brin is blaming Facebook for not opening-up the user profiles.
It's a fair (though hardly killer) point but if he was really going to push it that hard he might need to explain away Google's own app store, the second largest one on the web I believe.
Siri is shifting importance from 'search' to 'finding information' + many other things.
Google knows this damn well, 'search' and 'finding information' are really two different things. As things move on from text based search. Voice based, image based search are really going to be very important in the future.
No doubt apple is being perceived as a threat.
But the concept itself is frightening to Google. It can enable searching when you are driving, taking a shower or whenever you can't use your hands to search. And a great deal of people come into that category.
And it can be a big thing in the future. And going by Apple's reputation they can leverage it to some amazing things.
Imagine a consumer Apple TV. TV's can't have keyboards but they can have a mike. Imagine finding information through speech. That can really be a killer feature, searching and finding information by just talking through a TV connected to the Internet.
Now this is just tip of the iceberg. Siri can be disruptive in almost device/scenario where a keyboard is not a practical source of input. Going by how small things are getting, Siri is the thing of the future.
Google is no more Open than Facebook or Apple.