Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by confluence | Hacker News Reader

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I've said it before - and I'll say it again - Google is about to crush Apple into the ground. The fundamental difference between the two is that Apple brings style but Google brings substance.

Now in the short term style > substance for the simple reason that it is easy to repackage something that is difficult to use into something simple.

Making things easy to use is obvious for designers - but not for engineers - because they focus on actually making complex things work instead of making it easy to use.

However, in the long run substance > style for the simple reason that anything that can be repackaged to make it simple will either become a minority player or a commodity item because style and veneer are easily copyable but substance isn't. Substance is a natural monopoly, and monopolies make lots of money.

What you see here is the fruition of substance over style - big data is a monopoly and Google owns it hard.

Google will be the first trillion dollar corporation. And it will do so by making everything else apart from Artificial Intelligence a commodity.

Disclaimer: I'm looking to buy Google stock and I recently exited an Apple short.

Apple has a monopoly on Apple. What other company can put out one new phone per year and still rake in money? HTC and Samsung wish they could do that, but they still each spread themselves over a half dozen budget phones and a new high-end phone every 3 months. Apple has built up so much good will and trust that they can do what no other company can: nothing. They can just work on one phone, all the engineering and supply chains, for an entire year before releasing it. That's why you're never going to see Android hardware like the iPhone 5. I wouldn't write off Apple quite yet.

Goodwill and trust works if your product is differentiable. Apple's products are glass screens with grey backgrounds. Android has surpassed iOS parity in many ways, and is equivalent in others.

Both the Nexus 4/10 surpass, or are equivalent to, the iPhone 5 and the iPad 3 respectively. Apple has no more products to grow into - outside of Aug reality glasses - where they'll just get squeezed again and Google already has the lead.

Apple's strength is not, and never was, in their hardware. It was software - and it is now commodity. Apple is the new Microsoft.

Linux kills everything that cannot differentiate.

"Linux kills everything that cannot differentiate."

Yeah, and Windows differentiated by offering an insane level of backward compatibility which makes both developers happy (they don't have to maintain and patch their apps as much) and users who don't have to lose their favorite piece of software, which is why Linux has never overtaken the desktop. Windows runs the apps people want : MS Office, Photoshop... the mac also runs some of those but you can see how fickle backward compatibility is with Apple. You can install Windows 8 on the early macintels, you can't install Mac OS X Mountain Lion on those. MS offers better support for older Apple hardware than Apple themselves.

Apple is not going to survive android on the long term unless they truly manage to turn the iPhone into a fashion statement and multiply their effort to make it look like jewelry. Apple revenue depends entirely on the iPad and iPhone nowadays, Mac aren't making them any money. Unlike Windows, people don't have any sort of long term, or big in $ investment in mobile software. Transitioning from iOS to Android is not like going from Windows to Linux and losing Office, Photoshop, thousands of dollars worth of a game library built over a decade..

Backward compatibility is for chumps. If you hide behind that and inertia in tech you will be replaced.

Everything will run in the cloud on the latest tech and whatever software you want will be streamed to you direct. And those servers will run on Linux.

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