Apple and Google move computing forward in identical-yet-incompatible ways

Op-ed: If you think ecosystem silos are bad now, just wait until the fall.

Read the whole story

 

[Tom West]

You know, it used to be a lot easier to be a lot easier to rail against lock-in when there where companies that embraced interoperability that were successful.

Now, it's like trying to persuade companies to commit economic suicide so that my life as a consumer will be easier.

Not an easy sell :-(.

*sigh*

 

[sonicmerlin]

Is it just me or does Continuity go a lot further than what google demoed?

 

[thomsirveaux]

sonicmerlin[/url]":3i0tfubs]Is it just me or does Continuity go a lot further than what google demoed?

IMO it does, and the number of people using Macs is (as far as I can tell without official sales numbers) still greater than the number of people using Chromebooks. Either way, they're still moves in the same direction.

 

[Maxipad]

Wasn't Windows once valued for it's openness and interoperability (within limits)? Then Apple started to make big bucks and everyone decided they needed to copy them. So now we're moving towards fragmentation, with walled gardens for profit.

At some point I'd think that the consumer would rebel and opt for the system that offers the most flexibility of choice, which favors Google/Android right now doesn't it? (Not sure).

Seems to me that whoever ends up offering the most interoperability may win in the long run, as consumers usually value choice. (Though Apple will continue to stake out the high-end market and Google/Android the low-end.) Not sure.

I find it all rather annoying.

 

[under]

Tom West[/url]":27k346f9]You know, it used to be a lot easier to be a lot easier to rail against lock-in when there where companies that embraced interoperability that were successful.

Now, it's like trying to persuade companies to commit economic suicide so that my life as a consumer will be easier.

Not an easy sell :-(.

*sigh*

nicely said.

Odd. The post I'm agreeing with is almost universally also agreed to by everyone. Yet, my post that is agreeing with the post is "contraversal". I wonder why?

 

[joesegh]

Consider for a moment both Apple and Google's core business strategies (or at least how they make make most of their money). Apple makes its money selling high margin devices. Google makes its money by selling ads based on detailed user data from its services (search, maps, email, etc.)

This is why you'll never see iCloud on Android. Apple uses services to get you to buy an iDevice. But you see lots of high quality Google apps on iOS. Why? Because a Google user on an iPhone is just as important as a Google user on Android when it comes to making Google money. Google still needs signal for ads from iOS users to make its horizontal services strategy work.

This line of thinking is particularly interesting when it comes to Microsoft, which wishes to be "devices and services", or both vertical AND horizontal, or both Apple and Google. It's difficult to do because on some level, your services will be beholden to your devices (and suffer, as Apple's do, but they don't care), or your devices will be beholden to your services (which Google doesn't do, making things available in as many places as possible). They are starting to make some services-first decisions (Office on iPad prior to Windows tablets), so it will interesting to see if they can execute this two-headed strategy well (or if they will give up on devices).

 

[saodvnsidonwejf]

Idk, i feel like it's always the same story. For the watch example, companies wrest for control and try to lock down access at the detriment of the customer experience. Then a startup comes along and sells something that is cross compatible (since neither google nor apple seem willing it'd have to be a third party here). Then the big companies wake up and realize that the startup is selling twice as much as everyone else and getting name recognition since its market is twice as big, and they finally open up.

There are few markets which support exclusives and designed lack of interoperability, at the detriment of customer experience. I'm not knowledgeable enough in economic to know what the conditions for one are. One rare example is exclusives on gaming consoles, but i can't think of any others

 

[under]

Maxipad[/url]":3oryjhgi]Wasn't Windows once valued for it's openness and interoperability (within limits)? Then Apple started to make big bucks and everyone decided they needed to copy them. So now we're moving towards fragmentation, with walled gardens for profit.

At some point I'd think that the consumer would rebel and opt for the system that offers the most flexibility of choice, which favors Google/Android right now doesn't it? (Not sure).

Seems to me that whoever ends up offering the most interoperability may win in the long run, as consumers usually value choice. (Though Apple will continue to stake out the high-end market and Google/Android the low-end.) Not sure.

I find it all rather annoying.

I think most consumers value simplicity over choice. And within an ecosystem, there can still be a range of choice.

 

[MightyPez]

under[/url]":ihqyam3q]

Maxipad[/url]":ihqyam3q]Wasn't Windows once valued for it's openness and interoperability (within limits)? Then Apple started to make big bucks and everyone decided they needed to copy them. So now we're moving towards fragmentation, with walled gardens for profit.

At some point I'd think that the consumer would rebel and opt for the system that offers the most flexibility of choice, which favors Google/Android right now doesn't it? (Not sure).

Seems to me that whoever ends up offering the most interoperability may win in the long run, as consumers usually value choice. (Though Apple will continue to stake out the high-end market and Google/Android the low-end.) Not sure.

I find it all rather annoying.

I think most consumers value simplicity over choice. And within an ecosystem, there can still be a range of choice.

Count me in on that camp more and more. I like having my phone, tablet, computer, and media device all tie together seamlessly without the fear that a small update or looking at it wrong is going to cause it all to stop talking.

Would I prefer these companies to all have open communications between all their devices? Sure. But I live in the real world and that's not terribly likely to happen.

 

[Maxipad]

under[/url]":11n45zo9]

Maxipad[/url]":11n45zo9]Wasn't Windows once valued for it's openness and interoperability (within limits)? Then Apple started to make big bucks and everyone decided they needed to copy them. So now we're moving towards fragmentation, with walled gardens for profit.

At some point I'd think that the consumer would rebel and opt for the system that offers the most flexibility of choice, which favors Google/Android right now doesn't it? (Not sure).

Seems to me that whoever ends up offering the most interoperability may win in the long run, as consumers usually value choice. (Though Apple will continue to stake out the high-end market and Google/Android the low-end.) Not sure.

I find it all rather annoying.

I think most consumers value simplicity over choice. And within an ecosystem, there can still be a range of choice.

Yah, a legitimate position, which favors Apple at present. Cost is their Achilles heel. They're in demand for those that can afford their devices. For the rest of the world Android/Google is chosen. Price is going to be a factor in developing markets.

Apple keeps use simplest/easiest, but you pay for that ease of use.

 

[CrackedLCD]

I feel like the automakers have missed a huge opportunity to quash the increasingly proprietary nature of our digital devices. They're possibly the only industry who has the power to say "we're not going to pick sides. If you want in our dashes, you need something that is interoperable."

It really disheartens me to think that the level of in-car connectedness I may get in the future will be determined by which of the two closed systems the automaker chooses to go with.

I'm currently all-in with Android and if I were to buy, say, an Audi in the future I might be locked out of dozens of features because they chose to go with Apple (in theory.) As consumers, we really shouldn't have to choose what works and what doesn't based on these opposing forces of nature, especially when it's tied to a $15-50,000 automobile that I won't necessarily own forever.

Unfortunately, I think the post above mine by under is right: people value simplicity over interoperability and flexibility. This is why open standards have largely failed to gain a foothold in smart phones. Android may have started that way but Google is quickly closing the doors. If they were smart, they'd let any phone attach to their in-car entertainment system, be it iOS, Windows or miscellaneous. But that would be too good for consumers, I suppose.

 

[darke]

So... where's the google lock-in? I have a Macbook Air, a iPad, Android phone, and Windows desktop; I use my google services across all four, but I can only use the Mac services on mac for the most part (iCloud and it's syncing being a big one) and even MS seems to be relatively 'open' with onedrive/skydrive support on linux, along with it's iOS office365 apps and so forth.

It seems like the only group trying to be incompatible at the moment is Apple. (Which is one of the reasons I'm actually moving away from their hardware; between never being able to find a lightning cable when you need one (but micro usb's coming out of your ears) to just general terrible pricing on their iOS devices, to general lock-in, it's getting annoying.)

 

[jonah]

Anytime the mainstream media cover technology (NPR, CNN, et cetera) whatever talking heads they bring in tend to vastly overstate the lock-in inherent in any platform. Sure, if you buy music, movies, or other content on one platform you'll have a harder (though still not difficult) time switching to another without buying it all again, but honestly, most of the apps and services people use on a day to day basis are free.

1) It's not like you have to turn around and spend hundreds of dollars to re-buy the same apps you had before since most of them are free
2) Any data you have is generally trivially easy to migrate from platform to platform

I'm disappointed to see Ars parrot what I hear technologically unsophisticated reporters say in mainstream outlets.

The biggest hurdle when switching platforms is the cost of hardware. The second biggest is the different UI's and workflows you have to develop when you shift. A distant third is the actual cost of replacing apps.

 

[BullBearMS]

darke[/url]":29e4ivjv]So... where's the google lock-in?

Ever heard of forked Android devices like, for example, the Amazon Fire tablet?

Windows Phone?

 

[beebee]

thomsirveaux[/url]":25o27yo7]

sonicmerlin[/url]":25o27yo7]Is it just me or does Continuity go a lot further than what google demoed?

IMO it does, and the number of people using Macs is (as far as I can tell without official sales numbers) still greater than the number of people using Chromebooks. Either way, they're still moves in the same direction.

Has anyone ever seen a Chromebook in the wild? Starbucks, Peets, etc. I've seen more Microsoft Surface than Chromebooks.

The only new connectivity I've seen in recent years that has value is rsap. Everything mentioned in this article is stuff I don't need or want.

What some people call connectivity, I call a vector for hacking.

 

[Maxipad]

CrackedLCD[/url]":32ygczmi]I feel like the automakers have missed a huge opportunity to quash the increasingly proprietary nature of our digital devices. They're possibly the only industry who has the power to say "we're not going to pick sides. If you want in our dashes, you need something that is interoperable."

It really disheartens me to think that the level of in-car connectedness I may get in the future will be determined by which of the two closed systems the automaker chooses to go with.

I'm currently all-in with Android and if I were to buy, say, an Audi in the future I might be locked out of dozens of features because they chose to go with Apple (in theory.) As consumers, we really shouldn't have to choose what works and what doesn't based on these opposing forces of nature, especially when it's tied to a $15-50,000 automobile that I won't necessarily own forever.

Unfortunately, I think the post above mine by under is right: people value simplicity over interoperability and flexibility. This is why open standards have largely failed to gain a foothold in smart phones. Android may have started that way but Google is quickly closing the doors. If they were smart, they'd let any phone attach to their in-car entertainment system, be it iOS, Windows or miscellaneous. But that would be too good for consumers, I suppose.

I agree with you. If you consider sheer numbers of devices world-wide, Android/Google has Apple beaten by a wide margin. Automakers are probably going to be influential in developing standards that allow interoperability or at least connectivity with multiple devices.

MS could've once ruled in that space but they F-ed the pooch on that. Now the market is up for grabs and the big automakers could do themselves a favor by agreeing on one standard.

It's the Beta/VHS wars again. Of course this will probably include the Internet-of-Things down the road. Whoever gets their OS on the most dashboards is going to have a lot of power.

 

[CuriousChris]

I am not sure if I am reading this right. Google who controls the direction of Android, a phone operating system is going to use those phones made by many different manufacturers to market their chromebooks

I don't think that is going to work so well.

 

[cpragman]

So even if the next version of android has these features, the carriers don't upgrade the OS, so the penetration of the new features is slow..,

Also, both AppleTV and the Google competitor are both so cheap that they are commodities. I'd drop the $99 in a flash if I changed ecosystems. The real lock-in there is the media I've already bought. If I were a consumer that had invested hundreds of dollars in digital videos, I'd be less likely to break-away from that ecosystem.

 

[beebee]

cpragman[/url]":d0a4wky9]So even if the next version of android has these features, the carriers don't upgrade the OS, so the penetration of the new features is slow..,

Also, both AppleTV and the Google competitor are both so cheap that they are commodities. I'd drop the $99 in a flash if I changed ecosystems. The real lock-in there is the media I've already bought. If I were a consumer that had invested hundreds of dollars in digital videos, I'd be less likely to break-away from that ecosystem.

Media lock in is why you never buy Apple anything.

I buy CD/DVD/Bluray and rip em.

 

[darke]

BullBearMS[/url]":3kw5t29h]

darke[/url]":3kw5t29h]So... where's the google lock-in?

Ever heard of forked Android devices like, for example, the Amazon Fire tablet?

Windows Phone?

Yes I've worked at Nokia, so I'm intimately familiar with Windows Phone. Though quite frankly given how terrible they're selling it's clear no-one else has.

And gmail, youtube, and google plus all worked fine on it when I last had access to a Lumia, so... am I missing something here?

And Amazon Fire? Are you kidding me? That company makes google look like an angel in terms of lock-in. If you want an example of a "locked in ecosystem" that's right up there with Apple, but with less convenience. The hardware's great but I've no desire to be trapped in Amazon's ecosystem even more then I want to be trapped in Apple's.

 

[Maxipad]

Death_wish01[/url]":537rcbv7]you know. I think once everything is made. some people will figure out a way to splice the two OS together.

It didn't happen with Beta/VHS. VHS won in the consumer market and a version of Beta continued to rule in the professional TV production market for decades. Now some digital format is used, of course.

Apple has no desire to be interoperable with anyone else. They're making a fortune with their walled garden, high-quality devices, and premium services. Why "fix" that model when it isn't broken? They make a great product; the Mercedes of portable devices, and they charge premium prices for that quality.

It's a business model that's worked for millennia. Make the best and charge the most. Leave the low end to somebody else.

 

[JChurch]

Although not an option for everybody, be it technical ability or policy enforcement, I'm so very glad my iOS devices are jailbroken.

These little handheld computers are amazing and they can even make phone calls. Being locked-in to an ecosystem blows especially when there are so many artificial limits. For example, pairing my iPhone with a Bluetooth OBD scan tool or GPS is not possible without circumventing those limits. WHY?? Because Apple is waiting for fat pay checks from said manufactures of the listed products.

It's a classical economic game of making 2-sided markets and extracting wealth from each side. Congrats to Apple and Google for making things exceedingly easy to integrate into our lives but with just a little technical know-how, and not being limited by company policy to do so, you can save a bundle by switching to being your own developer.

 

[Companion_Noob]

BullBearMS[/url]":1grklopo]

darke[/url]":1grklopo]So... where's the google lock-in?

Ever heard of forked Android devices like, for example, the Amazon Fire tablet?

Windows Phone?

Neither of those have anything to do with Google, unless you choose to install those services after unboxing.

 

[Companion_Noob]

I'm a Mac user with a Nexus phone. It's not hard to get interoperability between these two ecosystems, it's just that this isn't really something that's written about. I can very easily do everything that locked in users do in their ecosystems without being tied town a hundred percent to either one.

 

[kezeka]

This isn't a new thing for Apple. They have been content to build a walled garden of an ecosystem since Jobs took over the second time. It was a surprise that they even allowed the iPod to be used on windows computers a decade ago.

I hated it when I was younger and couldn't afford to buy an Apple laptop to have a better experience with iTunes etc.. Now that I work 12 to 30 hour shifts and barely have any time off, I am stupendously happy to have completely bought into the Apple ecosystem. My MacBook works seamlessly with my iPad and my iPhone. If any of them break, I take them to the apple store and I don't have to fuck around with replacing hardware or talking to some moron on the phone for 3 hours before I have to pay out the ass to have it shipped to them for a repair. They are interoperable, they don't crash, I don't have to install a new driver every week to keep things working smoothly - these are the benefits of a beautiful little walled ecosystem and Apple has shown that people are more than willing to commit to it. I know I am, and so are 80% of the people I work with.

This is obviously just my experience and my opinion. Just presenting the positives of one of the walled gardens. I had an android once and it was a hilariously bad experience. The original firmware with my HTC evo 3D was laughably bad, then I rooted it and it got mildly better. It didn't sync with programs in windows or OSX or linux. I think of all of the ecosystems, android is going to rapidly be left behind with the desktop/laptop OS integration. Microsoft obviously has the major advantage of a huge Windows install base over chrome OS.

 

[cjek420]

You avoid lock in by using Open Standard Protocols. Apple uses open standards where it can, IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV. Google has been replacing open standard protocols with private protocols/APIs, Apple has not. Makes you wonder how long until Google closes access to those private protocols altogether?

Neither Apple or Google develop open standard protocols to provide new functionality, sigh.

 

[BullBearMS]

darke[/url]":3pfngq8r]

BullBearMS[/url]":3pfngq8r]

darke[/url]":3pfngq8r]So... where's the google lock-in?

Ever heard of forked Android devices like, for example, the Amazon Fire tablet?

Windows Phone?

Yes I've worked at Nokia, so I'm intimately familiar with Windows Phone. Though quite frankly given how terrible they're selling it's clear no-one else has.

And gmail, youtube, and google plus all worked fine on it when I last had access to a Lumia, so... am I missing something here?

And Amazon Fire? Are you kidding me? That company makes google look like an angel in terms of lock-in. If you want an example of a "locked in ecosystem" that's right up there with Apple, but with less convenience. The hardware's great but I've no desire to be trapped in Amazon's ecosystem even more then I want to be trapped in Apple's.

So you ask for examples then pretend they don't count?

Also, Amazon is far from the only company that has forked Android. If you don't toe Google's line you don't get access to their services and the play store.

Heck, you aren't even allowed to produce a separate forked device if you want any of your companies other devices to get access to Google's services.

 

[under]

Home automation is the big battlefield for lock in. Once your computing ecosystem starts to impact choice of light bulbs and the like, you're pretty locked in.

 

[Deimal]

I think a lot people are missing a key difference between the two ecosystems. Apple designs, engineers, and produces the entire core ecosystem themselves (APIs, mobile devices, operating systems). Google on the other hand is at the mercy of third party manufacturers for it's hardware (phones, chromebooks, etc). By at the mercy I mean that in the worst way possible. Google does what it can to ensure quality I'm sure (what company doesn't want a great product?), but they only have so much control.

Right now, imo, that puts Apple ahead of Google. That may turn into a negative at some point in the future, but for now, that's a big plus for the consumers that decide to go all-in on Apple. Android yes does give you more choice, but there's a (very) large gap in quality between the best Android-based products and the worst Android-based products. For uninformed consumers, they have a much large opportunity to be disappointed in an Android-based product than an Apple one.

 

[Deimal]

BullBearMS[/url]":11g3dji4]

darke[/url]":11g3dji4]

BullBearMS[/url]":11g3dji4]

darke[/url]":11g3dji4]So... where's the google lock-in?

Ever heard of forked Android devices like, for example, the Amazon Fire tablet?

Windows Phone?

Yes I've worked at Nokia, so I'm intimately familiar with Windows Phone. Though quite frankly given how terrible they're selling it's clear no-one else has.

And gmail, youtube, and google plus all worked fine on it when I last had access to a Lumia, so... am I missing something here?

And Amazon Fire? Are you kidding me? That company makes google look like an angel in terms of lock-in. If you want an example of a "locked in ecosystem" that's right up there with Apple, but with less convenience. The hardware's great but I've no desire to be trapped in Amazon's ecosystem even more then I want to be trapped in Apple's.

So you ask for examples then pretend they don't count?

Also, Amazon is far from the only company that has forked Android. If you don't toe Google's line you don't get access to their services and the play store.

Heck, you aren't even allowed to produce a separate forked device if you want any of your companies other devices to get access to Google's services.

There's a very fine line there for Google to walk though in how much control they can actively assert over their manufacturers. Consider that by far the most popular hardware is produced by Samsung. How much is Google willing to gamble against Samsung trying to wrest additional control over what they put into the base software package on the phone? The longer Samsung is that high in the list, the more control they'll be able to exert.

 

[bokuwaomar]

beebee[/url]":13aoiirz]Media lock in is why you never buy Apple anything.

I buy CD/DVD/Bluray and rip em.

Actually, avoiding Apple isn't what allows you to avoid media lock-in. The only way to avoid that is to simply not buy digital media (except for music).

cjek420[/url]":13aoiirz]Neither Apple or Google develop open standard protocols to provide new functionality, sigh.

That's because it's usually impossible to do that. If some functionality of a device you manufacture is truly new, initially, there isn't anything for it to interoperate with unless you collaborate with your competitors before you release it. Obviously, no one wants to inform their competitors of their plans before they execute them, so the best that is ever done is to simply publish your products implementation for anyone to use. The problem with that is usually no one is so far ahead that products doing similar things in a different way aren't right around the corner, and then you have multiple competing standards. And then this happens: http://xkcd.com/927/

We'll get open (and actually implemented and supported) standards to cover new use cases when things cool off again.

 

[Mitlov]

Tom West[/url]":2u9usxgv]You know, it used to be a lot easier to be a lot easier to rail against lock-in when there where companies that embraced interoperability that were successful.

Now, it's like trying to persuade companies to commit economic suicide so that my life as a consumer will be easier.

Not an easy sell :-(.

*sigh*

I think it's worth noting that the value of Microsoft's stock increased significantly as it moved away from Ballmer's lock-in approach and instead adopted Nadella's our-products-and-services-on-all-platforms approach (MS Office on the iPad and soon Android, Halo: Spartan Assault on Steam, Xbox Music on Android and iOS, etc).

 

[BullBearMS]

Deimal[/url]":330vhn1b]There's a very fine line there for Google to walk though in how much control they can actively assert over their manufacturers..

Not really.

How successful is a device that doesn't have access to Google's services going to be if you can't manage to replace all of those services with your own versions?

 

[Dianne Hackborn]

There is a lot more interesting stuff going on I think that it would be nice for the article to address.

One of the things I have found most fascinating about what has been going on in the mobile industry is the contrast between the approaches taken by the to major mobile platforms. (Just to be transparent, I do work on Android, so I surely have my own biases about this.)

If you look at the PC industry, there were similar differences: Microsoft was the more open platform, allowing any hardware manufacturer to build a compatible PC and run their software on it; Apple was the more closed, only allowing you to run their software on their hardware.

When it came to mobile, Apple seems to have decided to take a harder turn towards being a closed platform: not only controlling the hardware, but now even the software you can install on your device. Android, however, took a harder turn towards being open: developed as an open-source platform, giving even more freedom to hardware manufacturers in how they build devices with the software.

I of course can't speak to much about iOS in this regard, but this "even more open" approach to Android has impacted a lot of the design decisions in the platform: of course there is no restriction on what apps you can install, and more than that the platform itself needed to be designed to be flexible enough to support Google's services on top of it as regular applications (because the open source platform can't by definition contain proprietary Google code). This is what drove the fairly open-ended multitasking design of Android (since support for Google services can't be built in, but something that seems core like Google Cloud Messaging actually needs to be implementable on top of the core services the platform provides). This continues to impact major design decisions in the platform, such as the introduction of the NotificationListenerService, which is central to how Android Wear implements its interaction between the watch and phone, but by necessity needs to be an open API which means it could be used by other apps.

At the same time, as this article rightly points out, mobile operating systems are growing to be deeply tied to other devices you have, which potentially makes lock-in to a platform even stronger. (Though let's be fair, lock-in to proprietary desktop platforms like the Mac and Windows is quite strong, at least until web-oriented services started loosening their control.)

I think this is a natural part of what these new platforms are: because your phone is now something you always have with you, instead of your PC being something that sits at home, it becomes a natural conduit for these interactions with other devices. And this was already happening; for a while now I've had an application for my AV receiver to control it, and if that application isn't available on another mobile platform I may want to switch to it is serving as lock in to a platform somewhat similar to what is described in the article (just involving more than one company).

With the major mobile platform vendors now starting to get deeply involved in these types of cross-device integrations, it is certainly worth talking about this new kind of lock-in. However in doing so, I think it is worth taking a somewhat deeper look at how the different platforms approach this kind of integration to understand what is going on in their ecosystem. Again I can't speak for iOS, but on Android we often approach these integrations as applications on top of the platform (due to our basic platform philosophy previously described). As I said, the Android Wear integration is implemented by essentially an application on the phone, using APIs available to other applications. Likewise the Chromecast integration, and in that case the application has been made available on other platforms as well.

And since Google is very much a cloud services company, they have a lot of incentive to make those services available as widely as possible. Everything from the Google Music application to application services such as Google Play Game Services are made available to other platforms, because it is in Google's best interest to do so. One of our goals for Android as an open source platform is to make it the best platform on which to host Google's services, by providing those services the kinds of rich APIs they need to work best. And by approaching this goal as one of creating open APIs for anyone to use, it also makes the platform able to support services from other companies as well.