Earlier this week, developer Stephen Troughton-Smith successfully ported Siri, the new voice recognition/artificial intelligence service on the iPhone 4S, to the iPhone 4. For anyone not familiar, Apple released the service on their new iPhone 4S only, leaving out the iPhone 4.
Reasons Siri can't be on the iPhone 4: none.
Reasons Siri isn't on the iPhone 4: Apple is a greedy, heartless company.
For the past several days, Apple's stock has been rising high enough that the company has flitted between being the first and second most valuable company in the world. Regardless of the final value of the stock on any given day, it is without a doubt the greatest comeback or turnaround story in the history of American business: A single company has gone from being just 90 days away from shutting down to becoming the unequivocal leader in innovation, design, branding and now valuation, and the transformation happened in less than a decade and a half.
Most interestingly, there's a unanimous consensus, from fans and detractors alike, both within and outside the company, that a single man bears the lion's share of the credit for the vision, leadership and execution that's made this achievement possible.
So, who is this man? He's the anchor baby of an activist Arab muslim who came to the U.S. on a student visa and had a child out of wedlock. He's a non-Christian, arugula-eating, drug-using follower of unabashedly old-fashioned liberal teachings from the hippies and folk music stars of the 60s. And he believes in science, in things that science can demonstrate like climate change and Pi having a value more specific than "3", and in extending responsible benefits to his employees while encouraging his company to lead by being environmentally responsible.
Every single person who'd attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They're unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions.
It's a choice whether you, or anyone else, wants to accept the falsehood that liberal values are somehow in contradiction with business success at a global scale. Indeed, it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to "save" us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible. I side with the makers, the creators, and the inventors, and it's about time that the pack of clamoring would-be politicians be put on the defensive for attacking the values of those of us on this side.
I'm a PC, and I'll readily admit that this article and the man it's about are both genius.
This year, the WWDC conference showcased Apple’s plans for the future of Mac OS X, iOS, and their cloud storage solution, iCloud. Nothing in the conference was really revolutionary, but there was one extremely important aspect to the entire event. It wasn’t explicitly mentioned, nor was it a tangible product or feature. Rather, the conference cemented Apple’s strategy for the future of the Internet as a whole—one which opposes Google’s in every way.
There are two fundamentally different approaches for utilizing the Internet as we know it. The first, the “World Wide Web” invented by Tim Berners-Lee and CERN, is what we are all most familiar with. It is the vast collection of websites written in HTML that are viewed by a web browser over the HyperText Transfer Protocol. The second approach doesn’t involve websites at all. Occasionally referred to simply as the “Internet,” it is a combination of all the other protocols and methods used to transfer data over the Internet. This approach is utilized by smartphone apps, Netflix and other streaming services, Skype, desktop email applications, peer-to-peer networks, BitTorrent, FTP, and other applications which connect to the Internet in the background. Google and Apple have emerged on opposite sides of this great war over the future of the Internet, and indeed computing itself.
Apple, a hardware company at heart, have placed their bets on the “Internet” side of things. First with all of their iOS devices, and now with the future they envision with iCloud, Apple have made it clear that they are fully dedicated to promoting native applications that integrate with the Internet behind the scenes. That is the basis of iOS, a phone operating system whose greatest asset is its millions of native apps, rather than the equally significant number of web apps available through a browser. Apple seemingly gave up on the Web as a serious platform after its last release of Safari (How long ago was that, now?). iCloud is just another step in a predicable direction for Apple. It forms a background network of your content that Apple shuffles around to your assorted devices, which then utilize and view that content through native apps, rather than through a web interface. Apple’s belief in the superiority of these native apps was expressed directly in Steve Jobs’s keynote at WWDC 2011. He listed the ability to use iTunes with Apple’s iCloud music service as an advantage to Google & Amazon’s offerings, which rely on web interfaces. There was even a hint of distaste in his voice as he casually disregarded their viability. The “Internet” is overtaking the Web in the online world, from rising mobile device usage to the incredible popularity of video streaming services. From this monumental shift, however, rises a behemoth dedicated to reversing it.
Google is without a doubt one of the largest Internet companies in the world. From the perspective of this debate, Google is definitely on the World Wide Web side. Until recently, the entirety of Google’s business was based on the Web. All of their products, from Google Search—the number one tool for discovering content on the Web—to Google Apps—powerful web apps accomplishing a myriad of different tasks—to advertising, everything Google does is firmly rooted in the Web, rather than the native-app “Internet” model. Granted, Android is a Google project, promoting Apple-style native apps (substitutes for their Web alternatives), but it seems that Google may have simply recognized the trend emerging and decided to capitalize—in the literal sense—on both sides of the Internet. Philosophically, however, the company still appears dedicated to the Web. One of Google’s most important products, the Chrome browser, has played a key role in advancing the web as a platform. By improving Chrome, Google has promoted the growth of the Web platform as a strong alternative to native applications. Chrome enables web apps to be more powerful and easier to create, and furthers the development of other browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer. In this respect, Google seems to be taking the torch of leadership away from Mozilla as the strongest progressive force in the World Wide Web. It may seem an overwhelming task—reviving a slowly dying platform originally designed some 20 years ago for storing static documents—but if any company is up to the challenge, Google is. They have already made astonishing progress, as Chrome has grown at an unprecedented pace. It has already overtaken Safari, the default browser in Mac OS, and is on pace to outdo Firefox, the browser that has done more for advancing the Web than any other. Now, Google is using Chrome’s success to eliminate the oldest obstacle to the Web’s growth, native PC applications. The Chromebook project is the company’s effort to rid the PC world of native applications, by replacing the operating system with one that is entirely browser-based. Google firmly believes that web apps can fully replace any native applications a user might need.
Web App vs. Native App [Chris Cameron / ReadWriteWeb]
And so we witness the beginning of a war which will certainly rage for years to come. One company envisions that the future of the Internet lay in behind-the-scenes data transfer powering native applications, on PCs and more importantly, mobile devices. Perhaps this is the real meaning behind Apple’s push for the “post-PC” world. Another company, one which was born and has thrived on the World Wide Web, is fighting desperately to revive and enrich the Web as the platform of the future. Who will end up victorious? The answer is unclear. Apple’s native approach seems to be gaining more momentum, and may draw in greater corporate support from companies like Microsoft, whose business is better served in the native application/OS market. Google alone, however, throws very considerable weight behind their side. Web applications are easier to develop than native apps (write-once, run-anywhere), and are increasingly becoming equal to their native counterparts in terms of power and functionality. This may prove to bring developers over to the Google camp, not to mention corporate backing from companies who, like Google, have their business rooted in the Web (e.g. Oracle, Amazon).
In the end, as always, it will be the consumers who decide the victor of this fight. As it stands, we seem to be liking the native approach better, but that may change. The Internet is without a doubt the most revolutionary invention in centuries—perhaps in all of human history. It is, consequently, comforting to know that whatever direction the Internet takes, it will be for the best.
