The Digital Edge Blog

Google and Apple always seem to get lumped together as the “new tech titans” that will define our digital future. While no one can deny the leadership each of these great companies has shown in their respective markets, they each represent a fundamentally different view of how this future we are racing toward will unfold. In many ways, Google’s approach to the market is actually pretty similar to that of the company many define as their biggest competitor: Microsoft.

Both Google and Microsoft take the view that the best way to develop a product is to quickly put out a roughly thought-out “beta” version of it (hardware, software, or service), and continue refining it until it becomes something that might have appeal beyond a hard core tech audience. Products that never get to that critical mass eventually get pruned, and the really successful ones become the drivers of the business. All of the other products or services continue to roll along in limbo, backed by someone in the organization that believes in their potential to succeed but not fully supported by the organization as a whole. This ends up creating a fairly Darwinian environment for these projects to mature in, and the competition that results from it doesn’t always provide the best outcome.

Apple, on the other hand, takes pretty much the exact opposite approach. They rarely release anything that hasn’t been fully thought out, and they focus on getting the core value proposition of an offering to a fairly high level of polish before it goes out the door. Even a product like Apple TV - which is clearly still trying to find it’s footing in the market - was still well integrated into Apple’s iTunes ecosystem from the day it launched. But given it’s evolving feature set and interface, Steve Jobs never misses a chance to refer to it as a “Hobby” product for Apple - clearly distinguishing it from their very successful mainstream offerings. Apple is all about creating an extraordinary consumer experience, anchored by market redefining design and technology. Anything less is unacceptable to them, and they invest years of internal product refinement to try and avoid that kind of failure.

The difference between these two approaches will have an important impact on the long term success of both these companies - positive for Apple and negative for Google.

Because so much refinement takes place before a product hits the market, Apple is able to provide a focused, consistent product and brand strategy across everything they do. Their product sets are diverse enough to cushion market fluctuations in various lines of business, but still linked at a software level that lets them integrate more or less seamlessly. Apple makes a limited number of products, which lets them lavish great attention on each one. And unlike most tech companies, they view a product as the entire user experience with a device - shopping, packaging, design, technology, interface, functionality and support. And that results in products that people don’t just like but are actually passionate about. To Apple, defining the future starts by tapping in to the needs of the individual. And they do that very well.

For Google, in contrast, defining the future starts by tapping in to the power of a collective community - something they also do well. They cast a wide product net, giving them a finger in just about every aspect of evolving internet trends, standards, and technologies. In some areas - like Search based advertising, online video, mapping, and email - they have been incredibly successful. But the number of real Google successes is small when compared to the full suite of services and capabilities they now offer. Just look at the number of significant product betas, open source initiatives, and Google Lab projects that they have active at this point. And even more telling than all of that is that, if you put popularity aside, search advertising still ends up being the only really meaningful source of revenue they have today. While incredibly successful right now, Google as an organization is unbalanced and spread thin. Outside of a few big areas they lack cohesion, with many smaller project teams competing with each other for funding and management attention. This has driven many incredibly bright, entrepreneurial developers, unable to make an impact or accomplish anything meaningful in this environment, to simply leave the company in complete frustration. I personally know a number of them. While this may not matter much to Google while the search ad dollars are still rolling in, it could really end up undermining their competitiveness over the long term. Not only are they losing talent they really could leverage today, they are seeding it to an incredible number of small, innovative companies that could end up competing with them in the future. Web search is still in its infancy, and the web is littered with the remains of once dominant search providers. Google isn’t immune to this, and needs to be careful.

Don’t get me wrong - I use many Google services on a daily basic and I depend on them for a great deal of what I need to do online. They are an extraordinarily innovative company. That said, I don’t have the same passion for Google’s services that I have for Apple’s products. There is a pleasure I get every time I open my Macbook or touch the screen of my iPhone that transcends the basic utility the devices provide. There are very few things in life that are able to deliver that type of experience, and none of them spring from the efforts of a collective. It takes the vision, talent, and desire of individuals to produce a result like that. That is the feeling I hope I’ll get one day from doing a search on Google.

But they still have a long way to go.

This isn’t to say the the next new product from Apple couldn’t be a complete market failure, or that an update to Google couldn’t completely redefine our expectations of web search. Either of those outcomes are possible. And while both Google and Apple are in exceptionally strong market positions today, that shouldn’t be much comfort for either of them going forward. Change is the one constant in the tech world that no one, no matter how big, can avoid. And change can be unforgiving.

After a decade of dominance in the 1990’s, Microsoft struggled to maintain relevance in the evolving internet landscape. Their size, diversity, and lack of clear focus made them slow to react and adapt. They instead tried to use their dominant position to preserve the status-quo that tilted in their favor. When they could no longer do that, the wave of competition that followed upended the entire market, even placing into question the fundamental value proposition Microsoft built their business around. Despite the strength of their significant product franchises like Windows and Office, Microsoft now finds itself in the position of playing catch up in as market that won’t cut them any slack.

The challenge for Google is to avoid a similar fate.

While Intel has been pouring money and effort into increasing the number of processing cores they can pack on a single chip, they may simply be offering too little, too late. The software industry has already begun to take advantage of other more specialized processors found in today’s computers, and the results are pretty impressive.

Most current desktop computers (and some higher end laptops) have graphics cards that contain multi-core, high speed processors. Software being developed today, especially games and media editing/creation tools, leverage these specialized processors to boost their computational performance. Hard core gamers have even begun adding “physics simulation” processors to help speed-up frame rates and improve the visual realism of 3D environments like those found in First Person Shooters (FPS’s)

These specialized processors allow for a more natural simulation of water movement, light refraction and diffusion, shadow casting and other “natural world” phenomena to make games more believable and immersive. Quality rendering of these types of elements using just traditional multi-core processors would be prohibitively expensive at this point in time, though Moore’s Law will help with that over time.

Another useful type of special purpose processor are those that you can just plug in when you need them. Since I end up doing a lot of video work, my personal favorite “outboard processor” has become the El Gato Turbo.264 HD.

This processor does one thing exceptionally well. It accelerates the rendering of H.264 video all the way up to HD resolutions. Since H.264 is the native resolution for video on the iPhone and Apple TV, rendering any videos I produce into this format is almost de rigueur. It has reduced rendering times for me by over 60%, and has allowed me to allocate more time to actual editing.

While traditional multi-core processors are critical for efficiently running the kinds of high end, multi-threaded applications found in corporate environments, they don’t add anywhere near the same value to typical consumer focused computing applications. Intel isn’t blind to this, but has decided (after their own failed attempt at developing a graphics processor) to focus on ramping up the number of cores they can deliver on a chip (expect 8-16 core before the end of 2010). The main folks developing specialized graphics processors - NVidia and AMD/ATI - are not resting on their laurels either, and will continue progressing both the clock speed and number of processing pipelines they make available on their solutions. It’s too early to predict winners in this space, but the benefit to consumers from either approach should be significant.

It will be interesting to see which one will ultimately prevail.

I need to start off with an apology. It’s been over two weeks since my last post, and that’s a long time for me. Unfortunately, I have simply been overwhelmed with things to do this month, and spare time has been hard to come by.

Perhaps the biggest demand on my “free” time has been selling my current house and buying a new one. It’s amazing how many things need to get done as a part of this whole process. And having as much technology in my house as I do, there is a side of this that feels a bit like a data center relocation as well. Wiring, telecoms, automation and control systems all needed to be planned out in the new house. Not only that, but I’ve actually had to start documenting how everything works in the current house for whoever ends up buying it. I’ve been told more than once that my house isn’t exactly ‘plug & play’ by most folks standards.

While this move will give me a chance to update my current technology and streamline some of my infrastructure, there is one piece of tech that I will need to leave behind in this move that I will sorely miss - my home media center:

From accessing the internet, to streaming media files stored on servers around my house, to big screen gaming - and even traditional uses like TV and Bluray viewing - this has been the media and entertainment hub of my house for the past 5 years.

The design goal in building this media center was to allow individual technology components to be updated as needed while keeping the basic frame of the system untouched. Everything is built around a rear facing projector/mirror system housed in a “black room” I had built behind the screen. The screen itself (93″ diagonal) is made by Stewart Filmscreen out of optical glass with a high gain coating on it. I’ve already done one major technology refresh in a move from 720p to 1080p without any issues. Even the audio setup - currently wired for 7.1 surround - could easily be extended for the new 9.1 surround systems just coming out on the market. The glass in the doors on the two lighted display cases can easily be replaced with speaker grill panels, and simple wire pulls can be made to the new receiver. A lot of thought went in to future-proofing this set-up.

It will be tough leaving this one behind.

That said, I am really jazzed about making this move. As I start to get things set up in our new home, I’ll post about some of the new technology choices I finally make, and how I end up configuring everything there. I’m excited thinking about the possibilities.

As for my postings through the end of this year, I will do my best to be more timely.

Thanks!