Google created Google - they more or less are the internet (that and Facebook) for the world. To 'Google' something is a phrase that entered into the vocabulary a very long time ago. Both their enormous presence in Internet/search, plus more cultural things like Youtube makes it unable to imagine a world without them.

Apple created iPhone. Holy shit, the iPhone. More or less, they invented the smartphone and the ecosystem around it. I really do wonder whether things like Uber would exist if Apple never made iPhone. I doubt Twitter would be as popular. Entire industries have been created now because Apple made iPhone[1].

They're both world-changing companies that have had an enormous impact. This pissing competition of who's bigger and better is so unimportant and just misses the point entirely.

[1] This is actually an interesting thought exercise, for me at least. What would have actually happened if Apple didn't make the iPhone? It's been shown that before release Android pivoted from a Blackberry device (btw, Blackberry just announced they're going to stop making hardware) to a more 'iPhone-like' device once iPhone was announced.

The most favourable approach is that it would have taken Android and Microsoft longer to get to the stage that iPhone was to create the type of influence things like the App Store has.

I bet that nothing much different, another company would have made one in 1-2 years timeframe. The idea of "hand phone-computer" was very old (decades in sci-fi and real products in nineties called "PDA"). It just happened that around the time when Apple made the first iPhone, tech was advanced and cheap enough for the mass market. To sum up, it was perfect timing, not revolutionary idea.

Before the iPhone was released, the mobile web was a mixture of rudimentary WAP/WML, or if you were lucky awful browsers that tried to render HTML. Everybody hated it.

Then the iPhone was released and it had a web browser in the same ballpark as real desktop browsers. What's more, WebKit was open-source. In next to no time, all the major phone vendors had a WebKit-based browser of their own and the mobile web took off.

Yes, if Apple didn't release the iPhone, eventually we would have gotten decent mobile web browsers. But phone vendors were doing an awful job of it up until Apple moved the whole industry forward. The only other possibility would have been Opera, but that would have required unrealistic licensing deals to have the same impact as the iPhone, and Opera ended up switching to WebKit too.

You're also forgetting about the effect the App Store had on the mobile marketplace. Before the iPhone, buying a mobile application tended to be something that nobody did. Every app had to roll their own payment infrastructure – it was painful for developers to charge and it was painful for customers to pay. Then the App Store came along and made it easy. There was little movement on centralising this beforehand from any other vendor, but as soon as Apple did it, everybody else hopped on the bandwagon.

Yeah, that was my thought exactly. However, iPhone software was so radically different from everything else at the time that I still wonder "what" it would have been and what the App Store revolution would have looked like.

Of course, in this alternate universe it's just as likely that other amazing advancements happened because Apple didn't do iPhone.

3G wasn't the deciding factor, the first iPhone didn't have it but responsive sites started popping up right away. There's also no point in 3G for web browsing unless you have a decent rendering engine – WML and XHTML Basic sites were hardly data hogs.

I am far from Apple fan boy and never actually owned any of their products, but boy they really brought mobile revolution to this world. It took competition many years to catch up with that, with great help of Google and their Android. Main reason why their share price skyrocketed during that time.

Maybe Maemo wouldn't have been botched so badly?

Yeah, Alphabet is bigger in every way that counts except those two inconsequential things for companies: revenue and profit.

The right features at the right time, everybody had to have one and the margins are totally insane.

That can't last. The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.

It seems unlikely they will have another product that generates as much cash as the iPhone.

They will still be a very profitable company, but perhaps not the cash printing machine that we have seen over the last 5 years.

Google Docs, Google +, Google Glass (lol) etc never went anywhere much, revenue wise, and even Android is mostly a loss as far as Google is concerned, even including licenses and mobile ads (makes a good buck for Samsung though).

> The market is nearing saturation, and competitive pressures will erode margins.

They serve the top end of the market (neither feature phones, not "just give me some smartphone free with the contract") where there are not much competitive pressures and they've been milking more profit than all Android shops combined at that. Besides, that we have been kept hearing since 2008 when Android appeared, and it hasn't even happened in the desktop/laptop space (the sell 5-10% of PCs and get 45% of the PC profits).

Also they've got those cute/silly moonshots that just might pan out.

You just gave some very "flashy & visible" examples of Alphabet's influence while citing only a "big pile of cash" as Apple's flashy & visible trait.

Apple have always been the most secretive and they almost NEVER announce something before they're ready to advertise it.

Did anybody see the New Mac Pro redesign coming? What about the fact that they were developing a whole new language for 4 years before anybody suspected it, Swift? Now it's one of their biggest things ever (one of fastest growing languages on GitHub by some metrics.)

Hell, even the PowerPC to Intel jump could be considered a surprise, even though they had been working on it for 5 years. [1]

Now, just recently they revealed a bunch of stuff powered by offline machine learning in iOS 10 and the macOS Photos — all without sending your info to Apple — and frankly I'm more impressed by this and the differential privacy thing than with Google's efforts towards centralized AI.

If one were to make any guesses, I'd say Apple is in a unique position to build an AI network distributed across all their devices, without leaking privacy to Apple or anyone. This is very attractive to me as a user, even if I have "nothing to hide." There are over a billion iPhones and iPads and Macs combined, with beefier processors on average compared to the majority of Androids. Android's fragmentation may also make it harder for Google to pull off the same, even if they were to make a commitment to user privacy.

I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines. EVEN if Apple is just using it as PR ammo, Google and Facebooks are objectively the worst offenders in this area and they don't look so nice and shiny a People's Champion in a privacy-focused future. It may take just one good open-sourced and distributed search engine, or a newer and more hip social platform (Snapchat looks like a good contender there), to unravel all their prospects.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY_ABCZJcpc

> I think the winds of the world are changing direction; people are becoming increasingly aware about privacy concerns, and these issues keep making the headlines.

It seems like only a minority cares about privacy concerns to even understand them well and take some action. Even when privacy issues make the headlines, billions of people just shrug their shoulders (and perhaps a few thousand say a curse word or two) but still go back to the same old ways they've been using Facebook, Google, etc.

I feel sad that the winds aren't changing direction, or at least not fast enough to be a force to reckon with.

As they have been doing from the beginning. The masses only act contrary to top level input when desperately hungry. Even their righteous anger is scripted and handed down.

What has been the problem is that the critical non-elite core (say 10%) of society was ignorant of the consequences of these technologies and they are now getting a better sense.

We only have to educate the 10% and only need to provide secure software for these same 10%. Societies change when the 10% no longer accepts the rule of the 1%. This is the primary critique against geek efforts to get "grandma" using crypto. If grandma is part of the 10%, she'll be able to follow step by step instructions.

Even during casual conversations with some of my friends who wouldn't be expected to care about these issues, they occasionally let out a glib "Sorry NSA!" whenever they say something that's known to be picked up by their monitoring.

So there is change. There is a chilling effect. And a big player like Apple making a big deal out of it, does help.

Apple and Google are not the only players in this game, but Microsoft as well as others.

Rather than shut stuff off, Google or Apple if forced to pay taxes will just lawyer up and appeal it in some way.

Yeah developing on OSX/MacOS is better than GNU/Linux, but if you find a good IDE with the programming language you use on GNU/Linux it gets better. Plus GNU/Linux runs on the PC Clones out there as well as ported cross platform for ARM, PowerPC, SPARC, Etc.

A reason why I use GNU/Linux is that it is free and respects my rights as a consumer with no DRM, and if I don't like one version of GNU/Linux there are hundreds of others out there. GNU/Linux is not locked to just one brand of computers as MacOS/OSX is, nor does it have DRM and Telemetry in it like Windows 10.

If Android makes up 90% of the market share and is half as valuable as an iPhone and Google was capturing the same % of value created Google would have revenue numbers from android that are larger than Apples from the iPhone. But it's not even comparable.

Yes, I agree essentially with the above line (though Apple & Alphabet have comparable market values, which is why I said Alphabet has an excellent outlook). I didn't intend to start a minor flame war, as I meant "giant among giants" in the financial sense only, which of course is hugely important.

In terms of influence/clout (measured in eyeballs, political heft, economic clout via product ecosystems, etc.) Alphabet likely does edge out even Apple (perhaps not "far, far beyond"). However & without going into too much detail, I think my point still stands: from a "game theory" angle, there would likely be no strategic reason for Apple to join a partnership in this case.

My interpretation of your post is that Google might be more _important_ than Apple. And my counterargument is that importance is not equivalent to influence.