Everything Google does is about advertising and collecting data. Those two things don’t align with my desires.

They align with the needs and wants of billions of people.

Now Apple might be ahead. But its not hard for them to lose all of that. Apple as of now is not useful to the masses in most countries. Google is.

There is a reason why companies like Dell and Microsoft ruled so much in the 90s to the 2005. Once you exhaust Steve Jobs's established product lines, you are just selling expensive cosmetic shining gadgets offering little in extra value compared to Samsung or Dell. At that time is when Google like companies will outshine Apple.

Scary thing for Apple is the new Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems. Steve Jobs is no more, and its already showing.

In fact one big revolutionary product from Google could change everything for Apple. The raw utility of Google search still far exceeds that of iPhone. And that's just one product. Maps, YouTube, Android etc have very large utility to common masses compared to iPhone.

Dell and Microsoft won when the user is not the customer - enterprise sells. Apple brought in the “consumerization of IT”. People have been predicting the death of Apple and the failure of the iPhone for 8 years. They swore Android and especially Samsung was going to take over. Samsung in fact is seeing price pressure and they are struggling - not Apple.

In fact, a lot could change over the coming years.

>Macbook Pro already shows some of these problems It really doesn't. Apple has their fuckups time to time, like Pippin, G4 Cube, Ping, Maps or 'you're holding it wrong' iPhone 4.

This is a distinction most people don't grasp. I didn't, myself, until recently when a briefing from the legal department resulted in scouring the word "free" from eight web sites and replacing the word with "at no cost."

That said it’s irrelevant. Microsoft is happy to keep the competition alive for Google and I bet they are winning some revenue from their DDG deal, so it’s a win win.

And if DDG gets big enough, and it probably is already, they can develop their own web crawler - because in case you don’t know, it’s the crawling part that’s really expensive.