While the title is troll bait (especially coming from an Apple brand fanatic), blogger-turned-VC MG Siegler makes a few good points in a post over at his blog about how Google has failed in delivering their original Android vision when it comes to truly open platforms. Most of his tirade touches on things we've discussed over the years, like how Google's original plan to use the Nexus to completely revolutionize the wireless industry flopped, or how in order to protect billions they'd be getting from their Verizon partnership they were willing to completely sell their network neutrality principles down the river.
As you might expect from one of the industry's two largest Apple brand advocates, Siegler insists that this means that Apple has done a much better job at being "open" than Google ever did:
Apple, for all the shit they get for being closed and evil , has actually done far more to wrestle control back from the carriers and put it into the hands of consumers. Google set off to help in this goal, then stabbed us all in the back and went the complete other way, to the side of the carriers. And because they smiled the entire time they were doing it and fed us this open bullshit, we thanked them for it. We re still thanking them for it!
To get it out of the way: yes, both companies completely revolutionized the phone itself. However, revolutionizing the barely-competitive, lumbering, protectionist telecom sector is another matter entirely.Siegler floats over and past Apple's own failures in this regard. While Apple may have revolutionized phone design, Steve Jobs' original vision of a carrier-less future culminated in an a multi-year exclusive deal with one of the most anti-consumer, closed carriers in the industry (AT&T). For all of Apple's good intentions, the network side of their product was (for many) culminated with a total inability to actually make phone calls. While Apple did fight AT&T on some issues, they oddly replaced AT&T's walled garden vision with a morally-schizophrenic closed application store of their own. Meanwhile with their record on secrecy, Apple really can't talk about being "open" on any level.
The fact is that Apple and Google made constant concessions in their principles because AT&T and Verizon are absurdly powerful. These are protectionist, cuthroat giants -- who for generations have spent more time and effort protecting legacy business models (like landline) using armies of lobbyists and every dirty anti-competitive trick in the book -- than they have on innovation. Both Apple and Google could only hammer their heads against such empires for so long before making major concessions -- if they wanted to make money in wireless.
That doesn't excuse either company for bone-headed decision making, but it does at least lend context to why Google quickly sold consumer interests down the river. Fighting AT&T and Verizon is not a profitable venture, and if you're going to work long enough with such companies, you're going to be impacted by protectionist "telco think." That said, this street runs both ways, and we've seen both AT&T and Verizon make small and subtle shifts toward open devices and networks, even if they've done so begrudgingly.
Apple and Google failing to completely revolutionize such a dominated market in just a few years is not surprising. However, the fact that both have at least managed to make a dent through competition and innovation (quality evolution in smartphone GUIs, disruptive products like iMessage or Google Voice) is still something worth appreciating. Still, singling out one or the other exclusively for their failures in this regard usually reeks of fanboyism, and is like screaming at your cat for failing to put out a house fire.
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