[Hawkeye_a]

This thing is spiraling out of control, and i don't like it one bit.

Sources call Apple vs. Google battle "incendiary" | Electronista

What does really bother me is what effect this squabble would have on the stock prices and an opportunity opening given to M$ while these two giants duke it out.

Seriously Apple and Google need to reconcile and make some sort of a deal before Microsoft capitalizes on the situation.

[besson3c]

It is bothersome, but I have to say, without knowing a whole lot about all of this I'm tempted to be more empathetic to Google in its desire to create an open phone platform.

[Big Mac]

Strangely, I think I agree with you, besson, as well as with Hawkeye.

Apple is a terrific company, but if it were as powerful as M$ it would probably end up operating in an even more anti-competitive way than M$ ever has, since Apple has the natural inclination to want to rule over its creations with heavy handed control.

I haven't been keeping that close of an eye on this latest dustup between Apple and Google, but I have mixed feelings about Apple having exclusive control over the iPhone UI. Apple deserves to profit off its creativity and innovations for a certain period of time, but it's hard to say how long a company should properly be able to have an exclusive lock on interface concepts that other companies are capable of successfully copying. It definitely shouldn't be locked down in perpetuity. Even a few years ago I probably would have still argued for a perpetual lock on the Mac UI, but where would desktop computing be today if Apple's rights to the Mac look and feel had been upheld as exclusive? We'd probably be running Mac OS 8 right now, and M$ would be coming out with DOS version 15.

[Hawkeye_a]

I admire Google's guts to come up against Microsoft in challenging them on their own turf (licensing to hardware manufacturers). I'm not so sure i like "open" software, just cause of the lack of backing(warranties, etc) from the companies that distribute those products. And as a consumer i think i would be far less satisfied with the loosely coupled system (hardware-software-services).... sorta like the way Windows Linux and WinMo is currently delivered to consumers.

As far as patents n things.... what Google has done seems almost like DejaVu to what Microsoft did to Apple with the Macintosh. Befriend Apple, and then pull the rug out from under them. And im sympathetic with Jobs having to contend with the same situation all over again.

From an idealogical standpoint, i'm not a fan of Microsoft cause they essentially stole the UI concepts and reverse engineered everything from the GUI to quicktime, etc from Apple. WinMo7 was a pleasant surprise cause it "looked" different enough to me, and didnt seem like just a rip off of yet another Apple 'invention'.

What Google has done seems very similar to what Microsoft did to Apple back in the day. Instead of Microsoft Office....we have Google Search and Google Maps on our Apple products.

BigMac, with regard to GUIs on the desktop......think of it like.... what Apple got from Xerox was fundamentally the idea of using a bitmapped display to communicate instead of just lines of text (over simplification, i know)....but everything it added on top..like the concept of the 'desktop', 'trash', 'folders', 'drag-n-drop', etc....mostly came from Apple and is what contributed to the look and feel. Microsoft *should* have taken the idea of a bitmap and painted a completely different image(which would have involved investment into R&D), instead it chose to trace over the product that Apple had invented.

An analogy...words, story, books. Apple came up with the story and wrote a book using words. Microsoft read the book, and wrote a book using the same story with different words....they could have chosen to write a completely different story(had they had the imagination to do so). And so as consumers i think we lost, because now all we have are two different books telling the same story using different words.

It appears that Google is doing the same with Android as well. Although im not certain if Android is a Google product anymore.

[Sealobo]

"On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars."

Google’s ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Mantra is ‘Bullshit,’ Adobe Is Lazy: Apple’s Steve Jobs (Update 2) | Epicenter | Wired.com