Google Fights the Apple Technology Takeover

Google's purchase of Motorola may help quell Apple's imminent technology takeover.

Google's entry into the mobile-computing hardware market may provide some resistance to the Apple cult that is taking over technology.

Google has purchased Motorola Mobility, which will undoubtedly set off a new and bigger war in the mobile-computing market.

Google, which wants Motorola’s storehouse of patents more than its smartphone business, is clearly setting its sights on Apple’s lead in the mobile-computing space.

Good for Google.

I say this not because I love Google so much, but mostly because I’m developing a real hate for Apple.

Sure, Apple makes great products, and Steve Jobs is a mesmerizing presenter and leader. But Apple is also gated and secretive, avaricious, dictatorial, and incredibly arrogant.

It’s become a techno cult that is so controlling, it rivals some of the more extreme religious cults.

Publishers who want to sell their magazines, newspapers, or applications have to cough up 30 per cent (30 per cent – in this day of the long tail?) to Apple (presuming Apple deigns to allow them to sell at all). Anyone who sells Apple products unauthorized (i.e. not maintaining Apple’s sky-high prices) is immediately surrounded by a goon squad of lawyers waiving cease-and-desist orders.

(Thank goodness for the ever-innovative Chinese who just copied Apple stores and products and merrily pretended they were authorized until they were exposed by a travelling Apple-ite.)

It’s a throwback to industrialization in the 1970s, when a few conglomerates controlled everything, and if you didn’t like it, tough. You paid what they wanted, period.

But the tide may be turning on the Apple cult. Publishers are fighting back. Competitors like Amazon are starting to move in on its plan to control all digital publishing. Alliances are being made in other areas of the computing word.

A growing number of people are resisting the Apple Borg. They seek out lower-priced, equally as good products.

Many of them are coming from Google, and, it now appears, many more will be soon.

It is kind of odd, viewing mighty Google as the leader of the movement to avoid assimilation by the Apple juggernaut. But we’ll take our heroes where we can get them.

Apparently, resistance is not futile.

• Tags
  • tony wanless, 
  • google, 
  • Apple, 
  • Mobile and Wireless