Google v/s Microsoft v/s Apple

Here is an excellent analysis of Google's lessons from Apple. Some dissection of the same follows:

• Google realizes that typing in search terms is so last century. When there are dedicated apps for recipes (epicurious), restaurants (yelp), news (nytimes) why will I go to Safari's google search box and search? Clearly how we look at information access is changing and the iPhone (and the iTunes ecosystem) is surely a huge paradigm shifter.
  
• Taking a few pages from Apple's strategy cheat-sheet, Google is now attempting to control the user experience (by working on the phone's software). This is very similar to Apple's attempt with hardware to control user experience directly (the PC-MAC debate).
• While I understand the PC-MAC debate well, the numbers tell a different story. PC's reign supreme in offices, factories and even homes. I think where this story becomes different is in the consumer market, where it's all about the user experience. It's obvious that if my app. on my iPhone looked like a mid-90's Windows client with dreary grays and solid black lines, I would not even glance at that app.
• And finally, for people with short-term memory loss, another pre-iPhone world scenario to set you thinking some more. While on this subject, I'm still not convinced that the Nexus is doing great. But then again, I might just have to eat my words up, just like the iPhone naysayers.
  

Future of Media

Watching this and other wonderful videos on the future of media, and how transformative this experience is going to be gives me the goose-bumps. I've been thinking about this subject for a long time now, no doubt fueled by the secrecy and rumors around the iPad. Its release in April is going to invite many such discussions, and the future ahead is so exciting.

• How does Adobe fit into this media? No doubt - with a huge push from the Intel AppStore.
• Traditional print-media advertisers will need to switch/employ many more techies. After all, it would be a shame to just view a picture of a product and see a nice blurb about it, when what the consumer really wants is to flip the product 360 degrees and view it at all angles.
• Developers/advertising gurus would love to see a user-friendly SDK to make this happen - I know programming on the iPhone is not exactly a cake-walk - but building in Flex is quite easy. Will the tool-builders define who "wins"?
  
• Is the book really dead? I refuse to believe it is; it will again depend on how compelling the subscription model is.
• Interesting as always, how Google will picture into all this? Is it already an also-ran? (I say - not quite so fast).