Apple, Google, & the future of the internets

I thought this might be an interesting summary of a few things floating around the internet of late. I know we have both Apple fanboys and Windows jocks alike on this blong. We've been surprisingly respectful on issues of technology so far, so lets see how long we can last before we all take a collective dump on civility and TEAR THIS PLACE APART! Actually, I'm just curious if you guys think Apple and/or Google are heading in the right direction. BEGIN!

Charlie Stross: The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash.
I don't get the title. The piece seems less about Flash than it is an excellent forecast on the future collapse and rebirth of the computer industry...

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat. That's the time scale in which they expect the cloud computing revolution to flatten the existing PC industry. Unless they can turn themselves into an entirely different kind of corporation by 2015 Apple is doomed to the same irrelevance as the rest of the PC industry — interchangable suppliers of commodity equipment assembled on a shoestring budget with negligable profit.

Christina Warren: Apple versus Flash versus HTML5

A solid analysis of why Flash will be a non-entity in the future, and why it has little to do with Apple. With a cool graph, here. In fact, Windows seems to agree. (bummer for vector-based animators, of course)

Bobbie Johnson: Apple iPad will choke innovation, say open internet advocates

Wade Roush: The Apple Paradox: How a company that's so closed foster so much open innovation

Kyle Conroy: What if I had bought Apple stock instead?
Ugh.

It is also worth noting where Windows seems to stand on this front: Here, and here.

Lastly, Jon Stewart: On Apple's response to the stolen iPhone prototype. Granted, who knows if Apple forced the police to burn Gizmodo's headquarters to the ground, Either way, Mr. Stewart sums it up perfectly with "Appholes".

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Appholes
www.thedailyshow.com
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Google talks about newspapers

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, is speaking quite sensibly about newspapers. I suspect many in print media know he's right but don't want to admit it:

FT: Some people, in their concern about the sorry financial state of a lot of American newspapers, they’ve talked about the idea that some papers should become not for profit. Do you think that’s a good idea? Is that going to be the model for the future?

ES: There’s an old joke about newspapers – that some of them have been not-for-profits for many years. So I think the reality is that news gathering and the profitability model was always an uncomfortable relationship because it’s very difficult to make money from a story about a tragedy or murder or so forth - and yet it’s enormously valuable. So the structure of newspapers that evolved, where the majority of the revenue came from classifieds and these big, untargeted print ads, the content was fascinating but they were not connected to... it was ultimately destined to be challenged by technology and that’s indeed what happened.

...

FT: In their quest for revenues newspapers have started talking about trying to persuade you, Google, and specifically Google News, to share a little bit more of the revenue, specifically from their stories that appear on Google News. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

ES: We’ve decided that the value we provide to the partners is the traffic. So we want to provide incredible numbers of users going to their sites, their content, which is why we urge them to make it deeper, stronger and use better tools and so forth. From our perspective, that’s where the real source would be. In our model, and what we’re doing today, the vast majority of the revenue that comes directly from reading newspapers, in fact, goes to them through all these mechanisms. The real issue here is that when people are reading the news online, we’re not monetising it in aggregate, so if we were to transfer money we would be taking money from something unrelated to newspapers and just paying them, which doesn’t seem like a good sustainable model for anybody.