Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blub 3353 days ago
Well put.

Let's take a look at Google: they have the browser (Chrome), they have the OS (Android), they have their cloud, they have a popular programming language (Go), they have the internet gateways (Google search + other services), they have the data (Google analytics, data mining in all of their other services), they have the hardware (Android phones, Chromebooks), they will have the car (Android auto + self-driving efforts), they want to have the ISP (Google fiber), they have the communications (several chat efforts), they have the social network (Google+, several other efforts). I'm probably missing several things.

Now Microsoft: they have the browser (Edge, IE), they have the OS (Windows, Windows phone, Xbox), they have their cloud, they have several popular programming languages (C#, F#, Typescript), they have the internet gateways (MSN, Bing, LinkedIn), they have the data (data mining in Windows and all of their other services), they have the hardware (Surface, Xbox), they have the communications (Skype, Yammer). Once again, I'm probably missing several things.

Apple: browser (Safari), OS (iOS, macOS), cloud, languages (Swift, Objective-C), hardware (iPad, Macbook, iPhone, Apple TV), communications (iMessage, FaceTime). They don't have the data and internet gateways because they're the only ones still holding themselves back from large scale data-mining.

They say the web is open because "it opposes private, exclusive, proprietary Web solutions". But the web is built with Microsoft and Google tools on Microsoft and Google clouds and viewed with Microsoft and Google browsers on Microsoft and Google operating systems. Maybe we can swap one cloud with Amazon, or one device with Apple, but that's the current situation. The ideals of opens-source have been almost circumvented in this age of platforms.

1 comments

Or you can browse a site hosted on Heroku using a Firefox browser on a Linux distro.

The interopretability is huge.