[wickedchicken]

I don't know if you knew this, but Google, Inc. isn't Apple, Inc. Two separate companies! I know it's surprising, it took me a while to figure out myself. You may be also surprised to know that there are actually more ways to release products than how Apple does it. In fact, there many ways, each with various tradeoffs.

[korussian]

The Apple way being the one that results in multi-day campouts and kidney sales. Of course the trade-off to announcing/shipping simultaneously is…?

[wickedchicken]

Cost of keeping engineer/supplier secrecy [financial, intellectual, and morale cost], unable to use real people as beta testers, more difficult to involve outside research centers, encourages insular culture. "Oh, is that public now? I don't even know anymore."

In the case of something that has a developer culture around it (say, a chumby or something) you have a higher number of developers ready to go 'at the start' since they've had time to think about killer apps.

One could point at how early-stage multiplayer videogames are developed for a good counterexample.

[DanBC]

A better nicer world.

A world where people hack together cool things using Google tech, or hack together cool things a bit like Google tech, or hack together cool things better than Google tech.