Google Blindness

I don't know about you, but the device itself is branding. If I pick up an iPhone, I know pretty much immediately that I'm holding an iPhone based on the layout of the buttons, especially the "God" button. Similarly I would never mistake my Nexus 4 for an iPhone 5.

Marco's article is so poorly-written, so poorly thought-out, I don't know where to begin. It's really more an article about hating Google as a whole.

Google blindness? Or blind hatred for Apple's competitors?

Some gems, though:

  I think it’s unwise to use many proprietary, hard-to-replace
  services in such important roles, and I think it’s downright 
  foolish to tie that much of your data and functionality into 
  proprietary services run by one company in one account that 
  sometimes gets disabled permanently with no warning, no 
  recourse, and no support.

And Apple's services aren't less proprietary? Apple doesn't tie everything to one Apple ID? Google has pretty poor support, but I've never heard of anyone having their account (unreasonably) permanently disabled.

The Google search he links to is some useless Google search on "google account locked". Here's the equivalent Apple ID search:

https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+account+locked 26.7 million results.

Here's another:

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=apple+i... Over 29 million results.

I could go on a side-discussion about the number of Google users vs Apple users and then compare percentages and Google results and point out that there seem to be more issues with Apple IDs than Google IDs per capita, but why bother?

What does it mean? People using both ecosystems get their accounts locked up for some reason or another.

  If Apple somehow irrevocably locks out my Apple ID, which
  I’ve never heard of happening, it would be inconvenient.
  My contacts and calendar would temporarily stop syncing 
  during the 20 minutes it would take to create a new 
  account and point my devices to it. The biggest problem 
  would be losing my app and media purchases, although I 
  wouldn’t lose any local copies of anything*

I've never heard of someone having their Google account irrevocably locked out, either.

  and there’s a phone number I can call to convince a human 
  to give me a transfer or credit.

Yeah, there's a number you can call for the Play Store for this purpose as well. I wish it were at the bottom of every page, but it's buried underneath a Help menu. That said, Apple's support is truly industry-leading and far better than what Google's got going. It's still not as bad or hopeless as Marco attempts to portray, though.

  It’s important to maintain diversity of services.

And you can do this with Android. You don't need to use any Google services. Sure it'll badger you at first, but no more than an Apple iOS device will.

In fact, I'd say that Android is better at maintaining diversity of services. You can install an account for a wide variety of providers in the Settings app, whereas Apple forces you to stick with whatever they choose for you (Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, etc). Occasionally, they might remove a provider for you.

  It’s foolish for people on either side to ignore the 
  other or the middle, because despite what it sometimes
  looks like to geeks like us, we’re not everyone. Not 
  even close. Even within our world, we can’t agree on 
  much.

Is this self-deprecation on Marco's part?

  like Paul says he does

This snippet appears repeatedly in Marco's article and strikes me as a passive-aggressive snub. The leading Apple pundits (Gruber, Marco, Dalrymple) are getting more and more hateful towards Apple's competitors and I think this betrays an underlying belief that Apple's glory days are (sadly) waning. It screams desperation. Maybe this Ellison guy is right.

I'm not a particularly big fan of Google or Apple or Microsoft, and I despise Facebook. But I still use all of their tech daily, but I'm sure as hell not going to cheer lead for any of them.

Edit: Fixed broken copy-pasted links, thanks anonymoushn.

What about the personal cost of platform switching? I went to the iPhone when version 2 hit the market and it was clearly going to survive as a product. I hate switching technologies, with all the cost and frustration it involves. I've been able to have a single, constantly evolving configuration through four different phones now (five soon, once I can jump from my 4S to a 5S). It's always backed up. It's survived the physical destruction of a phone. It does everything I require of it, most of that very well.

So to get a user like me to switch platforms - it's a huge personal expense, not just of money, but of time and intellectual bandwidth. I don't need a device that's just arguably better, or a little better... I'd need a game-changer of a device to switch, something that does basically everything I do on my iPhone more efficiently, faster, better, cheaper. I don't see that.

I'll probably stay on iPhone unless Apple really screws up.

I'll avoid making a comment of how NSA talk is hijacking every thread, but I'll attempt to correct your misgivings:

Google's primary business is advertising, meaning that like the publishers of yore they sell "space", now with the advent of technology that "space" gets populated with what the algos determine to be the best suitable ad according to data about the would be viewer of said ad. They don't 'sell their users to advertisers', they offer them a dashboard with which they supply the content of the advertisement, choose the interests they want to target, and measure the effectiveness of it all. Advertisers do not get exposed to user data - they deal with abstractions.

He consistently writes positively about and supports Apple and consistently poo poos Android. It doesn't hurt that many sites that favor Android in such a consistent and highly biased way are instakilled when submitted here.

He's not quite the shill that Gruber is, but it all adds up that he's popular on HN.