Coolness Vs. Openness

June 16th, 2008 | by Jose Miguel Cansado |

Mac, coolness: the choice of the artist and the MBA. Style, simplicity, less features but works flawlessly, usability on the top, identify with brand, price premium. The right brain decides.

Ubuntu, openness: the choice of the engineer and the geek. Features, features, features, beta versions, open to add more features, open to develop and install applications, works on any HW, lowest cost. The choice of the left brain. Microsoft would fall in this category as well. It is far from being open source, but the independence of HW platform, openness for developers to write applications, easy install and uninstall of applications, and market dominance, make Microsoft a choice for the pragmatic, emotional phobias aside.

When openness meets coolness: Google and Android

Even Mike Arrington and BusinessWeek contribute to the hype of the iPhone 3G, set to beat even the most optimistic expectations. The right brain has made its choice, there is no handset as cool as the iPhone: MultiTouch, great web browsing, email, youtube, an iPod inside and the guarantee to be the envy of your buddies. But the left brain says: wait, what apps will you be able to install except those sold by App Store? at what price? no copy and paste, only h264 video, only syncs with iTunes, no flash memory card slot, no 3G video calls, no keyboard and forced to a two year contract with the operator…

And here is where Google appears. Google flagship is also simplicity, things that just work (even if Beta…), a brand comparable to Apple (for the moment), and a flavor of openness.  Android combines an open platform with the revolutionary concept the iPhone brought, only that you have an army of developers and a variety of handset HW so that you can pick which of the shortcomings of iPhone you want to fix in your Android.

Will you run for the iPhone 3G or wait to see what Android is capable? I admit it, I am an engineer, I will wait.

  1. 3 Responses to “Coolness Vs. Openness”

  2. By Floyd Showalter on Jun 16, 2008 | Reply

    I admit it, I am an average consumer, I’ll buy Apple’s 3G iPhone rather than wait on an unproven entity.

  3. By sachendra Yadav on Jun 17, 2008 | Reply

    You’ce given an inteersting perspective. Never thought of it that way. I guess Android will be a serious threat to iPhone if google can project this image to end-users.

  4. By weizbox on Jun 17, 2008 | Reply

    Since when has Ubuntu become a distro for the engineers and geeks? If so, who is Gentoo,Slackware,etc for? :P

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