Wishful thinking? I know I want a Facebook "killer" to pop up soon. Network effects are what I hate & love most about the tech industry: why is it that something beautiful always has to be ruined once some player becomes big enough to dominate the space? PCs : Microsoft, Social Networking: Facebook, Mobile Apps: Apple
Personally I am more worried of a big company dominating more than one space. Say, I'm happy with PS3 to beat Xbox 'cause Sony is not a threat anywhere else, but Microsoft got the Windows/Office monopolies.
I am happy with Apple being strong in iPod/iPhone because they are weak in PCs. And I am happy with Google being strong in search, and Facebook and Twitter having the social network market.
If we got a Facebook killer from Twitter I'd love it. But from Google? I think they got enough fingers in enough pies for the time being. :)
At least Google has a policy of you owning your data, and of making it easy to grab all your data so you can move to other services.
So if they ran something like Facebook it would be much easier to compete with them outside of their ecosystem, unlike Facebook which tries to dominate all data submitted into their system.
What about Macs and Macbooks? they are making some serious progress over the last few years despite market domination by PCs for a long long time (almost everybody outside of design industry was using PCs). I think really great technology does eventually shine.
To be fair though, iPod and iPhone did play a big role to give Apple the "coolness" as a whole, perhaps that's the right strategy - attack from the sidelines.
Perhaps a mixture of both. To me I made the switch when I got both an iPod and an iPhone so getting a Macbook was somewhat a natural next step when I needed to get a new laptop. Didn't care too much about what's inside the machine, the different OS experience was a major concern at the time though.
* An Intel chip means that it's faster to run Windows (without the need for x86-on-PowerPC emulation).
* An Intel chip means that I can run Linux on it and still have access to closed-source programs (Flash, Matlab, etc).
* An Intel chip makes it possible to boot Windows natively.
* An Intel chip makes it easier for Apple to maintain forward momentum without needing to goad Motorola/IBM/etc to improve their PowerPC offerings to be competitive with Intel/AMD chips.
It's not as simple as that - they are a hybrid. An interface as easy to use as the previous Macs, hardware as cheap as a PC, an underlying OS as powerful as Unix.
> Network effects are what I hate & love most about the tech industry: why is it that something beautiful always has to be ruined once some player becomes big enough to dominate the space?
Well, that is definitely a good reason to wish that Google will take over social networking…
