I think you might be missing the point. Android does a great job of integrating data from the cloud with the operating system. An example is the Google Music player streams your music from the cloud and integrates the player controls with Android on the lockscreen, in the widget, in the status bar etc. The demo video from Canonical shows this kind of integration with last.fm. Nobody is saying Android or Ubuntu is perfect or whatever but there are similarities to what Android does and what Canonical is doing here.
The point of this (Ubuntu feature) is not that it's integrating proprietary Ubuntu services with the OS (it has already done that, with Ubuntu One), like your example of Google Music, the point is that it is promoting web applications to first-class citizens alongside the native apps. Android fails at this pretty badly.
"web applications to first-class citizens alongside the native apps. Android fails at this pretty badly"
Android isn't "failing" at something that it isn't trying to do. Web apps generally suffer from low performance when trying to do anything moderately complex on a mobile device. If you must use web technology to create apps on Android, there is webView in the sdk for you. Many web apps that have tons of users like Google Maps, Pandora, etc. have native apps that are actually performant, follow UI conventions, and have access to all the APIs.
You're missing what's right in front of you; the fact that web apps suffer from bad performance on Android is a prime example of how it is failing. Perhaps Google doesn't care about web apps, but that would be a huge turnaround from just a few years ago when it was one of the web's biggest proponents.
I think it has less to do with this and more to do with them not focusing their efforts on that front. It isn't like their current dev stack is the pinacle of performance either. Give it a few years and I'm sure they'll have native Dart applications which will be just as performant.
I have an iPad and web apps suck on it too. What is your benchmark for good performance? I'm being serious as I'd love to be able to have a legitimate mobile outlet for high performance web applications.
I think the best example of this is Windows 8, which has 2 application environments, .NET and Trident (The IE10 rendering engine). They are, for all intents and purposes, on equal footing with each other, and an end user can't tell which environment an application uses.
The engine that powers it is exactly the same, the difference is additional APIs (that add functionality, not performance). Everyone already agrees that HTML/JS needs more APIs.
Do you really think the management at that Burger King are that stupid? Put yourself in their position. Say you get this picture. First you don't take it seriously then you look at it and recognize the employee as the lady at the BK in question did. Then you figure out who was working at the time, get a look at the lettuce containers (do they match the picture?) So on and so forth. It isn't too hard to put the whole scenario together and tell if it is real or not.
That's a pretty worthless example with nothing to compare it against. Had the developers released it on iOS or Android and had more success on Windows Phone then you would have an argument otherwise you really don't.
"The choice they made was that we need not shoehorn interfaces into desktop or touch categories."
Imposing a touch centric UI onto traditional desktops is the very definition of shoehorning.
"Why not be able to touch your laptop?"
Having a touch interface doesn't magically confer touchscreen hardware. Most laptops will not be touchscreen as this means additional cost.
"Android is the one that didn't make a choice and simply copied Apple in this regard."
Apple did not invent the grid of icons concept. At best they imitated designs that came before them and Android imitated the imitator. It made a lot of sense at the time considering the iPhone was in the middle of running away with the market compared to traditional smartphone interfaces like the Blackberry, Palm, Symbian, and Windows Mobile.
Exactly right and one of the main things I missed about Ubuntu on my desktop over Android on my Xoom was Android's seamless integration of "cloud" data and the operating system. In comparison desktop OSs feel like a collection of silos. I'm very excited about the future of Ubuntu and am beginning to think that Canonical actually do "get it".
buy their way into ads you mean. They bought their way into search via the Yahoo deal. and of course Google bought their way into search by paying firefox and others who distributed the google toolbar... everybody tries to do it I guess
> Google bought their way into search by paying firefox and others who distributed the google toolbar.
Google already owned search when firefox finally had nontrivial market share. They did not "buy their way into search", the transformed the market with an excellent product (Google altavista, the undisputed king until Google came).
At some point, they started paying e.g. mozilla to maintain their position.
But they reached that position based on merit. (A rather uncommon event, unfortunately).
Reminds me of Microsoft's investment in Apple in 1997...
"There was some suggestion that Mr Gates may be anxious to keep Apple afloat to forestall a scenario where, following an Apple demise, a virtual monopoly hold by Microsoft on the software market would inevitably attract negative attention from fair competition regulators in Washington."
Well, an update to Office 2011 for Mac is being released to add skydrive integration. There are also rumors of iOS and Android versions that will be released, but I guess we'll have to wait and see what actually happens.
It's just like how Ballmer came out recently railing about how no stone would be left unturned competing with Apple and how MS responded to Linux in the early netbook era. For a global tech company these days you cede nothing. No matter how insignificant Bing may be compared to Google in actuality that doesn't mean Google can afford to go to sleep for a second and they won't.
Have you considered the possibility that Schmidt the man actually believes that Bing is competitive with Google and sees this as something to rally against? How is that lying* and spinning? I would consider an executive to be remiss to arrogantly assume that their product is better no matter what. The fact that Schmidt isn't slamming the Bing effort and is actually offering praise should be seen as a good thing. Which CEO was it that laughed at the iPhone when it was released? You seem to be consumed by hate.
*recoiledsnake originally had the word "lying" in his comment. I just noticed he edited that out.
the possibility that Schmidt the man actually believes that Bing is competitive with Google
From a results-based perspective, it more-or-less is. But actually capturing the market is hard to imagine. Search engines in general seem to be reaching the limits of filtering 5 billion pages based on 2 or 3 word queries.
Exactly. Never fully trust the public statements of a corporate exec – they're often smart enough (or stupid enough) to try to be manipulative, either internally or externally and public statements can play both of those sides.
Google is not Netscape or Novell or anybody else that Microsoft can just execute incompetently against and "wait out". Not to mention the fact that "Bing" is just the latest rebranding of MS' search attempts going back many years so they have been waiting for Google to stumble for a while. And if you think Bing is even on the same plane of existence as Google search you are severely deluded.
The argument is intentionally silly to point out how it's a silly argument in the other direction as well.
Nothing gets designed in a vacuum. If you google around a bit you can find flatscreen tv's from 2002 that look like big ipads, well before apple started designing their tablets. Watt didn't invent the steam engine, he just had a really good idea how someone else's steam engine could be improved while repairing it. Bosch didn't invent electric ignition for cars, he just transplanted the idea from Volta's glass pistol, whose spark in turn was delivered by Volta's "pile" (battery), the idea of which was inspired by Volta's friend who noticed that when he dissected frogs sometimes the frog's legs would jump right off the plate by the generated currents from the scalpel interacting with the metal base. The iphone and ipad are brilliantly executed, but to pretend that they were invented in a vacuum does a disservice to designers and inventors everywhere.
But just as Apple are being silly by pretending they design in a vacuum, Samsung are silly for pretending they didn't rip off the iphone. I think they would have sold more phones if they hadn't actually (I know for me it was a reason not to get a samsung phone, even though I eventually did.) I think the silliness on both sides is why the courts are starting to hand down these silly rulings.
You specifically claimed Apple aped it's design, soemthing anything with a brain would find laughable. Please keep making these ridiculous declarations.
I don't care if Apple directly aped the LG Prada or not but do not come in here thinking you can fool people into believing that Apple just innovated the modern smartphone out of thin air. It didn't happen. The fact that similar looking phones to the iPhone hit the market first should give you a clue to that.
So, now we are just degenerating to ye olde "No True Scotsman" defense. Face it, dude. Apple imitated and you fell for it. You've been told now crawl away with some dignity.
I'm not sure it's really turning into something terrible, we've just got some trolls running around this week. See tysonjennings remarkably racist, entirely undefended (and indefensible) post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4262432
Or his post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4182402) where he rails against someone's anti-Google stance, while later taking on a similar (and perhaps more harsh) anti-Apple stance.
The ease of seeing a users comment history makes finding trolls so much faster. Now I just need a killfile...
Because warmed-over bro-backslapping Sailerisms sure don't stink of herd mentality, right? Aren't you late for your mutual-reinforcement MRA support meeting?
You disagree with my statements now you're my own personal stalker? Resorting to some kind of mob mentality group think to rally support when rhetorical skills fail you is...weak. I can't help but notice that at least at this moment this is your only comment on this story so you don't even care about the subject at hand you just wanted to get a jibe in against me. You don't need a "killfile", you need help.
Sure it is if those browsers are cross-platform. I doubt the Windows 8 APIs are cross platform.