Mobile Future: Want Apple Way Or Google Wild Ride?Mobile Future: Want Apple Way Or Google Wild Ride?

Perhaps we've come to expect far too much from these companies. After listening to the keynote, several people were excited about iOS 5 and underwhelmed by Lion. At first, I was too, but upon further reflection, while Lion isn't a revolution in operating systems, there are some very exciting new user experience advances. Since when did it become humdrum for Apple to completely increment an OS paradigm that is already original?

Multi-touch gestures from the track pad, a messaging client that is more information manager than email, Mission Control for quickly getting at any application or task with a swipe and a click, Airdrop for shipping files without risky USB keys, and a Resume function that lets an application pick up where the user left off. What other operating system can do all of this? It isn't life-altering, but it is innovative and it's better.

Google is up to its own tricks. This week we got our hands on Google's Chromebook, a product that ships next week, but has been in mass beta for a year. There are skeptics who can't believe the manufacturers are charging more money for the Chromebook ($499) than you'd pay for a more powerful NetBook; and others who remind us that thin clients have been around for many years. All true. But nobody's quite done it this way, and Google is more than willing to be first in an uncertain environment. This is its "post PC" world vision. I'm not quite ready to throw away my PC, but I'm anxious to try the Chromebook, and hopeful that it catches on.

Apple sees a world in which a file system doesn't really exist, and is managed in a cloud; it is a world that simply works, without consumers having to think. Yes, that's because Apple controls every point of distribution, from device to OS to data and applications. Its gleaming data center in North Carolina becomes device control central, iCloud headquarters. In Apple's post-PC world, the PC ceases to be the hub, replaced by iCloud.

Google sees a world in which its mobile ecosystem is the hub for other mobile doo-dads--refrigerators and microwaves and, frankly, any tangible object that deserves to be instrumented and probed. Everything will have a location, everything is capable of being tracked and operated digitally, and the data about all of that will be fed into the Google catalog, to be searched and probed and analyzed (and accompanied by an ad.) Order from the chaos.

Apple sees itself as a personal experience company. Google sees itself as the hub of all information. For Apple, the cloud is an offering or a service. For Google, it is simply a means to another end. Google gives away product after product at its developer conferences and sometimes to interested end users; another means to an end. Apple gives developers a swell jacket, never a product.

Apple and Google may have made the prognostication business difficult, but by carving out opposing strategies the way they have, they've actually made the choice pretty simple. Either you want it to all to just work, but Apple's way, on Apple's timetable; or you're willing to go along with Google for an incredibly interesting but unpredictable ride.

Fritz Nelson is the editorial director for information and the Executive Producer of TechWebTV. Fritz writes about startups and established companies alike, but likes to exploit multiple forms of media into his writing.

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