Google killed Wave last week and it highlighted for me the difference in how Google innovates versus Apple.
Both companies/cults are populated with very bright folks, but with hugely different views of the world. Google are engineers and very feature focussed whereas Apple takes more of a humanist design thinker approach. For Apple it’s more about finding the perfect user experience.
Did Google Wave have a lot of cool features? Sure, but were they intuitive or did you need a manual to figure out what it could do for you? I’m still a big fan of Google – gmail is brilliant. But they do expect their users to engineer the features and build them into something usable. For some this customization is powerful. For others they just want to be delighted when they open up their present. Apple creates magic and Google creates cool functionality.
Two very different approaches that are both spectacularly successful. Clearly there is a place for both types of innovation in a category.
