Google Plus Thread on My Siri Piece Yesterday

Chris Lacy, who started the thread, has valid complaints about some of Apple’s worst bugs in recent months. But I don’t think any of them refute my observation that it feels no longer true that “Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at web services”. Google is getting better at design — Material Design is the best thing that’s ever happened on Android design-wise. But it’s not that great. And I truly believe there’s a strong case to be made that Apple is getting better at web services at a pace equivalent to Google’s improvements in design.

Most of the commenters, though, seem to jump to the conclusion that I’m positing that Apple has caught up to Google in web services. I try not to roll my eyes at accusations that I’m an “Apple apologist”, but I read this thread, and re-read what I wrote yesterday, and it’s hard not to.

(And just to toss this out there: I’d say iCloud Drive is another sign that Apple is getting better at web services. It works great for me, and I don’t see many complaints about it. (Here’s one, though.) Would you have believed it if you were told two or three years ago that Apple would roll out a Dropbox-like cross-platform feature in iCloud and that it would pretty much “just work” right from the get-go?)

★ Wednesday, 14 January 2015