MobDig Reader Comment of the Week

From time to time I can’t think of anything to write about. Fortunately, we have readers who comment (from time to time). Among those readers is the infamous who dis?!, our resident Apple troll whose mission it seems is to incite flame wars. Because of his relentlessness in posting, his signature insults and clues in his writing style I have been trying to determine his identity, suspicious that he is an insider, either an alter ego of a frequent reader or even a writer — or even an editor in chief. According to the IP addresses stapled to his posts he is a frequent traveler of Eastern Europe. Alternatively, he is David K using anonymous proxies to mess with my head — but David K doesn’t write this good. Regardless of his identity he raises intriguing points, particularly in this comment. So, I leave you with who dis?!’s take on Microsoft, Google and Apple, in response to Dr. Jim’s piece on Android and Bing, as this week’s Mobility Digest Comment of the Week.

As someone who’s neither Google nor Microsoft, and quite happily that way, let me offer you my take on those two troublemakers. I’mma break it down for you metaphor style; pay attention.

Now picture a forest. Let’s call it the Innovation Forest.

Camp Google has a bunch of scouts slicing their way through that forest in all sorts of directions, trailblazing (some of those trailblazers losing reception on their walkie talkies when discussing wardriving protocols), leaving chalk marks in the trees of sweetness, but not stopping for too long at those trees to tap into them to extract the sap and refine it further.

Team Microsoft, with both recon and construction battalions, watches those Google trailblazers, follows them with night vision binoculars from a distance, taking note of which of those chalked trees have the richest sap in them. Then they call back to base with the GPS coordinates of the best trails Camp Google found and the construction battalion rolls in with their heavy machinery, the first line clearing out the trees for further sap refinement followed by steamrollers and finally the road paving squad.

Microsoft’s approach takes more time of course and they don’t deserve any trophies for inventiveness but when they open up those roads there aren’t too many beta signs on them and during that construction period they decorate things to add some sizzle and glitter that Google forgot about when they moved onto the Google Ride and the Google Web Accelerator trees.

Now Apple’s in another forest altogether. The forest has no name, for security reasons. The first thing they do is build a huge wall, Berlin style, around the entire forest; then their troops, consisting of men from West Point, MIT and some engineering university, do both the secret trailblazing and the top secret sap refinement and don’t emerge from that forest, not even to blog, until they’ve got the perfect, one antenna issue notwithstanding, product.

Jackasses.

Thanks for the insight who dis?! and please keep it coming.

Doug Simmons