Apple vs Google vs Microsoft: living across three technology universes
There have always been a couple different technology camps that have been out there. Primarily it’s been Microsoft and Apple, but a third player is getting more and more involved and that’s Google. It’s interesting to me to see how these three different companies are either interacting with one another or not interacting with one another at all, and just the level of interaction that’s happening. Now mind you there are a few different ways of going about things. I understand that, but one of the things that’s becoming more of a challenge for someone like me who loves technology is figuring out which camp should I be in, and can I be in multiple camps at the same time?
The reason why I bring this up is because I’m noticing that technology is changing and it’s changing at different rates in each one of these three camps. For instance, Microsoft recently did an announcement for their Xbox One product. It’s supposed to be the end-all, be-all television media center. It’s video games. It’s TV. It’s movies. It’s everything. Nobody can beat Microsoft when it comes to the Xbox, although the PlayStation 4 and that sort of thing. You have Apple who has Apple TV and AirPlay which allows you to use any of the Apple devices to connect via AirPlay and have it be displayed on your big screen in your living room. But Microsoft is the dominating force for video games in the living room, and now they’re trying to take that device and add to it by doing more television shows, more movies, live TV, that sort of thing; and so for me, you know, I use Microsoft products at work. I use Apple products at work, and for the most part they are interchangeable.
You can use Apple’s mail app for email with your Exchange server also with Gmail’s servers, and you can use Microsoft Office and Outlook for mail and such; but then you start getting into some niche markets things like Google Glass for instance where to get the full feature set that you would want from that device pretty much requires you to have an Android phone. Now mind you, you can get away with it by having all the text messages using it or not being able to do navigation at least at the time of this writing, but to get the full experience you should use an Android phone with it from what I’ve gathered. But there are other products too so you have people who really like Android tablets, but then they use an iPhone. These types of people are spending way more money than they should on applications because on the iPhone at least, if you buy an app for one device you can use them on any of your other Apple devices. On Android I’d imagine it’s pretty close to the same way, but if you’re someone who uses an Android phone and an iPad, or an Android tablet and an iPhone, it gets pretty costly, and these two don’t interact with one another.
To get an Android tablet to work with Airplay it may work with some hacking or something, but out of the box it doesn’t work. And being able to have your iPhone push out to a Google TV device may need the same type of hacking just to get it to work. So my question is here is how does someone live in multiple camps? How do you get your Xbox, your Apple TV, and so on to work together? You end up with like forty different things attached to your television or you’re carrying duplicate devices on your person. How does somebody pick the technology that they like, and then be able to pick the various technologies that are out there that will work for you without having to make it really hard for yourself in dealing with interoperability? Leave me some comments below and I’d love to hear what you do to be able to manage multiple devices and essentially keep up with the digital Joneses.
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