John McLaughlin, Web Designer, Lanarkshire, Scotland

So Microsoft has been copying Google’s search results. Should we be surprised? After all they’ve been trying to copy everything Apple’s been doing for the last 20 or so years.

What makes it interesting this time though is that rather than copying Apple, they’ve trained their photocopiers onto Google and have been using Google’s search results to improve  their own competing search engine, Bing. Now Google, which never tires of proclaiming the goodness of all that is ‘open’, is going mental. Really.

Google has done nothing but steal other companies ideas since it started, that’s old news (Overture, Yahoo! etc…) and recently has been attempting to clone Apple’s iPhone to make it’s own competing platform, Android, the codebase of which it basically stole from Sun and rewrote just enough to avoid a lawsuit (which hasn’t worked and it is currently being taken through the courts by Sun’s new owners).

Google constantly harps on about ‘openness’ while criticising Apple for being ‘closed’ all the while stealing almost every good idea the company has. It would appear that Google wants it both ways, when it suits it to be open, it’s open. When it suits it to be closed, as is the situation with its own prized search algorithm, it’s very, very closed.

Why is this hypocrisy never highlighted in media? I read in the press today that Microsoft has being caught stealing, but never the other way around. Google’s plan for a smartphone before Apple unveiled the iPhone was exactly like the Blackberry and Windows phones of the day. No touchscreen and a million buttons. As soon as they saw the iPhone they copied it almost exactly, even down to most of the icon designs. Hardly a word of criticism just lots of crap about how good ‘openness’ is.

It will be interesting to see how this story develops and if Google is finally going to be called out for its ‘closed is evil except when is suits us’ stance. I can see the wheels slowly coming off the Android bandwagon. Fragmentation is causing a lot of problems and its success, if you can call it that, is really down to the coalition of the losers. Namely, the handset manufacturers like Motorola, HTC, LG etc… who don’t have an operating system of their own but still need to sell smartphones as you can’t make money on cheap feature phones anymore.

Sure, Google makes money from searches made on Android phones but as they are, ahem, open, there’s nothing to stop manufacturers changing the default search engine away from Google as some have already started to do. In that case Google does not make a single penny on that phone sale (Microsoft and maybe Yahoo will though…) but it still paid to develop the operating system. In contrast Apple makes over $400 on every iPhone sale. This story has a long way to go.

Mac sales up by 28% to 4.1 million and iPad shifts 7.3 million units over last quarter. iPhone sales up 86% over same quarter last year.
Blockbuster quarter from Apple. I wish I’d bought shares a few years ago when they were in the gutter…

As always Horace Dediu nails it. Tim Cook sounds like he’s listened carefully and totally gets it.

Absolute nonsense piece in The Guardian asking if the iPhone is about to lose its mojo. I’m surprised how many people still read newspapers when they serve up piles of tosh like this. The Guardian is actually my favourite paper but this is one of the laziest and most one-sided pieces of journalism I’ve seen for a while.

There’s ample evidence available which shows that Verizon was desperate to get hold of the iPhone as its been struggling to attract new subscribers, something that AT&T has been doing at a much faster rate thanks to iPhone (and despite its much talked about inferior network quality).

The real story here should be whether Android can keep its momentum going now that the iPhone is available on both big networks, but the author prefers to say that the Verizon launch is too late to make a difference, despite the fact that smartphones only count for about a quarter of current US phone sales, leaving three quarters of the market still to play for.

You often just take what you read in the papers as being true, yet whenever they cover something that you have some knowledge of yourself you often see errors everywhere and this piece is no different. Poorly researched sensationalist rubbish that should have no place in a serious newspaper.

Make it better from Sebastianbap on Vimeo.

Really clever and subtle use of type and animation.Lovely.

It’s just been announced that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is taking another leave of absence due to poor health. He states in the press release issued by Apple that he hopes to return and will continue to be involved in major strategic decisions for the company.

Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 and his frail appearance has continued to cast doubt on his long term future at the company. Credited for masterminding one of the biggest turnarounds in business history, Jobs is seen as being crucial to Apple maintaining its position as the world’s most dynamic and valuable tech company.

His reputation as an innovator and a perfectionist and his ability to spot future trends have resulted in some of the most successful tech products of the past decade, and fears that Apple will not have the same knack of launching hit product after hit product without Jobs have sent shares in the company tumbling whenever concerns regarding his health have been raised.

As the news of Jobs latest leave of absence spreads, shareholders are preparing to take a battering with many expecting shares to drop from $348 to as low as $250 when trading reopens tomorrow.

What’s going on at Mercedes-Benz these days? The cars just seem to be getting uglier and uglier.

The company is about to launch the new CLS-Class (below) and I have to say that I think it’s one of the most heavy handed and clumsily detailed cars launched in a long time.

The last CLS was seen as M-B’s attempt at ‘doing a Jaguar’ and its sleek, low-slung shape helped make it a huge hit for the company.

The new CLS however has to be one of the most overstyled cars I’ve seen in many a year, and the massive swage line which runs along the side and into the huge rear wheelarch bulge is truly horrific. The effect is so overpowering that you hardly notice the giant slab of grille on the front of the CLS, which has more lines and creases on it than Dot Cotton’s face.

It’s a shame though as the main shape and stance of the design is nice and modern, but the detailing really leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Comparing this to the new Jaguar XJ (a design which is challenging in it’s own way) really is like night and day. The big Jag is classy and sleek with none of the clumsy and far too aggressive flourishes that blight the Mercedes. Most new BMW’s are no better either, with the 5 Series GT in particular being eye-poppingly ugly.

Blackberry maker RIM is set to manufacture 1 million of its new Playbook tablets this quarter alone. The Playbook looks to be the first proper competitor to the iPad in what looks set to be a busy year on the tablet front.

Although the Sumsung Galaxy Tab has been out for a couple of months, it’s running version 2.2 of Android which makes it effectively little more than a 7″ Android phone. The Playbook by contrast runs the QNX operating system which RIM purchased last year to run its next generation devices as the current Blackberry OS is at the end of the road, completely outclassed by Android and iOS.

Early reports about the Playbook are very complimentary, its powerful dual core Tegra 2 processor appears to offer plenty of performance, quick web browsing and impressive multitasking. The main concern would appear to be question marks over battery life with some reports claiming 3 – 5 hours compared to the iPad’s 10+.

People with memories as long as mine will probably remember the iconic John Player Special black and gold Lotus Formula One cars from the 70′s and 80′s. The cars raced in the distinctive JPS colours from 1972 until 1986, and are remembered as some of the most attractive cars ever seen in Formula One.

Group Lotus, now back in F1, has reinstated the black and gold livery for the 2011 season. There are plenty of doubts though as to how competitive the 2011 cars Lotus Renault cars are likely to be.

Google has just thrown a huge spanner into the issue of web standards support with the news that it’s going to remove support for H.264 video in it’s popular Chrome browser, a major blow to the proposed HTML5 standard.

The company intends to replace H.264 support with the multimedia container format WebM, which is unsupported by most current browsers as well as offering inferior video quality.

Another major stumbling block is that unlike H.264, WebM does not offer hardware support, meaning that all decoding of video will have to be done in software. This is extremely costly in terms of efficiency and is the main reason why Flash video, which also lacks hardware support, uses so much device computing power and runs so poorly on mobile devices.

It certainly seems like a crazy move from Google and it will certainly be interesting to see if Google will remove H.264 support from Chrome within Android, and whether H.264 support will be removed from the Google owned YouTube.