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.

Make it better from Sebastianbap on Vimeo.

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

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.