The Open Road

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a new job: overseeing the company's entertainment and mobile businesses in the wake of high-profile executive departures. It's not the first time Ballmer has taken the reins of struggling business units, having managed the Windows and Internet search businesses directly at different times, but arguably Microsoft doesn't need new management.

It needs new brands. Especially in mobile.

Microsoft has sought to extend its Windows brand to a diverse array of technology, from SharePoint to Windows Phone. Windows is a powerful brand. But it's also a brand that screams "20th century."

And while it's a safe and predictable brand for enterprise IT, more of the world is being driven by consumer spending, including the normally enterprise-friendly PC market. Windows isn't a brand that speaks to consumers.

It's certainly not a brand that tells the world Microsoft has something revolutionary to say about mobile.

For good examples of consumer branding, Microsoft could look to its peers Apple and Google. Neither one of these market leaders dresses up their mobile efforts in old brands. Apple didn't try to brand its iPhone the "OS X iPhone." Apple understands that the consumer demographic is focused on the device, not its operating system.

Google, for its part, does heavily brand Android, but it doesn't make a fetish of tying that brand back to Google and allows device manufacturers, wireless carriers, and others to tweak the software to fit their needs, obscuring or even eliminating the branding altogether. Not only that, but Google even competes with its own Android brand with Chrome OS.

Only Microsoft seems determined to force an out-of-date operating system brand onto the future. It's not working.

Ballmer tries to paint the executive departures and lack of market leadership in a positive light in his e-mail to Microsoft employees, but the company seems incapable of innovation in the critical mobile industry, and it starts with its inability to give up the Windows brand.

J. Allard, Microsoft's now departing chief experience officer, disagrees:

We're the only high-tech company with the track record and self-confidence to reinvent ourselves as we have. If you want to change the world with technology, this is still the best tribe out there.

Fine words to say as one is leaving his job. Allard will stay on as an adviser to Ballmer on "a specific set of projects," according to the company.

Microsoft knows how to rebrand. Look at Bing, which has been gaining market share since it distanced itself from Microsoft's more traditional branding. The Xbox, too, has been a hit, in part because of its emphasis on "Xbox," not "Microsoft."

Microsoft is a strong company that makes great technology. But its branding is somewhat stale. To get an edge in mobile, the company should dump "Windows" and embrace something edgier. Something more like Bing.

Something strange happened last week at Google I/O, Google's big developer event. Google may have attained cult status. There was an energy in the halls normally reserved for Apple events like WWDC, as 5,000 attendees chattered about Google TV, Android, WebM, and more.

Google is ascendant, and it may take the fanboys with it.

Android Froyo

(Credit: Google)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may believe there's "not a chance" that Google is leapfrogging Apple, and assures the faithful that "[they] won't be disappointed" at WWDC, but worrisome signs abound for the iconic technology company.

The media, for one thing, is jumping on the Android bandwagon, and not the normal suspects. CNET's Stephen Shankland actually called himself an Android fanboy, and Fake Steve Jobs (Dan Lyons) went so far as to suggest that Apple is now playing catch-up:

I'm assuming that Apple could have done [tethering, streaming music to one's phone, etc.] already, but chose not to. Who knows why? Maybe they want to keep people locked into their old way of doing things. Or maybe because they were a market leader with no real competition and just got lazy.

And, yes, while Apple might one day match what Google just introduced, the point is this: Apple now is chasing Google.

Based on the cool things Google revealed at I/O including, but not limited to Froyo, the updated version of Android, ZDNet's Garett Rogers speculates that: "If Apple doesn't do something interesting [at WWDC]...Google is going to...dominate the mobile space."

Maybe, or maybe that's just fanboy talk.

Left out of this zero-sum fanboy round-up is mention of Microsoft. Google is focused on beating Apple. Apple is focused on being Apple. No one is too bothered about Microsoft, as Apple advocate John Gruber highlights:

The big loser this week...was Microsoft. They're simply not even part of the game...They've got nothing. No interesting devices, weak sales, and a shrinking user base. Microsoft's irrelevance is taken for granted.

Google's competitive focus on the iPhone at I/O was intense and scathing. But it's Microsoft's lunch they're eating. Apple's and RIM's game is selling the integrated whole--their own devices, running their own software. Google is playing Microsoft's game--licensing a platform to many device makers.

The big problem for Microsoft is not that there isn't, in theory, room for more than one licensed mobile platform, but rather that Microsoft's model hinges upon monopoly-sized market share.

Maybe there's room for two clubs, just as there always has been. The Apple club and the "everyone else" club. That second club has been Microsoft's domain for years, but it appears to be Google's to lose going forward.

To do so, Google is going to have to figure out how to manage Android fragmentation, how to merge its maturing Android vision with a still confused message on ChromeOS, and more.

Oh, and it should also properly feed fanboys with adequate bandwidth. The Wi-Fi at I/O was so bad that the only viable way to spread the Android gospel was to leave the conference...and use the free (and plentiful) Wi-Fi at the Apple store down the street.

Mozilla's Firefox was born during a time when Microsoft's Internet Explorer had grown so fat and lazy that hacking off a massive chunk of its market share was almost a moral duty, one with a built-in fan club. "Anything but IE" was the mantra for some, and Mozilla delivered with aplomb.

Rediscover the Web...with Chrome?

That was then, this is now, and "now" is bound to be much, much harder.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes correctly notes that "the five years ahead of Mozilla will be far tougher than the five years that's behind the company." The reason? Mozilla is no longer the white knight riding to users' defense.

Or, rather, it's not the only one.

Google Chrome is much better funded by a company with a serious financial interest in seeing it succeed. Unlike Microsoft, which saw IE development as an afterthought or necessary evil, the browser is Google's lifeblood. It can afford to invest massive resources into making an innovative, lightning-fast browser. And it is, as the development of Chrome 6 shows.

That open-source community that made Firefox such an impressive experience? It's now equally enamored of Google Chrome, or getting there. Chrome matches Firefox's open-source bonafides, and raises the bar with an expansive view of what the browser can and should do. That's red meat for the open-source crowd, and it doesn't bode well for the more conservative Mozilla.

Indeed, this is essentially the argument that Firefox co-founder Blake Ross makes on Quora, which has sparked a reexamination of Mozilla's chances:

"I think the Mozilla Organization has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly," Ross wrote.

What to do? Glyn Moody argues that Mozilla may need to fork the Firefox project, releasing a lighter-weight competitor to IE9, Chrome, and Firefox. That's certainly a valid option.

But I believe Mozilla needs something even more fundamental, one made easier by John Lilly's imminent departure as Mozilla CEO.

I'm a huge Lilly fan, and have been an advocate of both Mozilla and its foundation approach to development over the years. I think both were appropriate for the past 5 to 10 years of Firefox's development.

But Mozilla needs a harder edge to it now, one that Lilly could have provided had he opted to stay. The browser is no longer simply a tool for browsing soccer scores or checking on the latest pie recipes. It's ground zero for the future of the Web and, indeed, the future of computing. Period.

The table stakes for competing in such a world are much higher than when Mozilla first raised its "and liberty and justice for all" call to arms. That's no longer sufficient. Users won't adopt Firefox because of high-minded slogans. They're going to opt for the browser that works best and is easiest to obtain. Google has distribution. Microsoft has distribution. Mozilla's download page...? It's not enough.

This is particularly true in a world where mobile is increasingly setting the pace and, as TechCrunch posits, Google Android gives it an unfair advantage over Mozilla's steadfast Switzerland approach. This isn't helped by the fact that more mobile browser development is happening around WebKit, which Android and others use, than Mozilla's Gecko engine.

Android claims nearly 10 percent of the global smartphone market, according to new Gartner data, and claims 46 percent of U.S. mobile ad requests.

How is Mozilla going to compete with that?

For starters, it must see itself as a competitor, not as some altruistic provider of Web browsers to benefit humanity. It needs teeth, even as it maintains the ideals of the open Web. (Guess what? Google has those same ideals.)

In its search for a new CEO, Mozilla should be looking for someone more like Marc Benioff and less like Gandhi. Much of its former competitive advantage--community, open source--is increasingly shared by Google, a competitor with its entire business at stake.

Indeed, perhaps Google offers clues as to the right model for how Mozilla should view itself and compete.

In an attempt to copycat Apple's hardware-plus-software vertical approach to the mobile market, the Linux industry is fragmenting fast and risks undermining its best chance for beating the iPhone.

The mobile Linux market has always had more variants/distributions than sense, ranging from Google Android to LiMo to Moblin (now MeeGo) to Bada to WebOS to...you name it. Whereas Linux has been a rallying force in the enterprise server market, with diverse competitors and partners collaborating on a common code base to save costs and boost innovation, in the mobile market Linux has tended toward entropy.

Such entropy is about to get worse, even as signs abound that things should be improving. First, Hewlett-Packard announced its acquisition of Palm to "double down on WebOS" development and thereby "compete aggressively in the market with Apple and Google."

Next, rumors are swirling that Motorola has bought Azingo, another mobile Linux vendor. Motorola has been a big proponent of LiMo, an attempt to corral different vendors around a common mobile Linux code base, and has also been a primary distributor of Android.

If Motorola acquires Azingo, will this end? Some speculate that Azingo is merely a way to develop an Android alternative for the China market, but this doesn't answer the question of fragmentation that such a move raises.

Meanwhile, Intel and Nokia have fused together their Moblin and Maemo projects under the MeeGo brand, while Samsung backs Bada and Google stands atop the heap with Android.

If only they could all get together on this and focus on a common Linux foundation, then compete on top of it with their different user environments, as I presented at the CELF Embedded Linux Conference 2010 in San Francisco a month ago:

A partial solution to a fragmented mobile Linux market?

(Credit: Matt Asay)

Again, this is now the norm for Linux servers, with companies as diverse as Red Hat, Canonical, Texas Instruments, Google, Intel, IBM, Oracle, etc. all working furiously to build a great core and then competing in the packaging, hardware, etc. that surrounds it.

But this isn't what we're getting in mobile Linux. In mobile we have a resurrection of the failed Unix wars, with competing vendors owning their own operating systems. Google Android is not compatible with MeeGo...or Azingo...or LiMo...or Bada...or...you get the point.

It's possible that the fragmentation will resolve itself. Android, according to new data from NPD, has just surpassed the iPhone in quarterly unit shipments:

(Credit: ZDNet/NPD)

Android may become the de facto mobile Linux out of sheer dominance.

But there's still a growing perception that to compete with Apple one must own the OS, which may push competing vendors to buy rival Linux distributions rather than collaborate. Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha said as much on Motorola's first-quarter earnings call:

I've always felt that owning your OS is important, provided you have an ecosystem, you have all the services and you have an ability and the scale to execute on keeping that OS at the leading edge. And I continue to believe that at some point, if we have all of those attributes, that owning our own OS will be a very important thing.

It's understandable why Apple's competitors would want to compete with Apple on its own terms. It's also foolish. To beat Apple, the industry needs to collaborate, even as it has done in servers to fix the Unix mess and meet the growing Microsoft Windows threat. Buying an OS is not the solution.

It may well be the problem.

Google attracts an ever-growing horde of Android-loving developers. But can Google's developer growth outpace Apple's?

It's not clear, especially as the developer battle spans both client and cloud.

I'm a big fan of Google's open-source approach, but there are signs that Apple's control-all-delete-competitors approach is working and will continue to work. That is unless, of course, Google can effectively counter consumer lust for Apple gadgets with compelling cloud services that tie to a broader range of devices.

Google, while making a lot of progress with Android, has a long road ahead of it. However much Apple may jerk around its developer base--and it does--Apple also provides a consistent, coherent developer story: write for the iPhone or iPad...or both. As Bloomberg BusinessWeek writes:

In order to develop products just as he wants them, [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs has shown a willingness to do more than his rivals. PC makers such as Dell and Hewlett-Packard are powered by Intel and run Windows by Microsoft; neither has shown interest in the costly job of building unique operating systems or designing its own chips. Apple does both. Microsoft and Google have only recently decided to design their own mobile devices, and in most cases they're purchasing "white label" hardware from other manufacturers and branding it as their own. The iPad's 10-hour battery life is a result of Apple's ablity to have its chip, software, and industrial designers work together to limit unneeded power use.

All this eases the tech-buying public down the path toward Apple; iPhone's smartphone market share is currently 25.4 percent, according to ComScore. And as long as the company exerts a gravitational pull on consumers--and manages to balance the rewards to developers with pushing them around--the apps will just keep coming.

Google, for its part, is both helped and hurt by its broad-based approach to the market. Its Android OS powers a proliferating array of devices, which is good. But it's also bad in the sense that developers have to write applications to run on different versions of Android and on different devices.

Mark Sigal writes that the "best case for Google with Android is that mobile technology and mobile platforms become sufficiently commoditized for its device OEM-centric, horizontal model to tip the balance in its favor."

We're everywhere. That's good, right?

(Credit: Google)

This isn't happening in the short term. As such, for the immediate future, developers want to write once and have consumers run their applications everywhere. For now, this is easier to accomplish with the iPhone than Android.

Apple, in other words, is to mobile what Microsoft was to the desktop. Given that "mobile is the new desktop," as Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady posits, this means Apple could dominate computing for decades to come, unless something changes, and soon.

But there's still hope for Google (and others). Lots of hope. Mobile is critical, yes, but it's only half the story, something that Charlie Stross points out:

If you're using [a mobile device] in 2015, my bet is that you won't bother to have home broadband; you'll just have data on demand wherever you are....[Y]ou won't have a "computer" in the current sense of the word. You'll just be surrounded by a swarm of devices that give you access to your data whenever and however you need it.

This is why there's a stench of panic hanging over Silicon Valley. This is why Apple [has] turned into paranoid security Nazis, why HP [has] just ditched Microsoft from a forthcoming major platform and splurged a billion-plus on buying up a near-failure; it's why everyone is terrified of Google:

The PC revolution is almost coming to an end, and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for surviving the aftermath.

Devices, in other words, are only part of the story. The cloud is arguably much more important.

Apple's compelling developer story ties the device directly to the cloud. As Jim Stogdill articulates, "[Apple's device strength] leads to market presence, and then the market presence makes for stronger monetization opportunities in the device-hosted channel [i.e., App Store/cloud services]."

Google, by contrast, has a more open approach. The stakes for winning, as Tim O'Reilly recently noted, are huge:

[I]t is becoming increasingly clear that the Internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment.

The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards.

There is no "tie goes to the winner" in this epic battle, because it's largely a winner-takes-all race, just as the desktop was before it. Apple has the lead, because it delivers such impressive hardware. Google needs to strengthen its Android hand with a cloud story that more directly ties into its device story.

Google isn't alone in this, which is why it would be nice to see the everyone-but-Apple camp consolidate around a common platform: Linux. (OK, so Microsoft isn't likely to do this, but it will eventually learn that flogging the dead Windows Mobile horse is a losing strategy.)

Android is not Linux: it is a developer platform that rides on top of Linux. Other initiatives, from MeeGo to LinMo are competing to be the dominant Linux platform for mobile, but no Linux player (including Google) fully appreciates and caters to consumers as much as Apple does.

To beat Google, Apple needs more robust cloud services. To beat Apple, Google (and the Linux crowd, generally) needs a simpler consumer interface with a more consistent developer message.

Game on.

The more you roll the dice, according to the law of large numbers theorem, the more likely you are to hit an expected average of 3.5.

And according to Google VP Andy Rubin, the more the search giant blankets the industry with competing Android-droid based mobile handsets, the more likely Google is to hit its expected value of market dominance over Apple's iPhone.

"It's a numbers game," Rubin said. And the numbers look increasingly rosy for Android.

Consider AdMob's new report (PDF), which pegs Android as accounting for 25 percent of mobile ad requests from smartphones globally and for a whopping 46 percent in the U.S.

(Credit: AdMob)

Consider also that Android now has 50,000 applications going for it--a population that is growing at a frenetic pace:

(Credit: AndroLib.com)

Importantly, unlike Apple, Google isn't dependent on a single device for its growth: there are currently 34 Android devices from 12 manufacturers--only one of which comes from Google itself. This is a strength for Google. Its own Nexus One sales are reportedly underwhelming, but Google is playing its odds, as Rubin notes:

"When you have multiple OEMs building multiple products in multiple product categories, it's just a matter of time" before sales of Android phones exceed the sales of proprietary systems like Apple's and RIM's...."I don't know when it might be, but I'm confident it will happen. Open usually wins."

Except, perhaps, if open is sued. Apple has already taken a shot over Android's bow by suing HTC, Google's partner on the Nexus One. Now Microsoft is jumping into the fray, with sources close to the company hinting that Android violates Microsoft's patents.

Such legal maneuvering suggests Google is winning, and winning in a market that is absolutely huge (Morgan Stanley PDF). Apple and Microsoft wouldn't be firing shots if they didn't see a clear and present danger to their businesses.

For its part, Apple still outpaces Android, but Apple increasingly is playing copycat to Google's developer story. Google has big numbers increasingly in its favor, as well as an open approach to developers and partners (like Adobe Systems) that make it appealing to prospective buyers...

...and a threat to existing competitors.

Is Apple joining the "Don't be evil" brigade?

I can't help but ask after reading Apple's attack on Adobe's Flash for being "closed and proprietary," while dressing itself up as the openness prom queen because of its support for HTML5, JavaScript, and other industry standards.

Flash may be closed and proprietary, but Apple is hardly the patron saint of openness. Nor has it ever seemed to care much about pretending to be anything other than religiously devoted to a beautiful consumer experience, regardless of open standards, open source, open anything.

What has changed? Developers. Lots of them.

Apple is seeing the "light of openness" now that it increasingly must cater to external developers. For years Apple was able to live within its shell, serving a narrow world of devoted consumers and a very limited circle of developers.

No more. With the iPhone, Apple hit the developer mainstream, and has had some growing pains getting comfortable with that audience, most recently with its increasingly restrictive developer agreement.

Apple has a tough sell for developers over the long term, particularly as it faces open alternatives in its various markets, including Google Android. Developers are attracted to the iPhone's sales volume, but the trajectory of the company may make it increasingly harder to work with the company, a proprietary trajectory ZDNet's Tom Foremski describes well:

Since the introduction of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, Apple is becoming less and less open, is using fewer standard components and chips, and far fewer Internet technologies common to Mac/PC desktop and laptop systems.

The iPhone and iPad, for example, don't support common Internet platforms such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. That means you cannot watch streaming video from Hulu, or Netflix.

And while iPhone chips are available from other manufacturers, the iPad runs only on the A4 processor--an Apple designed chip that no one else can buy.

This was OK when Apple was the most open smartphone game in town (RIM's BlackBerry was hardly a paragon of openness), but it's a tough sell with Google on the scene. Google Android, for all its problems and criticisms, has successfully attracted a host of applications recently through a more open approach, jumping from 6,000 to 25,000 applications in 2010 alone.

Apple may be its own best friend...and worst enemy.

Or, as Redmonk analyst James Governor puts it, "[The] company doing [the] most to grow the Android app base is Apple. The new terms of service are AWESOME for the Android team...."

It's not that Apple needs to open everything up to compete. But it does need to present a more credible argument than random smears against competitors for being proprietary. After all, let's be clear: None of these companies is open. Or closed. Not Apple. Not Adobe. Not Google. Each employs a hybrid approach, as CNET's Stephen Shankland points out. Each includes plenty of openness, and plenty of "closed and proprietary" technology and business practices.

That's the world we live in.

That's why, as Shankland writes, we (and particularly developers) should be wary of any vendor bearing gifts of openness:

In general, be very cautious when you hear any computing company wrapping itself in the flag of openness as it promotes its products. There are different kinds--open interfaces, open source, and open standards, for example.

Apple's reality distortion field afflicts us all at some point: it just makes beautiful technology. But developers aren't so easily swayed, including Apple's pot-calling-the-kettle-black moment with Adobe. Some won't care. Others, like Mozilla's Chris Blizzard, will.

Apple needs to figure out its developer story, one complicated by Google's surge into the smartphone market. I doubt we'll see Steve Jobs sweating to the Steve Ballmer beat, but Apple does need to up the openness quotient in its developer outreach, and soon.

Even as Google and other technology companies bet big on mobile computing, open-source developers seem to be fixated with "desktop" and server environments. If the future is mobile, why isn't this where open-source developers are focusing?

To be fair, some are. There are a few open-source applications for the iPhone, including WordPress and Doom Classic, and others like Shelves for Google's Android. But these are the exceptions, not the rule.

And, yes, we have important open-source platform projects like Android, Funambol, etc., but there are relatively few, particularly in the area of applications.

This is a bit disconcerting given statements like Google CEO Eric Schmidt's: "The answer should always be mobile first." If Google, Apple, etc., see mobile as their first priority, can open source afford to put mobile last?

A search for "mobile" on the popular open-source code repository Sourceforge.net, for example, returns 2,432 projects. That sounds like a lot, until you remember that there are 180,000-plus projects hosted on Sourceforge, most of them for "desktop" and server environments.

Google Code has others, but, again, it's a fraction of the total number of projects.

Perhaps it's a matter of open-source developers focusing on broad, horizontal markets with a common, x86 chip architecture. The mobile world has been fragmented for so long that even leading open-source organizations like Mozilla have historically struggled to know where to invest their mobile engineering resources. (Firefox originally appeared on Nokia's Maemo platform, moved to Windows Mobile, and is in early development for Android.)

Guess what? Proprietary software developers have the same challenge, and it's not stopping them from plowing ahead.

Or perhaps there simply aren't enough open-source developers with interest and aptitude in mobile? I find this hard to believe. Open source works for operating systems, for example, because every open-source developer needs them. Similarly, I'm willing to bet every open-source developer carries a phone and many of them would have both the propensity and ability to hack them.

Unless the open-source world wants to play catch-up to proprietary platforms and applications again as it did on the 'desktop' and server, then open-source developers need to start focusing on mobile in the same way Google and others are. Rabidly. Intensively. Now.

So let's do it. The fragmented mobile world is actually a perfect environment for open-source development, as I've written before. With great platforms like iPhone and particularly Android available, there really is no good excuse for continuing to ignore the mobile opportunity.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is betting on a mobile, cloud-based future and is winning.

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz bet big on that same future...with dramatically different results.

Google's vision: no secret to Sun.

It's easy to suggest that the answer must be because Google employees are simply smarter than their counterparts at Sun, or that Schmidt is a rock-star CEO while Schwartz was not. But history belies such facile reasoning.

For one thing, there's no shortage of Sun employees at Google, including, most recently and notably, Tim Bray, who is now a developer advocate focused on Android.

Schmidt, himself, is a product of Sun, having served as its CTO from 1994 until 1997. Sun in those days was at the top of its game, but Schmidt left Sun to join Novell...and failed.

Of course, anyone in that position would have failed. Novell was something of a lost cause.

Can the same be said of Sun? Schwartz gets a lot of criticism for his time at Sun, but could anyone else have done better? Perhaps. But significantly better?

I doubt it.

It's not as if Schwartz didn't have the winning vision for the software industry: he largely shared Schmidt's/Google's vision of a mobile future with the cloud/Internet connecting all of the nodes.

Vision, however, is nothing without execution, and execution is accelerated or hampered by a company's legacy. For Sun, this was exacerbated by its failure to ride the x86+Linux train.

But even a successful shift to x86 probably wouldn't have saved Sun.

After all, it's hard to realize a "network is the computer" future when you're stuck selling the hardware to power that network, rather than profiting from the software running atop the network, as Google does.

Software can achieve Internet scale in a way that hardware simply can't.

Arguably, Google is what Sun's intelligentsia desperately wanted Sun to be, but couldn't due to Sun's bulky hardware business. Google grew up on the Web, a software services giant. Sun, by contrast, sold the infrastructure for the Web and never could get beyond the fetters this approach created.

That's why the two CEOs can give essentially the same response to questions about the future of computing...but vary wildly in the results. Here's what Schmidt said just this week:

Hopefully someone else will be making the devices, we do the software. What's important now is to get the mobile architecture right. Because mobility will be the way you will provision in the future. Fast forward 5-10 years. The answer should always be mobile first. You want to have the best app on mobile....The promise of Chrome and Chrome OS is that the devices you give to employees will have 2-second boot time, will be disposable, low price.

Now compare this to Schwartz in 2005, speaking of the same shift to mobile phones:

The majority of the world will first experience the Internet through their handset. Our collective generation believes the desktop PC is the most important thing to give to people. I don't buy that. The most important thing to give is access to the Internet [in developing nations].

Two peas in a pod...at least in terms of vision.

In the area of a company's legacy in accelerating or inhibiting that vision, however, only one of those CEOs was free to execute on that vision.

Hint: it's the one who still has his job.