Alex Watson
Culture as much as technology is driving smartphone design, as shown by the different directions Google and Apple are taking with their handsets.
Discounting a few months back in 2001 when I worked for a website that existed solely inside the soon-to-be-popped dotcom bubble, I’ve spent all of my career as a journalist at one company. Over the years, I’ve become very familiar with its culture and I find myself keenly aware of how Dennis Publishing’s culture influences the magazines and websites we create.
There is such a thing as personality for companies. Company culture – because it’s a pretentious term, because it’s not easily quantifiable, because it’s not an economic indicator such as stock price or profit – is a deeply underrated factor in product design and strategy. I’ve been thinking and reading about how iOS and Android will develop over the next few years and while many commentators want to talk about closed-versus-open, Retina display versus OLED or the cloud versus iTunes, these are close-to-the ground debates that focus on a very specific area. It’s like analysing London by taking the Tube to a few different stations and focusing on streets roundabouts. There’s something to be said for taking an aerial view and looking at the bigger, slower, less-obvious currents that are less obviously expressed but just as important in shaping things.
I’ve written before about how, for Google, Android is very much a means to an end. As a company, Google is completely focused on driving and dominating Internet usage, learning about people and using this information to serve advertising. Android is one part of a grand, overall plan that encompasses google.com, services such as email and maps, the Chrome browser and the forthcoming Chrome OS.
As a company, Google isn’t driven by the idea of making a great phone, because the device isn’t what it’s really selling – it’s the services it accesses. As a result, it’s rare to see Google creating something specifically for Android – it’s more important for Google to be able to offer its services on Android and on your PC and on your netbook or laptop, and on whatever other bits of kit you use to get online. Hence we have new features such as ‘Chrome to Phone’, which allows you to look up an address on your PC and send it directly to your phone.
It’s a very small idea, but is a good example of Google’s strategic aims and its engineering lead, analytic and techy culture – announced on a blog, Chrome to Phone takes the form of a browser extension. It’s a geeky add-on that likely only a small percentage of Google customers will use, but with the numbers Google operates with, it’s still worthwhile, as those customers will be spending ever more time experiencing Google as a seamless universe.
This idea – that Google is everywhere, seeing everything – is the perfect expression of Google’s culture and its economic and strategic aims. Immensely wealthy, able to hire only the best and brightest people, able to deploy almost infinite amounts of computing power and used to dealing with huge volumes of data, and with little direct customer interaction, Google sees the world from a distance and finds itself drawn to the big changes, to action on a wider scale.
Its CEO, Eric Schmidt, is certainly no stranger to this and has talked several times in the past year about moving beyond mere ‘search’ towards AI, where the system, because it knows so much about you, can anticipate your demands. ‘I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,’ he told The Wall Street Journal. ‘They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.’
From reminding you to buy milk to building you a list of news in the morning with highly personalised stories, Google isn’t a phone, it isn’t a search engine and it isn’t a product. It’s a system, and it’s a system to which you’ll need to adapt. Later in the same interview, Schmidt said: ‘I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.’ He then went on to predict, in the words of the The Wall Street Journal’s journalist, Holman W Jenkins, that ‘every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites’.
Google is a company built by the children of the 1980s. Its culture and its products implicitly recognise the victory of market forces over ideology and it has endless faith in data and the unstoppable march of progress as a service that constantly refreshes itself, even as specific products evolve.
With its Think Different adverts, the aptly chosen music that plays at the start of press conferences, the fact (as they told AT&T) that its executives ‘don’t even own suits’, Apple is very much a product of the 1960s counter-culture. It has, of course, turned away from peace, love and understanding and instead took away the other messages of the 1960s – the primacy of the individual, the purity of the creative impulse and the importance of the final product (only it’s iPhones now, not concept LPs).
For Apple, the product is important, and anyone who’s followed the company over the past few years will have noticed the lack of focus Mac OS X receives: for Apple, the device matters and the device people are buying is the iPhone. Services are what the device runs, so contrary to what people expect, Apple continues to focus on creating services unique to its devices that fully exploit its hardware. As an Apple customer, you come to expect neat little touches such as the way the music fades down in your earphones when a phone call comes through and the thoughtful way copy and paste works on the iPhone. You also come to expect the relentless drive of hardware development that delivers a new model (and, of course, the resultant implicit pressure to upgrade) every year.
What is less obvious is Apple’s desire to add more services to the iPhone, often deeply integrated into the hardware design. With the Nike+ kit, it’s dipped a toe into health monitoring (not the wild leap it seems for a computer you carry all the time) and with millions of credit card numbers on file, it’s also not surprising to see Apple looking into allowing you to use the iPhone as a digital wallet. It has, in the past, filed patents depicting using the iPhone as a concert ticket, and recently hired a product manager of mobile commerce who previously worked on various mobile wallet schemes and is an expert in near-field communications (two devices communicating in close proximity).
I finished my last column by noting that phones are much more personal than the PC has ever been, and that they’re becoming an increasingly intimate extension of ourselves. In the way Apple and Google approach the design of their phones and software, we can see two companies not only with different strategies, but different cultures and very different concepts of the individual.
