This morning we brought you news that Google’s X labs employees are pulling some seriously long shifts to turn the Google Voice Actions feature in Android phones into a Siri rival, but is this ethos of copying Apple stifling creativity in tech?
I’ll be honest; hardcore Android fans aren’t going to like this article all that much; the crux of my argument is that Apple generally innovates with tech whereas other companies imitate.
There are obvious exceptions to this which I’ll get out of the way first: a drop-down notification window, widgets and, indeed, voice control elements were first implemented in Android and then brought to iOS, but these are just incremental features within an operating system, not technologies that become real talking points or applications that breed entirely new products.
It’s these kind of creative leaps that Apple specialise in more than anyone else. Google Voice Actions has been sitting around idly in Android handsets for 18 months, but it took a shock to Google’s system, delivered by Siri, to kick it back up the priority list for Mountain View’s finest.
See the Siri rivals for your phone
What pains me is that it’s an obvious move to incorporate a natural language recognition tool. It’s obvious that you need to make it system-wide; you shouldn’t need Apple to tell you that, especially if – like Google – you’ve hoovered up a collection of the best sound and voice engineers in the world.
And that’s what’s annoying. Only when a company sees Apple augment technology into something truly headline-worthy do they think it necessary to do the same. Amazon bought a voice recognition company called Yap almost immediately after the iPhone 4S and Siri were revealed to the world.
Was nobody thinking about this before?
It’s not just voice technology though. The tech industry’s copycat nature is much further reaching. Remember the ill-fated Google TV? It was three years late to a party that Apple TV started, albeit rather limply.
I’m not opening the floor to a debate on how good either one of these products are, but Google seems to skulk into everything it does these days with a half-hearted attitude.
Google TV launched with about as much confidence as Woody Allen on a first date, and soon disappeared into nothingness and waning support from its hardware partners.
It was as if Google just tried to tick the box with a bodge job, shoehorning Android and Chrome into a place they just weren’t designed for, just to say that it’s got something similar in its roster before moving on to the next. The recent launch of Google Music is much the same.
Curve jumping
The disparity comes from Apple’s seemingly supernatural ability to look further than its rivals, whatever the current implementation is.
Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee and technology evangelist calls this “curve jumping” citing Apple’s laser printers as a prime example.
Instead of bettering their ribbon-and-ink machines and competing on the same crowded turf as rivals, the company pushed forward into the next league of paper-churners and turned out some of the world’s first affordable laser-based machines. Instantly better, instantly ahead of the competition.
Fast forward to today, and you’ve got the same examples littered throughout the company’s hardware and software histories.
Let’s look at the Apple iMac desktops: as soon as Apple started making them into thin, sexy all-in-one machines, a slew of identikit clones started hitting the shelves from the likes of HP and Lenovo.
Likewise, the iPad. I don’t have time for anyone who genuinely tries to fight the corner that Apple didn’t invent the tablet. It did. Let’s move on. Unless you really, honestly want to run Windows 95 in the palm of your hand, on a device that weighs the same as a suitcase. Maybe both hands.
The same goes for the latest trend in Ultrabooks. I’ve gone on about it at length before, but an Ultrabook is a MacBook Air and, make no mistake, that was the first.
The industry seems to have aligned itself into a crippling position of waiting and reacting, but inevitably it’s Apple that most are waiting for.
I know Apple hires a lot of talented people, but I refuse to believe that the rival companies don’t also have the brainpower and foresight to jump curves and show us something new.
Apple’s most talented recruit?
And worse than being a bugbear, it’s starting to poison the tech world. Imagine a music chart where everyone waited to see what Rhianna did, and then just tried their best to copy the song as closely as possible without being sued.
That’s where we’re at with tech. It doesn’t breed creativity, it stifles it, and while I’d love for you to come up with some examples in the comments section below that prove me wrong, I don’t think you will. Consider this a challenge.
But remember: I’m not talking about the wee exceptions to this rule; forget your small tweaks to operating systems. I mean the big stuff: the product categories. The devices. The operating systems themselves. The far superior use of existing technology. It all seems to spill out of Apple’s HQ before anyone else’s, while the continuing pattern of half-arsed copying makes everyone else look foolish.
