“Open” Google

Listening to TWiT the past week or so and they’ve been talking a lot about the Apple education event, and making a lot of comparisons to Google. Leo would consistently talk about how Google is more “open” and Apple is closed. One person during one of the shows (I can’t recall which) even said Chromebooks were better because they could have developers make web apps, but iPads required iOS developers. Did they forget that iPads have Safari?

And on the topic of Google being “open”, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. Google has done a good job convincing everyone that they’re “open”, but they really aren’t. If Google were really open, you’d be able to develop a 3rd party Google Docs client and collaborate with people using the 1st party Google Docs app. What Leo really seems to be saying is Google has more cross platform apps, but cross platform does not equal open. That would be like saying an email provider that only allowed you to email other people on their service is open as long as they made apps for all the major platforms.  

This isn’t to say Google hasn’t contributed a lot to the open source community, they have, but so has Apple. 

I guess all of this is to say cross platform <> open.