Steve Wozniak may have co-founded Apple together with the iconic Steve Jobs, but he has never been one to mince words when it comes to critiquing the company. Now he is sharing that he wishes there was a partnership between the company he helped create and one of its biggest rivals, Google.
It may sound wishy-washy and utopian, but Wozniak’s dream is somewhat based on reality. His aspirations come from his experience of using both Apple’s iPhones and Android smartphones. In some cases, Siri, iOS’ speech recognition software and virtual assistant, is unable to understand or figure out what he was trying to say, whereas Android could. He believes that this advantage is due to Google’s success in search and machine learning, which is one of the most important foundations of such artificial intelligence systems.
But it is not only in search or speech or virtual assistance that Wozniak believes would benefit from a culture of cooperation in the whole tech industry. In fact, he holds that openness and information sharing would benefit everyone and help developer better technology, including wearable devices. He thinks that cross-licensing, at a fair price, of course, would improve products. He sees some things on Samsung devices that he would love to have on an iPhone, and yet the current culture and business setup would make it expensive, if not prohibitive.
Of course, Wozniak’s words have little effect today, especially at Apple, which he has left a long time ago. He himself admits that, although he could have probably made such a partnership if he were holding the reins, he is not is not well versed in the business side of things. Still, Wozniak has his fair share of fans, both within and without the Apple world, who find listening to his ideas illuminating, or at least quite interesting.
SOURCE: BBC
That´s the real attitude that a business person should have, create and share. Is understandable that he is not part of Apple which have the opposite attitude.
Huge android fan and I completely agree with him.
apple and google did have a partnership of sort. googles ceo, eric schmidt sat on apples board. google was to be the centerpiece for apples iphone software. look at android before and after iphone release. someone ripped a hole in that partnership.
Comments like these leave little doubt as to why Woz was bounced from Apple before 286 chips became popular.
News Flash for Woz: Apple and Google were partners in the past. In fact, Eric Schmidt was a member of Apple’s board of directors… until Schmidt was booted out for using his position on the board to take what he learned about the iPhone and iOS and develop a very similar competing product at Google!
Apple and Rockstar (a consortium that includes Apple) are now suing Google for infringement of many patents.
How could Woz not know this? Was he on another planet for the past several years?