India Internet News
How Apple Is Altogether Different From Google?
25 July 2011
One is considered to be a magic number in Apple Inc. In this company, only one person is the Decider for making the final design choices. There is no focus groups. No data crunchers. No committee consensus-builders. The decisions shows the sensibility of only one person: Steven P. Jobs, the CEO of Apple.
On the contrary, Google has followed a traditional approach that consists of a large number of people striving various role. Each team prefers to depend on experimental information, not designers, to direct its decisions.
The competition is not even close. The company with a single lead person has been manufacturing quality products, indicating that you do not require too many teams and large number of voices. Before two years, a technology blogger, named John Gruber, published a talk, "The Auteur Theory of Design," at the Macworld Expo. He recommended how filmmaking could be a helpful pattern in directing creative collaboration in other regions, like software.
The auteur, a filmmaker who both has a special vision for a work and practices creative control, works with a lot of other creative people. "What the director is doing, nonstop, from the beginning of signing on until the movie is done, is making decisions. And just simply making decisions, one after another, can be a form of art. The quality of any collaborative creative endeavor tends to approach the level of taste of whoever is in charge."
About two years after he outlined his principles, it is yet a test in design circles for debating Apple and its rivals.
According to Y Combinator partner and a designer in residence, Garry Tan, "Steve Jobs is not always right, MobileMe would be an example. But we do know that all major design decisions have to pass his muster. That is what an auteur does." He said Jobs has gained a fame as a great designer, not because he creates the designs on its own but due to "he's got the eye." Jobs also have some classically trained designers including Jonathan Ive. "Design excellence also attracts design talent."
Google has namely a "creative lab" team which had initially worked on advertising to boost its brand. Now-a-days, the lab has been interrogated to provide a design vision to the engineering and user-experience groups which work on all of Google's products.
According to the lab's creative director Chris L. Wiggins, who also belongs to advertising, depicts design as a collaborative method among groups. "There's only one Steve Jobs, and he's a genius. But it's important to distinguish that we're discussing the design of Web applications, not hardware or desktop software. And for that we take a different approach to design than Apple."
Google uses the Web to draw reply from users and make stable improvements, he added. He said not to compare Apple's apples with Google's oranges, and that's why Apple's smartphone software has gained much higher marks than Google's.
The capability of Google to draw and maintain design talent has not at all helped with the deviation of designers who think their expertise was not completely recognized.
Paul Adams' 'Think Outside In' blog states, "Google is an engineering company, and as a researcher or designer, it's very difficult to have your voice heard at a strategic level."
Yet other example is Douglas Bowman. He was working as Google's first visual designer during 2006, when Google was already 7 years old.