I am old and historically been a fan of Apple more than any other company of the past. Well besides DEC. Huge, huge, huge fan of DEC in the day. Never been a fan of Microsoft as felt they never strive to be the best and historically have provided a poor user experience compared to Apple.

But also MS just never seemed to care much about security and that really bothered me. Felt they had a responsibility with being the biggest tech company and dominated desktops. Took Google to do ChromeOS and that is wrong, IMO.

But today I am more of a fan of Amazon and Google more than any other company. I still use a lot of Apple hardware but I am very frustrated that they just lost their way on being the best and more importantly on user experience.

I am very into technology and more than anything the user experience. I love the interactions of humans and technology and this being the best it can be.

IMO, the best example we have to date is the Google search text box. That same text box is used by a rocket scientist, grandma, 7 year old kid, brain surgeon and everyone else in between.

That is the holy grail of UX. You type what you want and Google uses the computer to do all the work and you get your result. Quickly and accurately. Just that makes me a huge fan of Google. I can not think of any example in all of the history of computers that is close to what Google did?

But then the other aspect is I am an engineer by training. Founded a couple of companies and therefore had to do a variety of jobs but to my core an engineer.

So I spend a lot of time reading papers. The stuff Google has shared is just off the charts and no company in history can touch Google engineering. Not even DEC. I would say even surpasses Bell Labs.

So many things. Map/reduce, GFS, Borg, TPU 1.0, Beyond Corp, Wavenet, and I can go on and on. It is just amazing the incredible engineering things that Google shares.

I am truly in awe. I am all about fairness. There is ZERO question that Google provides a much better user experience in the things that are important today. Compare Google Maps to Apple Maps.

https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat/

Compare Google Assistant to Alexa or even bigger lead with Siri. This is where UX is at today.

Larry Page in the late 90s was asked about using AI to improve Google Search. He responded they are using search to improve AI. From that day I was a HUGE Google fan. Still an Apple fan at the time but that is where it started.

I am also a big fan of Amazon and continue to not be a fan of MS. MS and Oracle are probably the two tech companies I dislike the most today. In the past it was IBM when I was a big DEC fan. I worked in VMS internals and was doing clustering internals like what is done today literally 30 years ago!

The other aspect that bothers me is the privacy one with Google and Apple. Apple privacy agreement is here.

https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

In this agreement we have and I quote

"When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to participate in Apple services or forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number."

That is crazy. Then when we look at China we have

"Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese iCloud users"

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy...

The China gov tried to hack Gmail accounts and Google instead decided to leave China. These are the facts without emotions or marketing.

It does bother me you suggest I lie? I try to share a lot of links supporting my points. I do get things wrong from time to time but never have an intention of lying.

So if I post something that is factually incorrect then please call me on it and if possible share a link.

But do NOT confuse opinions with facts as happens so often. I am an engineer to my core and I therefore tend to be very unemotional and fact based.