14 DAY TRIAL // In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Google’s Sundar Pichai says he doesn’t feel as competitive as Tim Cook does, and that Android is most certainly not as bad as the Apple boss paints it. But he is concerned about Apple.
Responding to Cook’s “ancient” versions of Android, Pichai says, “Every piece of data I look at tells me that people are adopting Android at a faster pace than any other operating system. We are doing remarkably well.”
Speaking of Apple, he adds, “They run a great show. I take it for the value of the show. … Do I worry about what they are doing? Yes. They are a great company. I think they are building a very good product and it’s vertically integrated, which helps them do certain things faster.”
Indeed, Apple’s approach is to lock the OS into the hardware, integrating every feature tightly and seamlessly, providing great interoperability between functions, a smooth experience, and tremendous power efficiency (most visible in the iPad).
Speaking of adopters, Pichai doesn’t think it’s a matter of apples-to-apples. Rather, “I think of it almost … like two types of government,” he tells Bloomberg.
“Some [forms of] governments will be able to do things faster because they are opinionated and get things done. Than you can have a noisy, cacophonous, cantankerous democracy, which is often better in the long run. So you have two different world views being presented. To me, I look at it and say it’s remarkable that we live in a time when you have such different choices.”
During the WWDC14 conference at the beginning of this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook bashed Android, calling it a “toxic hell stew,” referring to malware coupled with the fragmentation.
In response to that, Pichai actually complements iOS.
“You have to be careful when you make a $100,000 [€73,499] Mercedes (DAI:GR) car not to look at the rest of automotive industry and make comments on it. … We serve the entire breadth of the market, globally across all form factors, et cetera. Android from the ground up is designed to be very, very secure. … History shows typically that malware is also targeted at the more popular operating system. So you know there is that.”
It is interesting to see how reserved and non-competitive Pichai is compared to Tim Cook and other CEOs in the industry. Makes you wonder if he has an ace under his sleeve that we’re about to see pulled out.