Google Comes of Age

In the past, Google has always been late to the party—and they rarely outpaced Apple. The iPhone set the tone and terms for the mobile wars, with iTunes and the App Store looming large over every newcomer, including Android. Apple TV came out in 2007. The iPad is the standard to which every new tablet will be measured. Through their successes, Apple has defined a vision: It's a company that loves control, that changed the meaning and importance of "apps," and which sees itself dominating nearly every aspect of its users' technological lives. It's a vision that ignores the cloud, except when it can't. And it's a vision that has an expiration date.

Google, too, has a hunger for domination, but they've finally got vision of their own to accompany it: A vision of cellphones and desktops connected seamlessly—revolutionarily, magically—over the internet; a vision of media that streams when you need it, and disappears when you don't; a vision that sees TV as an extension of the internet, not simply a dumb screen.

Google's got a ton of work to do. Android is fragmented, and huge share of the handsets people own today will never take advantage of Froyo's new features. Any new TV product takes years to filter into the average living room. Media streaming is an inevitability, but the infrastructure isn't there to fully realize it, and what Google showed off today doesn't address everything. (The is no video component to their new Simplify Media-based music streaming software, for now.) But listening to Google's newly emboldened Vic Gundotra after a particularly uninspired series of Jobsnotes, peering into each company's future, I see Google stepping out ahead—and with one impressive lead.

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