Sorry, Woz, but Apple and Google shouldn't work together

Steve Wozniak has no problems ruffling feathers. The same guy who built the Apple I in a dusty garage isn't afraid to publicly criticize the $415 billion technology giant he co-founded in 1976. And his deep love for technology and gadgets knows no bounds, extending — perhaps most famously — to Apple's very powerful and very formidable former ally: Google.

It isn't a secret that Woz is a big fan of Android, despite it being owned by the company on the receiving end of the other Steve's "thermonuclear war," allegedly for copying the iPhone's design. Wozniak wishes things were different, and imagines a world where the competitive landscape between Apple and Google was much friendlier and more open.

In a new interview with BBC by way of Gizmodo, Woz specifically notes that Android's access to Google's search engine elevates it above Siri, and that Apple still has catching up to do in the artificial intelligence department.

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He concedes that such a partnership is unlikely to happen, however.

It's a good point, all in all. Silly patent disputes and petty public mud-slinging often seem to stifle technological progress. Plus, it's fun to speculate what an Android/Apple super phone exquisitely crafted from the two platforms' best features would be like.

Thankfully, a Google/Apple partnership won't ever happen, at least in the foreseeable future. Competition is ugly but in the end it stands to benefit consumers. It breeds more variety, lowers prices, and is unanimously agreed to foster innovation in most cases. Why else would the the U.S. have laws — admittedly imperfect ones — designed to strike down antitrust behavior in the first place? As associate professor Maurice E. Stucke at the University of Tennessee College of Law wrote earlier this year:

Competition isn't always beneficial for everyone. It can yield, as Stucke suggests, "suboptimal effects." One would be hard-pressed to argue that subjecting low-wage workers in Asia to hellish manufacturing conditions to cut costs is ever a good thing. The same goes for copyright disputes over things like rounded corners.

But the ideological differences that pit Google and Apple against one another in the first place (Google Play's anything goes app policy vs. iOS's gate keeping; Android's scattershot approach with OEMs vs. Apple's tightly regulated in-house grip) serve only to benefit the public good. While it's certainly nice to imagine the two companies skipping through a field of daisies, in the end it's the need to aggressively outfox one another that breeds a nice selection of top-shelf phones, tablets, software, and more for consumers to select from. Choice is good. Otherwise we might all still be using BlackBerrys.

(HT: Gizmodo, BBC)