Many Apple pundits and analysts point to its services business as the future of the company and a major source of future revenue. I don’t deny that services revenue is steadily going up while hardware revenue is heading in the opposite direction.
Yet, I still see Apple as primarily, fundamentally and foundationally a hardware company. Its services exist to sell more hardware. When Apple makes money on services — sometimes, a lot of money — it only adds to the bottom line.
Continue readingJohn Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:
This difference in priorities is why Google forked Chrome’s rendering engine from WebKit in 2013. Which, in turn, makes me wonder what the endgame will look like with Microsoft adopting Chrome. Is Microsoft really going to stick with Chrome, under Google’s ultimate control, or will they fork it, the way Google forked WebKit?
Gruber’s question is the wrong one. The concern isn’t that Microsoft might fork Blink — the rendering engine that underlies not just Chrome but the Chromium open-source base upon which Chrome is built — but that its choice of Google’s project over another puts more control of the internet under Google’s purview.
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