Apple's Not the Only Interesting Company

After writing my last post, The Next Step, and as I went back to perusing the steady stream of news and articles I proctor throughout the day, I started thinking about the prevalence of the Apple blog. I touched on this briefly in my last article. There’s a strangely pervasive mentality in the blogosphere these days that in order to be successful, one must do some combination of three things: write about Apple, adopt the linkblog format, and post regularly, the argument being that few companies are as interesting to write about as Apple. For the most part, I agree with these requirements: nobody writes about Microsoft anymore, because Microsoft isn’t doing anything revolutionary anymore; for the same reason, nobody writes about Samsung or Oracle or Adobe. But that doesn’t mean Apple is the only interesting company on the market. As I said in my previous post, Google is doing many of the same things Apple does and receives so much attention for, although granted often to a lesser degree. In fact, Google does even more with their much broader research and development division, leading to the creation of driverless vehicles, augmented reality glasses, and, most recently, an experimental cell network. No other company in the world can claim the same.

Apple is not the only interesting company we have the option to write about, but it is by far the easiest. There is no shortage of opinions on the latest product announcement or what the thermostat setting in Apple’s headquarters means for the future of the company. There is, however, a great shortage of opinions on the inner-workings of Google, on those actions hidden behind a white screen and jauntily colored logo.