Excerpt:
Importantly, this failure generally has nothing to do with the technology that powers Google's products, which is often amazing.
Rather, it's the result of weaker product design.
Google TV, for example, was an absurdly complex flop that was apparently designed for consumers who have been dying to buy a TV that is as complicated as a computer (all four of them).
Google's email system, Gmail, for years forced consumers to use a "conversations" format that geeks raved about but that confused normal people who liked good old email.
Google's Android operating system, meanwhile, despite having many technological advantages over Apple's iOS, is still harder and more complicated to use that Apple's offering.
The common thread of these anecdotes is that Google designs its products for geeky technologists, while Apple designs for normal humans.
And it turns out that geeky technologists are a small, weird niche of the broader consumer market, which is making it harder for Google to become a beloved mass-market brand.
The difference between Google's product design and Apple's product design starts with the difference between the types of people each company places the highest value on.
Google has an engineering culture, in which brilliant technologists are the rock stars.
Apple, meanwhile, has a product-design and marketing culture, in which "technology" merely serves to support a product's function and form.
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