Sameer Samat, president of Android ecosystem at Google, asked a TechRadar journalist why they were using an Apple Watch, iPhone, and MacBook:
I asked because we’re going to be combining Chrome OS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they’re getting done.
Why did you obliquely reference a different company doing a completely different thing? Microsoft did do something very similar on desktop - making Windows 8 tablet-centric. Nothing in XP or especially 98 has anything to do with mobile computing.
It’s not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I feel like I’m talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.