http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1811814-4,00.ht

Take what man makes and use it,
But do not worship it,
For it shall pass.

An anonymous wit scratched those lines on the side of a junked car door and lugged it to a trail near my home in Northern California. The middle of a pristine, ancient redwood grove is the wrong place to find a rusted-out car door, but the words magically transformed the thing from an aggravating piece of junk into art. I Googled the quote as soon as I got home, of course, but found nothing. (Thanks to Google, we live in a world where "I don't know" has become an unacceptable response. So my inability to identify the author there is driving me crazy.)

My town is pretty close to Silicon Valley, and most of my neighbors make their living in technology, while I make mine writing about it. All of us, though, worship at the altar of bright and shiny things. These days, it's the impending launch of Apple's next-generation iPhone that has the faithful davening. If the whispers of pending miracles are to be believed, this new phone could end up becoming the next big "platform."

A platform, to computer people, is the software code on which third-party applications function. There are scores of big platforms out there—something like three dozen in the international mobile-phone business alone. But a truly successful one can extend far beyond its immediate group of users and effectively create and control an enormous market. In the computer industry, IBM dominated the first commercial platform with its expensive mainframes and operating systems, aimed at corporate users. Seemingly overnight, IBM was supplanted by Microsoft and its Windows operating system as the PC revolution took hold. Windows, in turn, is now losing its power as the Web—owned by no one, accessible to all—becomes the dominant platform. (Yes, the Web is nothing more than a big layer of code; all those websites we visit are merely applications that sit atop it.)

Every major player in Techland wants to create the next great platform, of course. What's new here is that it's possible for any number of them to succeed. "Among the things that are different from the old status quo is the idea that one will win," says Marc Andreessen, who helped write the first widely adopted browser, Mosaic, which popularized the Web. The Internet is a much larger playing field than PC operating systems. "Trying to decide which will win," Andreessen adds, "is kind of like debating whether beef, chicken or lobster is going to win the market for food."

Still, for wonks like me, it's been riveting to watch three of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley—each representing a fundamental phase of the information era—battle it out. Apple, Google and Facebook are, respectively, an icon from the pioneering days of personal computers; the biggest, most profitable company yet born on the Web; and a feisty upstart whose name is synonymous with the current migration to social networks.

In many ways, these companies are technology's standard-bearers, though their guiding philosophies differ. Google, for instance, advocates an "open" Web and tends to push for open standards and alliances among developers. Facebook, with its gated community of 70 million active users, offers a more controlled experience and, so far at least, wants to keep its users safely within its walls. Apple comes from the old world. Its elegant products cocoon customers from the chaos of the information age, but the Apple experience tends to be highly controlled, with Apple hardware at the end points and Apple software and services, like the iTunes Music Store, in between.

The winners of the platform wars stand to make billions selling devices, selling eyeballs to advertisers, selling services such as music, movies, even computer power on demand. Yet the outcome here is far more important than who makes the most money. The future of the Internet—how we get information, how we communicate with one another and, most important, who controls it—is at stake.

Why Facebook Opened Up
The word platform reached buzzword status a year ago when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the start of a movement. "Social networks are closed platforms," Zuckerberg told a gathering of about 800 developers in San Francisco. "Today we're going to change all that."

You can watch the video of the speech, as I did, by Googling the name of the developers' conference, "F8." What made F8 significant, historic even, was that it was the first time the Facebook platform was thrown open to developers. Anyone who knew how to write applications for Facebook was invited in. Andreessen says an open-coding environment is key to any successful platform because the easier it is to use, the more developers will be drawn to it, making the platform that much more powerful. Facebook also gave developers free distribution. Users who want to add a new app can do so with one-click simplicity. All this, says Andreessen, who is rumored to be considering a seat on Facebook's board, has helped make Facebook compelling: "The point of being a platform is you can enable creativity on the part of thousands or millions of other people who you don't have to pay and who have ideas that you wouldn't have thought of."

That's precisely what has happened at Facebook during the past year. A kind of gold rush took hold as developer after developer started writing simple applications. As of June 1, some 24,000 programs—ranging from simple social gestures, like the ability to virtually poke a friend, to fully formed games like Scrabulous—were available to Facebook's users. Expect loads more. Facebook has given out its API keys—the code that developers need to access Facebook's platform—an astounding 400,000 times, many more than even Zuckerberg expected.

Zuckerberg, 24, is a hot ticket on the conference circuit, and when I spoke to him, he had just returned to Palo Alto, Calif., from a major tech-industry event near San Diego. There he had been grilled yet again on whether he'd sell Facebook to Microsoft, whose minority investment gave Facebook a $15 billion valuation. (Microsoft, which tried and failed to buy Yahoo!, could use a new platform itself.) Yet again Zuckerberg said no, he's not selling out—he's just trying to build a great and viable platform and that takes time. Zuckerberg speaks in a steady, mellifluous tenor; he has a long neck and tends to point his chin upward, as if aiming the bell of a saxophone. "A lot of the last year in developing the platform has just been keeping up with the runaway success there," he says.

That's what happens when you create a successful platform: a virtuous circle blooms, with a mass of users attracting a horde of developers who build fun or useful stuff, which in turn pulls in even more users. Needless to say, there are some pretty worthless and annoying applications too. At Facebook, app writers' income is derived from advertising based on the number of people who install their programs, and a bunch have adapted in intrusive ways. Facebook has taken flak for applications like FunWall, which made it easy for users to accidentally spam their entire friend lists with e-mail invites to install FunWall. Zuckerberg says Facebook is tweaking its platform to help the most useful apps to spread while squelching the junk.

I ask Zuckerberg about the theory that closed, proprietary networks like Facebook could stifle the Net's innovative spirit. That idea is the subject of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, a new book by Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He argues that the rise of gated, closed communities like Facebook, the advent of the iPhone and even the seemingly innocuous standards-setting of Google could draw nerd talent away from the disruptive kind of innovation that occurred on the wild and woolly Net. Zuckerberg pauses for a minute to think, then says, "I generally agree with those principles and think that type of openness and portability is extremely important." Great platforms are often closed when they start and open up only as they mature and can handle the load. He adds, "We're kind of leaving that initial phase now and moving to a more open phase."

In fact, last month Zuckerberg announced Facebook Connect, which would allow users to take their contact lists with them to websites that add a snippet of code. Over time, it will be possible for, say, a blog owner to embed a Facebook-style "wall" on his or her site, which would allow one to read only the comments scrawled there by friends. It's a very cool idea. Facebook everywhere! But there's only one problem. A few days after Facebook Connect was announced, Google launched a nearly identical plan called ... Friend Connect. And if there's anything that could slow Facebook's frantic pace, it's Google.

Google Tries to Connect
The first phase of the web's growth was all about putting information online and giving people a way to find and connect to it. The second and current phase is all about connecting people to one another.

"Social is the new black," says Joe Kraus, who oversees Google's efforts to build out a social layer that runs across the entire Web. In this, as in all things that Google does, Kraus' strategy has been to create an alliance of social networks that will use open standards rather than Facebook's proprietary network and coding language, so that developers can spread their applications.

"Google has relied on an open Internet to make its entire business," he tells me. "It has a genetic predisposition for openness." That's partly because Google's core business, search, depends on openness. Google can't find the things you want on the Web—documents, music, images and so on—unless they are open and accessible, Kraus says. The richest Internet company on the Fortune 500 (it's ranked 150, with $16.5 billion in revenue), Google has a business plan that depends on the Web being used by as many people as possible. That's why the company spends so much time and energy building new applications that make the Web more useful or fun.

Social networks are a threat to that business; users tend to stay within their network and communicate among themselves or simply fool around with apps. When Facebook's users are playing Scrabulous or tagging photos, for example, they're not using Google. Indeed, they're more likely to discover new things via friends or in-network applications such as iLike, a service that matches your friends' musical tastes to your own.

So Google retaliated last November with OpenSocial, an alliance of Facebook's competitors—MySpace, hi5 and Google's own social network, Orkut, among others—to try to create a write-once, run-anywhere application platform. That means a developer, with only modest tweaking, can build an application that runs across all the major social networks except, of course, Facebook. "When you talk to developers, most of them don't have 50 people; they can't write their applications 50 different ways," Kraus says. "They really want to write their application once and get as much distribution as possible."

He definitely has a point. But I wonder if Google is too late—and old—for the social-networking party. "Google recognizes it needs to become more people-oriented, but it needs to add that to its existing platform. It's not at all native," says my neighbor, Seth Goldstein, who runs SocialMedia, an advertising network for social networks. "Facebook was designed from the ground up to render these complex and nuanced social relationships."

Why the iPhone Matters
Apple's calculus is much simpler: it doesn't matter who prevails online—Facebook, Google, both or someone else. Steve Jobs simply wants to ensure that you use his devices to get there.

To that end, the new iPhone, which is expected to be announced on June 9, is "hugely significant," says Andreessen, who now presides over a company, Ning, that allows anyone to build his or her own social network. "The iPhone, a lot of people around here believe—and I think this is true—is the first real, fully formed computer that you can put in your hand," he says. "It has all the requirements it needs to be a viable platform."

Matt Murphy—a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers who oversees the $100 million iFund to seed start-ups that build great iPhone apps—goes even further. He claims that the iPhone will "absolutely be the driver of the post-PC world." Murphy points out that the kit needed by developers to build iPhone apps has been downloaded more than 200,000 times, and he estimates that about 1,000 applications will be available to consumers when the iPhone-apps store launches with the phone. "If you look at so many of the constraints that have held back the mobile ecosystem, Apple basically takes all of those away and provides an open platform, a great device and a user base that's rabid for these new kinds of applications," he says.

Jobs' great skill has always been integrating cutting-edge technology and making it accessible. Flat-panel monitors, moviemaking software, wi-fi, digital-music players, touch-sensitive screens—these have all been out there over the past decade or so in ragged and unpolished ways. His genius was finding and repackaging them, making the technology work to delight the masses. Similarly, Apple's iPhone 2.0 will popularize "geo-location"—think of the satellite-based navigation systems in many cars—as a way for people to communicate wherever they are.

Yet again, Google, which is fighting the platform wars on multiple fronts, could be Apple's stiffest competition. It is leading another coalition to build an open-operating system called Android that will work in the next generation of cell phones as well as other consumer devices. The Open Handset Alliance has 34 members—mobile-phone carriers as well as handset makers, including Motorola, LG Electronics, Samsung, China Mobile, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. Though Google ceo Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board of directors and Jobs saluted Google as a partner whose apps were on the iPhone, Apple is notably not in the alliance.

This appears to be a case of—in Valleyspeak—"frenemies," companies that work together in some businesses while competing in others.

The first Android-powered phones will arrive, Google says, in the second half of the year, possibly around the same time as the new iPhone. At a recent Google developers' conference, the company showed off, for the first time, a generic cell phone running the operating system. Touch sensitive, with an onboard, motion-sensing accelerometer that can also place a user precisely on a Google satellite map, the device resembles nothing so much as an iPhone. Android, explains Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, is an open platform for developers � la Facebook; the code is theirs to modify. He says developers have so far written more than 1,800 applications, which could be distributed on a Google site arranged according to popularity, as YouTube is. "There's some pretty innovative stuff there," Rubin explains. "This is merging the handset and the Web and coming up with something completely new."

To spark development, Google held a competition that will ultimately seed 10 application developers with $275,000 for the best apps. Robert Lam, whose Eco2go was named last month as one of the 50 finalists for the top prizes, says he decided to develop his application, which helps users compute and reduce their carbon footprints, for the Android platform rather than the iPhone because it's so much easier. Developing for the iPhone "would have cost us an annual fee to list our application, and we would have to share 30% of our revenue with Apple as well," Lam says. That said, Lam is already looking into porting the app over to the iPhone after Eco2go is established. The iPhone could end up being enormously popular, and at this stage of the game there's no sense in foreclosing options.

I agree. Like him, I'm rooting for everyone in this war because it sounds as if—the concerns of Harvard's Zittrain notwithstanding—we all win here. Andreessen is right when he says the Web is so vast that it defies attempts to control it. With Google riding shotgun, it strikes me as unlikely that Facebook or anyone else can pull too far ahead. Also, I believe Zuckerberg when he says Facebook will continue to open over time. It's the smart move, and he's a smart cookie. Finally, I want to get my hands on the new iPhone. Its time will come and go. But for now? Great technology, today as always, renders us as gods.

谁将领网络之风骚？

把人类所创造之物拿来用，

但切勿神化它，

因为，它终将被超越。

上面那段话，是一位不知名的智者在一扇废弃的汽车车门上刮出来的，他还把这扇门拖到了北卡州我家附近的一条林间小路边上。一扇锈透了的车门，本来和一片原生古红木林格格不入，但就是这几行字，把这扇门从一堆恶心的垃圾，变成了一件艺术品。回家之后，我马上Google了一下那段话，如我所料，搜不到任何线索。（多亏有了Google，我们现在才能生活在一个不可能“我不知道”的世界里。所以，没能找到这段话的作者让我很崩溃。）

我住的城市离硅谷很近，我的邻居也大多是吃技术饭的，就我自己是个耍笔杆子的。然而我们都很喜欢并崇拜那些闪着（智慧的）光芒的东西。这几天来，Apple即将上市的下一代iPhone无疑是让所有人都仰慕不已的新物件。如果那些关于奇迹的传言都成真的话，这款新手机就将成为下一个庞大的“平台”。

对搞电脑的人来说，平台就是可以让第三方程序在其上运行的软件代码。已经有几十个这样的平台存在了——全世界光手机界的平台也有大概三十多个。但是一个真正成功的平台，不仅可以扩展它的直接用户群，而且更可以高效地建立并控制一个巨大的市场。在计算机业，IBM曾用它昂贵的主机和操作系统，统治了第一个针对企业用户的商业化平台。但当PC革命到来之时，几乎在一夜之间，IBM就被微软和它的视窗操作系统所取代。而风水轮流转，视窗的控制力现在也正在网络——这种不由任何人控制、且任何人都可以使用的东西——成为统治平台的现实面前，慢慢地减弱。（没错，网络不过是一大片代码；我们浏览的所有网站，也不过是建立在其上的程序而已。）

当然，技术舞台上的每位主角都想创造下一代的伟大平台。现在的新情况是，最后成功的人可以不止一个。“与以前的情况不一样，让人成功的因素还包括思想，”协助编写了第一个被广泛应用并风行于网络的浏览器“马赛克”的马克·安德森说。互联网是一个比PC操作系统大得多的竞技场。安德森补充说：“判断谁将会胜出，就好像是在辩论牛肉、鸡肉还是龙虾哪个会赢得食品市场。”

然而，对于像我一样的书呆子来说，就只能看着硅谷最富创新精神的三家企业来争出个胜负——它们中的每一个都代表了信息时代的一个重要阶段。Apple，Google和Facebook，分别是个人电脑的先驱者；网络出现以来最大、赢利能力最强的公司，和一个可以被看作是当今社会化网络潮流同义词的活跃的新星。

虽然这些公司的指导哲学都不相同，但从许多方面来讲，它们都是技术标准的持有者。比如，Google就倡导一个“开放的”网络，致力于推动开源标准和建立开发者联盟。Facebook凭借着它7000万活跃用户的封闭式社区，提供了相对可控的体验，而且至少到现在为止，还是希望保持社区的封闭性。Apple是从旧世界一路过来的。它精巧的产品，让人们在信息时代的混沌中找到了一片净土。但是Apple的体验似乎被Apple的硬件、软件和像iTunes音乐商店这样的服务高度地控制着。

平台战争的胜者，往往会通过卖设备、向广告商卖注意力、应要求提供音乐、电影、甚至计算能力，来赚个盆满钵满。但后果会比谁挣钱最多要严重得多。在这个时候，互联网的未来——我们怎么获取信息、怎么互相联系，以及最重要的，谁控制它——已经岌岌可危。

Facebook开张的幕后故事

早在一年前，当Facebook创始人马克·扎克伯格宣布开始一场运动的时候，“平台”这个词就已经是业内通用的词汇了。“社会化网络是封闭的平台，”扎克伯格在旧金山一次约800人的开发者聚会上说。“今天，我们就是要来彻底地改变它。”

你可以通过Google这个开发者聚会的名字“F8”来找到这次演讲的视频。F8之所以如此重要，甚至可以说是历史性的，是因为这是Facebook平台第一次呈现在开发者们眼前。所有会在Facebook平台上编程的人都被请了去。安德森说，一个开源的编程环境是一个平台成功的关键，因为平台的使用越简单，就会有越来越多的开发者被吸引过来，这样就使这个平台越来越强大。Facebook也向开发者们免费派发它的平台。想要添加程序的用户也只需要简单地用鼠标一点就行。所有这些，安德森——据说他想在Facebook的董事会谋得一席——说，都让Facebook更加有竞争力：“一个平台的关键之处，就在于要能激发成千上万人的创意，而他们都不是你雇佣的，但又有你所没能想到的想法。”

那正是在过去的几年中Facebook在做的事情。开发者们已经开始像当年淘金热一样，争先恐后地编写着简约而不简单的程序。到6月1日为止，已经有24000个程序可供Facebook的用户选择使用了，这些程序小到能可视化跟朋友找招呼的表情，大到完全版的拼字游戏Scrabulous，可以说是一应俱全。这也带来了更大的期待。Facebook已经开放了它的API接口，这就让开发者们能在Facebook平台上编程了，开放的代码数量令人震惊，比扎克伯格当初预想的多了40万倍。

24岁的扎克伯格是聚会上的红人，当我和他交谈时，他刚从加州圣迭哥附近帕洛阿尔托参加完一个重要的技术行业盛会回来。在那儿，他又被N多人问是不是要把Facebook卖给微软，微软先前给Facebook的估价是150亿美元。（微软收购雅虎失败之后，可能会使用它自己的一个全新平台。）扎克伯格不得不再说了一次：他不会卖的，他只是想建立一个好而可行的平台，而这需要时间。他说的时候用的是一种平稳、流畅的、让人回味无穷的语气，而且他的长脖子也仰着，下巴像是要指到天上去，好像是萨克斯风的管口一样翘着。他说：“去年一年对平台的开发，让我们更加接近本属于我们的成功。”

开发一个成功的平台就是这样：有一个良性的循环，大量的用户吸引了众多的开发者开发出有趣的或有用的东西，然后这些东西又拉来更多的用户。

当然，不可避免的是，也会有些无用的、令人讨厌的程序存在。在Facebook上，程序作者的收入是从使用他们的程序的用户数量所带来的广告中提成的，当然也有的人是非法使用程序的。Facebook也已经对像FunWall这样的程序进行了封禁，因为它会让用它的人一不小心就给自己所有的好友发送垃圾邮件，邀请他们安装FunWall。扎克伯格说，Facebook正在调整它的平台，来推广最有用的程序，封禁那些垃圾程序。

我问扎克伯格，像Facebook这样封闭而专有的网络理念，有可能会扼杀网络的创新精神。这也是新书《互联网的未来及应对之策》的主题，它的作者，是哈佛大学伯克曼互联网和社会中心的创始人之一乔纳森·齐特林。他说随着像Facebook这样限入的、封闭的社交网络，iPhone以及看似无害的标准制定者Google的出现，对互联网的过度约束和对互联网安全的担心将摧毁此前网络世界所建立的开放、创新的精神。扎克伯格停下来想了一会儿，然后回答说：“我基本上同意这种说法，我认为某种程度上的开放和便利是非常非常重要的。”好的平台一开始通常是封闭的，只有当它成熟、能承受重担的时候才会变开放。他还说：“我们现在正在走出前一个阶段，进入一个更开放的阶段。”

事实上，上个月扎克伯格发布了Facebook　Connect，它能让用户在任何网站上加一段代码，就能看到自己的好友列表。假以时日，它还可以实现更多功能，比如让博客作者在他或她的博客里嵌入一个Facebook风格的“墙”，从上面可以读到好友们发表的评论。这是个很酷的想法，让Facebook无处不在！但是也有个问题：就在Facebook Connect发布后几天，Google也发布了一个几乎同样的计划，叫……Friend Connect。要是有谁能让Facebook狂进的步伐放慢的话，那就是Google。

Google也要“联通”

网络发展的最初阶段，就是把信息放在网上，让人们能找到并看到它们。网络发展的第二阶段，也就是现今的阶段，就是把人们联系起来。

“社会化是一匹黑马，”乔·克劳斯说。他负责监督Google在建立运行于整个网络的社会化层面方面的工作。就像Google做的其他事情一样，这个工作中，克劳斯的战略是要建立一个使用开放标准的社会化网络联盟，而不是像Facebook那样的专有制的网络和编程语言，这样开发者们就能传播他们写的程序。

“Google一直在靠着开放的互联网做业务，”他告诉我，“它天生就欢迎开放。”这部分是因为Google的核心业务，搜索，就是靠的开放性。除非你所想要的东西——文档、音乐、图片等等——是开放而且可达的，否则Google也找不到。作为财富500强中最有钱的网络公司（它在其中排第150，总收入1650亿美元），Google的业务计划都是建立在网络被越来越多的人使用的基础之上的。这也就是为什么它会投入如此多的时间和精力编写新的程序，从而使网络变得更好用、更有趣。

社会化网络是对Google模式的威胁，用户倾向于待在他们的网络中，在自己的一小群人之间交流，或者只是玩玩程序。比如，当Facebook的用户在玩Scrabulous或者给照片写标签的时候，他们不会用Google。实际上，他们更喜欢通过朋友或者网络程序来发现新事物，比如iLike就可以得出一个你和你朋友之间的音乐品味的相似度。

所以Google在去年11月也开始行动，推出了OpenSocial，一个联合了Facebook的竞争对手MySpace、hi5和Google自己的社会化网络Orkut的联盟。它试图建立一个可以实现“一次编程，随处使用”的程序平台。这也就是说一个开发者只需要适当地调试，就可以编写出一个能在所有主流社会化网络间（当然，不包括Facebook）通用的程序。“你所说的开发者，他们的团队大部分不超过50个人，他们不可能为50个不同的社交网站去编写他们的程序，”克劳斯说。“他们很想编一次程序，就可以得到最大化的传播。”

他说得确实没错。但我担心，对于社会化网络大家庭来说，Google是不是有点儿迟到了——还有点儿土。“Google意识到它必须变得更加以人为本些，但是它就得把它‘插’到原有的平台中去。这就不自然了，”我的邻居塞斯·古斯坦说。他自己开着一家叫SocialMedia的公司，为社会化网络提供广告。“而Facebook自打一开始，就是用来处理这些复杂而微妙的社会关系的。”

关iPhone什么事

Apple的算盘就简单多了：谁赢得网络——Facebook赢，Google赢，双赢，或者别的谁赢——并不重要。史蒂夫·乔布斯只想保证：你上这些网站用的工具，是他生产的设备。

从这个角度上讲，预计于6月9日发布的新iPhone是“里程碑式的”，安德森说。他是一家叫Ning的公司的主席，这家公司可以让任何人都能建立自己的社会化网站。“许多人相信——我也相信——iPhone是第一个真正全能的掌上电脑，”他说。“它满足成为一个可靠的平台的所有要求。”

KPCB投资公司（Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers ）的风险投资家马特·墨菲，现在正在负责一个1亿美元的iFund项目，为的是寻找编写好的iPhone程序的新公司并对其进行资助，谈到iPhone，他更是不吝言辞。他说iPhone　“绝对会主宰后PC时代”。墨菲指出，给开发者提供的开发iPhone程序所需的套件，现在已经被下载了20万次以上，他还估计说，当iPhone程序商店和手机同步上市时，将有大约1000种程序可供消费者选择。“现在有太多的东西制约着移动产品的发展，Apple几乎可以把这些约束全都去掉，提供一个开放的平台，一个棒极了的设备，同时还会有一个为这些新程序而疯狂的用户群。”他说。

乔布斯的高明之处，就在于他总是能把前沿科技作个整合，将它们应用于实际。平板显示器、电影剪辑软件、wi-fi、数字音乐播放器、触摸屏——这些都已经存在了几十年无人问津的东西，在乔布斯的天才下被重新发现、重新包装，让这种技术的产物变得让人乐于接受。同样地，Apple的iPhone2.0也会普及“地理定位”这个东东——就像装在车里的那种卫星导航系统一样，让人们随时随地都能沟通。

再说一下Google，它正在平台战争中多线作战，并会成为Apple最大的对手。它正在领导一个联盟，来建立一个叫Android的开放式操作系统，它将会被应用在下一代的手机和其它的消费设备中。这个叫Open Handset Alliance的联盟有34个成员，包括有移动电话运营商和手持设备制造商，比如摩托罗拉、LG电子、三星、中国移动、Sprint Nextel和T-Mobile等等。虽然Google的CEO艾里克·施密特也在Apple的董事会，虽然乔布斯也尊敬Google，把它的软件装入了iPhone，但值得注意的是，Apple还是不在该联盟里。

这个似乎是个方言中“frenemies”的例子，公司之间既在某些业务上合作，又在其它一些业务上彼此竞争。

Google宣布，第一部Android手机将于下半年面市，极有可能会和新iPhone的发布撞车。在最近的一次Google开发者会议上，Google首次展示了一部运行了该系统的通用手机。带触摸屏，内置的运动感应加速度计还能在Google地图上精确地标出使用者的位置，这部手机一点儿也不像iPhone。Google的移动平台经理安迪·鲁宾解释说，Android是一个像Facebook一样的开放平台，开发者可以自己修改代码。他还说，开发者们目前已经写出了1800种以上的程序，都放在Google网站上以供下载，并像Youtube一样按受欢迎度进行了排序。“有不少极有创意的东西，”鲁宾说。“这是把手持设备和网络整合之后的全新产物。”

为了促进软件的开发，Google举办了一个比赛，最终会给最佳的十款软件颁发27.5万美元的奖金。罗伯特·拉姆编写的Eco2go上个月进入了争夺大奖的50人大名单，他说，他编写这款软件，是为了帮助用户计算和减少他们的碳足迹。选择在Android平台而不是iPhone平台上开发，是因为前者比后者简单得多。在iPhone平台上开发“要花年费才能让我们的软件显示网站上，而且我们还要向Apple进献我们收入的30%，”拉姆说。不过，在Eco2go发布之后，他现在已经在寻求把这个软件装入iPhone中的办法。iPhone最终会变得非常非常流行，到那个时候，互相抵制也就没有意义了。

没错。和他一样，在这场战争中，我支持每个竞争者——可能哈佛大学的齐特林会不同意——因为我们消费者总会是获益者。安德森有一个说法是对的：网络如此之大，不可能被谁掌控。在我看来，有Google在这儿顶着，不管是Facebook还是其它什么公司都不可能实现对网络的垄断。而且，我相信扎克伯格所说Facebook会永远开放的承诺。这招很聪明，他也是个明白人。最后，我还是想要一台新iPhone。虽然它总会过时，但是对于现在来说怎么样呢？伟大的技术时时会有，而我们则像神仙一样快乐地享受生活。