Today, the world is divided into two separate halves, Apple and Google.
Hmm... So lets start with Apple. [Though I hate it the most]
Apple has changed many people's lives, almost everyone in the street owns a Shuffle. Apple owns some very popular brand-names (other than Mac) like iPod, iPhone, iPad. It owns the world's largest music store, iTunes.
Google on the other hand, from the beginning has focused on the Cloud. It started from a search engine, which had something better than Yahoo! and AltaVista.
There is no verb like "to apple", but "to google" is one of the most frequently used verbs by us. Google has shifted the whole cloud networking network from our systems to our phones with its Android OS. Four years ago Google and Apple were just two distinct sectors of the IT industry and now for every other product of Apple, Google has an answer (or vice-versa).
To compete with Apple's [tombstone] iPhone, Google launched Nexus. To challenge Gmail, Apple launched me.com.
These days its the Apple-Google war everywhere like, Safari vs. Chrome, iAd vs. AdSense, iPhoto vs. Picasa, iTunes vs. YouTube, and the biggest of 'em all! The "iOS versus the Android OS"!
By now, Android is the most selling smartphone system [xD]. Google has empowered around 70% of the smartphone manufacturers with its Android operating system. (LG, Samsung, Micromax, HTC)
In the second innings of Steve Jobs (when he came back after he was thrown out of Apple by John Sculley), whatever Apple manufactured, from the iPod to the iPad, were one of the greatest successes of all time, while Google is more into experimenting, it had some greatest disasters like Buzz (everything was public, even our contact details :O ), Wave (I found it interesting but most of the people found it complicated) and some greatest achievements like Orkut (the place where I actually learnt social-networking), Gmail, Google Instant, Street View.
Some of the Google's most awaited and recent products include Google Books, Google Music, its Realtime search function, Google Cr-48 Netbook, etc.
In my final verdict I would like to say that, for me, Apple is kinda expensive, while Google is cheap and it ain't an evil! Apple is just restricted to some limited boundaries while google is focused on Cloud Computing and thus it supports everything, everywhere.
