Jon: Welcome to episode 130 of the Digital Life the show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hi-de-ho Jon.

Jon: Today Dirk I wanted to revisit one of our favorite topics on the Digital Life with a slightly different lens. Over the years we have noted the rivalry and the back and forth between some of the top tech companies for that prime spot, namely Apple and Google have been among the top 2 over the past 5 years or so. I think you've noted on more than one occasion how Apple seemed to be losing some of its mojo. I believe you had a prediction for this year that it was going to be the downward slope for Apple as the dominant tech company, although it might not necessarily feature in their stock price, not necessarily this year, but that there was going to be some significant change in the way Apple was viewed. I notice, lo and behold, I was reading a publication I enjoy online, Fast Company, and there were two very notable authors, mainly because they came from the design side of Apple, that's Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini, very famous interaction designer, basically started the IxDA and Done Norman, usability guru well known.

Both of those had contributed to this rather long article, this long screed that was entitled "How Apple is Giving Design a Bad Name". Now aside from the reference to the '80s Bon Jovi song "You Give Love a Bad Name" which always rings out in my head as a child of generation X, that's a pretty strong statement for these two guys who basically came out of the Apple shop at one point, helped establish Apple as a design powerhouse and they're not looking at what have we wrought, what is the incarnation of Apple currently. It is not as some would like to think of it as the paragon of design anymore. There are lots of reasons for it but I wanted to get your reaction to that first and then dig into that topic a little bit more.

Dirk: Yeah. A lot of people are finally talking about it, Apple especially on the software side, Apple's software design has been garbage for a really long time, garbage. Now finally people are talking about it, people are calling them on the carpet for it. That's good because they can't be allowed to keep getting away with it. Software's garbage.

Jon: Do you think that this decline is reflective of the absence of Steve Jobs at the helm? What do you think? Did it start happening during his tenure? What do you think?

Dirk: I think Apple's never done software well. They've had moments where they come out with Keynote and Keynote is better than PowerPoint, okay great, incrementally better this one piece of software. But if you go back and look at all of Apple software over all of time, the vast majority of it has always been total garbage. They've never done software well. They've been a hardware company, they've done hardware well but on the software side it's been really barren. I think it's only now that their hardware is becoming more mediocre that the software is being held accountable too.

Jon: Do you think Apple has reach the tech summit and has more or less become what we thought of Microsoft in the '90s as being a more business oriented, less user friendly kind of bully in the tech space now? Is that what they offer it as?

Dirk: I think the connotations are different. I don't know that Apple's operating as a bully by any means. What happened with Microsoft in the '90s was very different than what's happening with Apple now. Microsoft earned their business success by ruthless business practice, by monopolistic ownership of personal computing to some degree over a period of time. Apple's dominance is both less dominant by far than Microsoft's ever was, but it was built on the back of design, it was built on the back of creating new markets and featuring products that were a clear cut above. I will certainly say that Apple now is cycling down,