There’s been a statement going around for a while that says Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at services. To which I reply, duh! Google bought a hardware company! I’d hope they are getting better at design.

The shape of the mobile market has changed since that day when Google acquired Motorola. Yes, Motorola is still a separate company but all the same I’m certain the experiences and expertises have leached into Google. Since then, the Nexus devices and Chromebook devices have only gotten nicer. I have a Nexus 7 tablet here and can honestly say that it is by far the nicest of the Android tablets that I’ve played with.

Meanwhile, Apple continues to struggle with services. MobileMe became iCloud and still there are endless problems in making them work correctly. Ping came and went. Now Apple’s maps has received plenty of criticism. Four years ago I watched a small Oregon company, Urban Airship, come about. Urban’s business was to make notifications really simple.

My colleagues and I never thought the service would take off not because we thought Urban Airship wasn’t doing something useful but because we thought Apple would provide the service. After all it is one thing to provide the operating system hooks and another completely to make it easy to use. Apple never did it and Urban Airship is now approaching 100 employees on two continents.

Will Apple get better at services? I’m certain Apple can be good at whatever it turns its attention to. But I know Google has gotten better at design, and a big part of the reason is because Google recognized it needed the expertise, went out and acquired it.

Jean-Louis Gassée has written a couple of interesting pieces lately on the viability of the iPad as a productivity tool. The first, called The Missing Workflow, outlines how creating a simple blog post is very complicated on an iPad:

For example, can I compose this Monday Note on an iPad? Answering in the affirmative would be to commit the Third Lie of Computing: You Can Do It. (The first two are Of Course It’s Compatible and Chief, We’ll be in Golden Master by Monday.)

I do research on the Web and accumulate documents, such as Dan Frommer’s blog post mentioned above. On a PC or Mac, saving a Web page to Evernote for future reference takes a right click (or a two finger tap).

On an iPad, things get complicated. The Share button in Safari gives me two clumsy choices: I can mail the page to my Evernote account, or I can Copy the URL, launch Evernote, paste the URL, compose a title for the note I just created, and perhaps add a few tags.

Once I start writing, I want to look through the research material I’ve compiled. On a Mac, I simply open an Evernote window, side-by-side with my Pages document: select, drag, drop. I take some partial screenshots, annotate graphs (such as the iPad Pro prices above), convert images to the .png format used to put the Monday Note on the Web…

On the iPad, these tasks are complicated and cumbersome.

The second article, entitled iPad and File Systems: Failure of Empathy, outlines how the hidden file system complicates, well, everything:

This is all well and good, but with success comes side effects. As the iPad gets used in ways its progenitors didn’t anticipate, another failure of empathy looms: Ignoring the needs of people who want to perform “complicated” tasks on their iPads.

When the iPad was introduced, even the most obliging reviewers saw the device as a vehicle for consumption, not creation. David Pogue in the New York Times:

“…the iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on.”

This is still true…but that hasn’t stopped users from trying — struggling — to use their iPads for more ambitious tasks: Building rich media presentations and product brochures, preparing course material, even running a business. Conventional wisdom tells us that these are tasks that fall into the province of “true” personal computers, but these driven users can’t help themselves, they want to do it all on their iPads. They want the best of both worlds: The power of a PC but without its size, weight, (relative) unresponsiveness, and, certainly, price.

And this, frankly, is the iPad’s shortcoming. I love my iPad. I use it constantly and even for some basic content creation. But there is no way I’m editing Excel files, doing full-blown Word docs, creating a PowerPoint, even trying to create a blog post with more than text. Even taking notes on an iPad, with fat fingers and styli, is ridiculous. It’s just not conducive to those tasks.