Why are Apple & Google winning?

• They understand the impact of performance on users' decision making.
• Google is passionate about fast response times and good performance of all of their systems.
• Apple is consumed with producing the best quality and highest performing devices.

Why is Microsoft losing?

• MS software performs poorly.
• They accept poor performance as "good enough".
• MS's culture is hanging onto outmoded user expectations regarding performance.

Today's Tech Leaders Understand Performance

Google is winning because they place a very high priority on performance. They are impressive because they are possessed with being fast.

Their search engine has always been the speed demon, and that appealed to all of us...not just geeks, but even my mom can tell the difference. She recently made Chrome her default browser because it runs so much faster.

I've been impressed with Google's engineers because they invest in speeding up everything. They even give away cool performance tools like PageSpeed in order to help the whole world make sites faster.

They not only provide tools for Chrome, but they also have PageSpeed Insights for Firefox. It sure seems to me that high performance is a pervasive part of the Google culture.

Have you heard of Google Now? It's the Android competitor to Apple's Siri. The latest advancements in voice recognition and functionality to make it useful. Well, here is another example of Google's passion for performance. Google Now is fast. BusinessInsider interviewed Hugo Barra, Google's Android product manager who reported that his team spent months shaving seconds off the response time. The early reports from users indicate it's very fast - "nearly instantaneous" according to BusinessInsider.

Would you argue that performance is not key to Google's DNA? Isn't it a key reason they are so successful? Performance = Google.

I'm convinced their engineers are some of the best and brightest on the planet, and they understand that speed sells. Performance = business success. Performance = technology leadership.

Apple has surpassed MS in company value and is the leader in technology. Apple has always taken a different approach and has shown how to be a driver in the global tech industry by employing integrated strategies between software and hardware. Performance is greatly enhanced by optimizing all the parts of the technology (e.g. iPhone) together.

Sales of smart phones and tablets are exceeding traditional computers, and the tightly constrained resources of mobile devices demand performance tuning that is enabled by hardware/software integration.

Not only the device, but also websites and cloud applications must run fast with fewer glitches. That's one of the key reasons why Apple's iCloud has been such a big success with the masses. It works well. It is fast. It performs up to expectations for a world full of impatient users.

Gartner reports 13.8% increase in mobile device sales in the second quarter of 2010 over 2009 Q2.

Load testers should take note that global access to web sites is becoming more common from smartphones. In fact, smartphone sales are now up 50.5% from the same period in 2009.