Google has placed its faith in data, while Apple worships the power of design. This dichotomy made the two companies complementary. Apple would ship the phones and computers, while Google would provide Maps, Search, YouTube, and other web tools that made the devices more useful.

Building a successful company (or living a happy life, for that matter) is not about embracing someone else's philosophy, but staying true to your own beliefs about the world and learning from the mistakes you make along the way.

Windows Updates have sometimes been a pain point for users. The update pop-ups can interrupt a movie or a video game, and the automatic restarts can result in lost data or confused users.

Google is famous for making the tiniest changes to pixel locations based on the data it accrues through its tests. Google will always choose a spartan webpage that converts over a beautiful page that doesn't have the data to back it up.

Trending topics helped make Twitter a more relevant metric of what the world was talking about at any given moment. Google has worked for years in the space, most notably with Google Trends and Hot Searches, but Google+ offers the search giant the ability to see what is truly trending in real time.

I'm proud to call myself a Mashable alumnus.

Difficult situations require compassion, level-headedness & the empathy to see issues from somebody else's perspective.