To be frank Google wants to actively discourage, native app development. And they are right, their vision involves everyone using Web as their source for information or applications.
The only issue is that internet is not as ubiquitous as they would want it to be. But wait for 2-3 years and then we will live in truly internet filled world.
Regarding iPhone, Apple wants to own all parts of their users experience, which is even worse than having crapware.
Apple is one of the most old-world corporate minded corporation. and wants resurgence of old large corporate entities like newspapers, etc. They want an internet which is about selling stuff by large corporations to general consumers and not about sharing information between people.
They are the ones who slept with crappy companies such as EMI.
A reason why I would join Microsoft / Google rather than Apple.
I have found employees of the former two to be much more interactive with outside world, compared to Apple employees.
Also Microsoft, Google and other companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Twitter go to great lengths to make sure that they provide best compensation and benefits to their software engineers, somehow Apple always makes their software engineers look like secondary citizens and i doubt if they even pay well.
The only thing that i care about is that it helps a lot for doing incremental searches, e.g. if you are searching for someone, you can add keywords like their occupation, university expertise and it works really well.
most of the ppl crying over this are doing this because now there SEO is all messed up and people can look for things that they want much more efficiently. Consider so many people who rather looked at results that they got rather than modifying their searches. also people will choose top 5-6 results, so if your results are not in top 5-6 they are worth much less.
All this talk is nothing but google hate.
if you just dont want to use this feature press enter every time you type.
why MSFT operating systems, they can just go and catch everyone with jail broken Apple ipods. and seize all computers, including linux and unix boxes stating that they were used for jailbreaking.
an MS in CS probably, and its worth it for Indian students, Assuming you get admitted to a descent school, you need to pay ~ 50 k$ [lesser if you get TA or RA ship] for a year or two, and then you can get jobs that pay around 75k+.
also you are assured an employment status for at least 29 months post graduation.
Note: I am assuming a Good School [GATECH, Columbia, Cornell, TAMU, UT Austin, NCSU] and a good student.
you can pay back entire loan in at most three years, even earlier if you end up at MSFT, or similar places. Parents generally pay a significant portion of the tuition using their savings.
Also undergraduate education is damn cheap in India, Tuition is around 2K - 8K$ for four years. Hence most of the students are debt free.
he is in India with yearly salary of 14K$ at best, even if saves his entire salary he would need 3-4 years to pay for an MS degree in USA. also professors cant help much since they are flooded by emails from students.
Loan is an option, one can get loan for around 40k$ but it requires some property to be mortgaged.
I guess you are in India, here is my advice, if you wish to do a Graduate degree in USA with full scholarship:
Rather than working on startup full time, you can try doing research under some good professor, at IIT or IIIT maybe. Try getting few conference publications. Plus try getting a good GRE score. If you can do that then getting fully funded PhD or MS in Computer Science wont be too difficult. WWW 2011 conference is slated to be in India, though the deadline for papers in around 40 days away, by doing interesting research you can try getting at least a poster accepted. That will help significantly in your applications.
There are several ways to fund your education in US, you can try to go to a universities where TA and RA positions are easier, these colleges are tougher to get into, but with good research they wont be that difficult. Also you are allowed to work 20hours on campus, you can try for CO OP jobs they pay around 10 -25 $ per hour, they may not cover your entire living costs but would cover substantial portion of it.
I saw your current twitter app, even though it is a nice implementation, professors and admission committees are looking for creative and research oriented endeavors, rather than skills for creating web apps. An MS student at a good company such as Google, MSFT, Amazon, Oracle, or Yahoo makes around 75 - 90 K a year in base salary and additional 25-30 k in stocks, options or bonuses. And then you would be much better equipped to launch your startup. a good PhD candidate earns even more. if you end up as a Quant on wall street you would earn significantly higher amounts.
Which universities did you get into? A good idea would be to work on a broader research subjects, which many professors in that university study. that will increase your chances for an RA position.