Posts by Armando 123 1116 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2011
"That is really how fucked up the internet is, the men with the most money can tell sites like this what to tell everyone through the power of advertising budgets."
This is different from other media ... how? It's always been this way.
Mine's the one with Mencken's "Newspaper Days" in the pocket.
I remember those days well. I cut my programming teeth on a TRS-80 with the slowest cassette reader in the world; there might have been one on Sirius 4 that was slower, but for Earth, this was it. Some days you could count the individual 1s and 0s. The Apple II was a godsend, and both were before the IBM PC came around. And IIRC you had Burroughs and Unisys and someone else selling mainframes then.
And I did convert a program from punch card FORTRAN66.
Anyone else remember when C was a high-level language and vi made file editing quick and simple?
Two other things, in conjunction, pushed the market IBM-ward. First, the mantra at the time was "no one has been fired for going with IBM". So when corporations started to impose standards on PCs, those standards were decided largely by people with a mainframe background who knew nothing about personal computers. Naturally, they defaulted to IBM or at least IBM-compatible machines. Then, when people bought a computer for personal use, they wanted "something I can use with work". Which increasingly meant IBM-compatible machines.
There were other factors, to be sure, but I don't think this factor gets enough notice by people writing about that era.
I said that while the design-by-committee approach worked for, say, an OS a la BSD or language a la Perl, it didn't work with a user interface a la Gnome. That's where Apple is king, their UI may not be perfect but it is consistent and well thought out and, whatever its faults it, reflects one vision on how things should work. I don't think "hodge podge" is used to describe OS X's user interface.
Apparently we now have even more proof of this.
Design is often protected under law, to the extent that, if consumers could easily confuse the two items, then the copycat must cease and desist. And keep in mind that most consumers aren't tech-savvy in the least, anymore that we, as tech site readers, are fashion-conscious in the least.
Having worked on a couple similar things, I'd say that this is a huge opportunity for Apple but with huge steps to overcome as well. If they bring this operation in-house, it will tie up a lot of resources who might be of more use elsewhere and it might not work well unless those resources know China well. If they farm it out, will it still be of the kind of quality Apple is known for? Tricky.
Ford did this in the 60s and 70s.
I see what you're saying, but think about this: would you, as an American, rather have 10,000 people working in a high-volume low-profit-margin business that is susceptible to small changes in the economic environment, or 10,000 people in 20 new businesses in a variety of industries spending their intelligence and effort on new things that may be more profitable?
You may be right. Let me think out loud a second: imagine you own a cell phone company. Android looks bad now with the Googorola deal. iOS is unavailable. Windows Mobile, or whatever it's called, doesn't seem like a great option as its market share is hitting rock bottom and looking for pickaxes. Bada has issues and I doubt Samsung would license it.
This just might make sense. I'm not saying it would work, but it just might make sense.
This is nothing new. Remember these classic lines from P.G. Wodehouse:
"It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of medical thought."
And
"I felt so dashed sorry for poor old Corky that I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself."
(These might not be verbatim as I'm going from memory.)
I think this is one of those stats that, as @Some Beggar said, is a smallish annual or daily filter that gets magnified when calculated over the years. You know, like taxation on sports tickets, gasoline, etc. And the more they tax, the more alcohol appeals, so there y'are.
Okay, I have an advanced degree, own an iPhone, and like a good Riesling. However, I also own a chainsaw, go squirrel and deer hunting, have season tickets to the local NFL team, and like watching dirt-track sprint and midget races.
And I refuse to eat sushi; I've cleaned too many fish to do that.
OTOH, I do know a couple Android users who keep trying to argue that I paid too much for my iPhone and that their phone is just as good. They say the same thing about their Korean cars and my VW Golf ... until we raced.
PETA is a bunch of commie/hippy loops who have delusions of reality; I've often thought if releasing snakes and rabid wolves in their offices would make them feel closer to nature. Dog fighters deserve to be smeared in pig blood, tied down in the pits, and have hungry fighting dogs let loose. (The things I've seen working with canine rescue groups would sicken you.)
If these two groups wipe each other out, I'm for it.
I've dealt with them off-and-on over ... seven years now? Gad, I'm getting old(er) ... and no complaints. Now granted, certain options might be better or cheaper at certain things, but for enterprise-level Linux, they're definitely an unbad option, in my experience.
Apple having iTunes and the iTunes/App store already built gave them a huge advantage here. I know that most Reg readers have a strong dislike of Apple's iTunes/App store, but for most consumers, having their music and phone apps right there ready to transfer is a huge bonus.
If an editor has two writers with two very different opinions on a topic, it makes sense to have each one write an article on the subject. Generates links, readers, responses, etc, also gives the impression that you're a good place for open debate, which is good for "branding".
[BTW, is anyone else here old enough to remember when branding was something that Texans did to cattle?]
Given all your premises, you make a good case, but there are quite a few if clauses in it.
Remember, MS dominated the PC market because they sold to businesses and people bought their first computer based on what they had at work. Tablets are going to be different. First, most workplaces don't use tablets and those that do probably aren't using MS. Second, an iPad is $500 in 2011 vs a PC being $2000 in 1982. Adjust for inflation/wages, and we're talking a tablet being 1/10 or less the investment of someone's first PC.
Keep in mind that part of the success of the iPod was that it was dead easy to use. Senior citizens with absolutely zero aptitude for technology could figure out how to use it and how to get music onto it. It wasn't cheap, but it didn't feel cheap and was a great design: simple, looked good, and felt good. Apple went into the market and ran roughshod over, first at the high end and then into the less profitable low end, with iTunes and the iTunes Store as its secret weapon.
The phone and tablet markets are different, but I suspect Apple's approach -- making the whole widget to provide you a solution -- may work here as well. The PC is about the only consumer electronic device I can think of where you don't get the whole thing from one company. Microsoft makes the software, someone else makes the hardware, and the enhancements/applications are made by MS or third parties. Using PCs always feels a bit half-assed to me, whereas Macs, whatever their shortcomings, at least have reasons behind the shortcomings. I might disagree, but there seems to be a logic there rather than a hack.
We'll see how it plays out, of course, but I suspect that Google made a mistake here. MS took a few years to get the idea of hardware/software down in the previous decade ... and even then, they have a high return rate on things XBox and the Danger fiasco ... and MS had been making customer-facing software for a lot longer than Google has.
Either way, I'm grabbing some popcorn and an adult beverage. This should be good; certainly more interesting than baseball or NASCAR.
In strategic terms, it might be that Google blinked and now they're trying to play Apple's game of providing you the whole widget: hardware, software, etc. Remember, Apple sells solutions; everything they sell is part of a solution: the iPhone is part of the mobile music solution, as is iOS and the iTunes store.
The amazing thing to me is not that a lot of people like us don't get this; it's that a lot of industry leaders don't get this, either.
The iPad is dead simple to use. I know someone who gets confused by mouse and keyboard. No sh*t, this person is an adult, chronologically, and is so far from ept that his user skills on a computer would cause jaw-dropping amongst ElReg readers. But he has no problem using an iPad.
It may be dumbed down, but sometimes what you're doing would work fine on a dumbed down interface.
I wouldn't say Apple rips off its customers. It provides hardware/software/solutions to people who, if they don't want them, can go elsewhere. If people aren't satisfied with Apple's customer service, they can go elsewhere. If people find someone offering something better, they can go elsewhere.
Now, you might think Apple is ripping people off, and for all I know they are, but their customers don't seem to agree and that group has been growing fairly steadily for the past ten years.
I don't consider any company ideal, really, just as no person is. However, Apple seems to have been better as a business partner, at least in backing their business partners in lawsuits, and have done a pretty decent job working with the OSS community. Choosing one or the other, I'd probably go with Apple because of this and some other factors as well, though of course YMMV.
Look, I'm the father of two boys who are nearly teens. Trust me, I see a good bit of googlish behavior in them ALREADY. I get enough of that at home that I don't need more of it in the office.
Apple has been, by and large, a good company wrt open source software. Not perfect, of course, but no one is.
They've done a lot with/for CUPS/zeroconf, the webkit engine, gcc and g++, and other OSS projects. They've also supported those who've been under legal attack for using Apple's software and services, when the attackee has done so in agreement with Apple's licenses.
Again, they haven't been 100% accurate in this ... no organization that's done as much as they have could be ... but if I were starting a company or a project today, I'd much prefer to work with Apple than Google. Heck, lately even MS has shown it's better at backing up its business partners than Google is. And let's let that sentence sink in for a moment.
There is one difference. Unlike SmartBoard, Apple's products will likely work. We had SmartBoards at one place I contracted to recently and I think we had meetings where we spent more time trying to get them to work than actually having the meeting. I don't know if we had a Monday Morning board or what ...
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