Slashdot Mirror
Startups a Safer Bet Than Behemoths
Former Slashdot editor ScuttleMonkey raises his voice from the great beyond to say that "TechCrunch's Vivek Wadhwa has a great article that takes a look at difference between startups and 'established' tech companies and what they each mean to the economy and innovation in general. Wadhwa examines statistics surrounding job creation and innovation and while big companies may acquire startups and prove out the business model, the risk and true innovations seems to be living at the startup level almost exclusively. 'Now let's talk about innovation. Apple is the poster child for tech innovation; it releases one groundbreaking product after another. But let's get beyond Apple. I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. Google certainly doesn't fit the bill—after its original search engine and ad platform, it hasn't invented anything earth shattering. Yes, Google did develop a nice email system and some mapping software, but these were incremental innovations. For that matter, what earth-shattering products have IBM, HP, Microsoft, Oracle, or Cisco produced in recent times? These companies constantly acquire startups and take advantage of their own size and distribution channels to scale up the innovations they have purchased.'"
"Start me up..." TWANG TWANG.
They don't innovate. They scrape the internet looking for ideas, making products that are "just different enough" to avoid existing patents, and they buy up startup companies just as you describe. Just because Apple has better press management skills doesn't mean they don't have similar business practices. Apple is not an exception -- stop dodging this just to please the fanboys.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Wait... Apple is a "tech innovator"? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Wrong. Apple uses last gen (or barely current gen) tech in their devices, and trots them out in shiny packages with pretty UIs. Sorry, epic fail.
How many false stories have they "broken?"
And now this fluff piece?
Here's another earth-shattering conclusion: People with more to lose take fewer risks.
Also, please define "safer bet." That certainly isn't with regard to investment safety.
"I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple--with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad."
VMWare. It's owned 80% by EMC, which is a behomoth and totally innovation free. Yet VMWare puts out a lot of very innovative products.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Google made Wave* and GWT which are both quite innovative solutions.
*And then dropped it again.
Google has quite a few features I use a lot that noone else offers. Google Docs for things I like to keep location neutral while still having full create and edit abilities while not downloading anything. Google Voice to keep my phone number portable along with all its other features. Android running on my as well as millions of other smartphones. etc. Google doesn't innovate? Sounds like selective memory with a bias towards Apple to me. About par for a Slashdot submission as of late.
Oh you mean how apple buys up startups to produce their products or how the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad were really just incremental innovations of other services and products that people were already offering?! Yea, I agree. Apple is the greatest tech company, but lets be honest; they are more polisher than innovator.
For those of you who are new to the tubes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Nomad, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PressPlay, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_pc
Yes, Apple's products did improve upon all these ideas, but they weren't earth shattering. They just used Apple's "size and distribution channels to scale up the innovations" and bring it to the masses.
Apple isn't actually very innovative. They have had one good idea and the rest is just taking that idea and cramming whatever stuff they can into it.
They are just polished products - there is nothing ground breaking about them per se.
All were preceded by someone else doing largely the same thing, Apple just has good user experience on top of the same ideas that everyone else had, is having, and will have in the future. Sales success != innovation
How are the ipod, iphone and ipad innovations? They were better styled than competitors but hardly the first digital music player/smartphone/tablet computer. Maybe my memory is going but we had mp3 players before the ipod and smartphones before the iphone, right?
Surely what apple was doing with its iblank is just as incremental with what Google is labeled with here?
"Google certainly doesn't fit the bill—after its original search engine and ad platform, it hasn't invented anything earth shattering." Playing down the accomplishments of large, established companies doesn't mean they're not innovative, but it does seem to indicate bias by the author.
Apple is over 30 now. Of the four examples given in the OP only one might qualify as real innovation.
But let's get beyond Apple. I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
Um...how about the #1 smartphone OS?
Apple makes nice front ends to existing technology. The innovation at Apple takes place in its marketing department.
I'm an angel investor, so I can talk fairly competently on this subject.
Let's compare a well known behemoth (IBM) with a well known start-up (Twitter).
If I invest in IBM, I'm guaranteed a healthy return. Barring any major disaster, IBM will consistently return a profit on what I invest.
If I invest in Twitter, I'm not guaranteed a healthy return. My returns may be enormously higher than investing in IBM if the company is successful, and I might lose my entire investment if the company goes bankrupt.
This actually has some real world ramifications for me. The majority of my money is stored away in Corporate Bonds for major companies, because I know that I have a very low probability of losing the money and a very high probability of seeing at least a two to three percent return on my money every year. That's what makes behemoths a safer bet than start-ups. I only give about 15% of my assets towards start-ups at any time, because for the most part, I will break even in what I invest or lose about five to six percent of my investments.
I angel invest in companies for the fun and excitement of creating something, not because I want to make money.
It's not even valid to compare the number of patents a company takes out, as a measure of it's innovative measure, since everyone is patenting everything as a marketing ploy to stop other people doing it first.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
IBM innovates more than just about anyone, but most of it is behind the scenes. How about GMR disk technology, for one? Before that, a terrabyte took up a whole room. Now it sits in your hand. Never mind a lot of memory and CPU tech. Problem with IBM is, since it's the biggest of the behemoths, it can be hard to look below the layers of marketing and management to see the cool stuff going on. The startups get a lot of press because they're trying to be seen. That raises capital. The bigger companies with established capital keep their innovations close to the vest till they're ready to exploit. That way, even if they have to share them with others, they still have a bit of a head start.
Agreed.
If you think that the iPad is a groundbreaking innovation and (for example) Google Docs is not, you're seriously biased. Both are "incremental innovations". Tablets have been around for a long time, and so have office suites. While Google did improve some things, like collaborative editing, Apple did just improve the UI without adding any remarkable technical features.
The term "technical" is far to often used for things that are clearly not technical (like UIs), just because they are used on electronic devices like phones and computers.
PS: I'm not a Google fanboi (i don't use it at all), I just used it as a comparison.
How the hell are a crappy set of cellphone, laptops that are 2x the price for the same specs, and media players that cannot play common formats considered earth shattering?
The only thing innovating about Apple is their ability to market to the tweens to Gen XYZ crowd.
Their hardware is subpar.
VMware is innovative and Earth shattering, Google is innovative and earth shattering. There was nothing like Google Earth of the scale of google maps prior.
Really, this is not news. Higher risk means higher expected returns, if there weren't higher expected returns, noone would invest their money into higher risk ventures. Large Cap companies widthstand widespread financial turmoil better, but Small Cap companies tend to climb out of a recession faster and have much higher growth potential. This is simple logic
Google *is* innovating. It does so in a similar way as Philip Glass music. You listen to it and you barely notice how it evolves and keep adding to the whole, but should make the effort of listening to the beginning and then the end, there is a *huge* difference between them. Google is slowly but surely changing our lives. Apple is more about blowing our mind, which honestly besides the iPhone, there is not much else that did it. Small incremental innovation is still innovation.
Intelligence shared is intelligence squared.
Was providing satellite imagery of the entire world to a level where I can make out the plants in my garden, and then providing street view for every single road in my country something that was done by a startup and then bought by Google? Or is something anyone could do with a weekend and a camera mounted on their car?
"with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad"
I'm glad to know Apple spent many hours inventing all these things and then gave away their ideas years - and sometimes - decades before they released their own version. Why, I bet the even told Xerox how to make a GUI!
Indeed, the few things Apple truly invented on their own flopped - though in their defense most truly new ideas *do* flop. Apples innovation is in marketing and their reality distortion machine, not their products (see antenna detuning, macbooks sharp front edge for a number of years, insistence on a one button mouse for years, etc).
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
Real innovation means that their existing products no longer sell because everyone buys the innovative product.
So why would an established company scrap their existing investment?
What they want is something new enough to be interesting ... but not different enough to threaten their cash cows ... that supplements their existing product line.
Apple is great at that. Look at the iPhone. New iterations of their existing product that never threatens their laptop / desktop computer segment. But can supplement it and works well with it.
It is only the startups that don't have an existing investment to threaten that will take the real risks.
Which is why software patents are bad. They allow the existing companies to sue the startups and limit the innovation.
The author seems to be taking an awfully narrow view of innovation, as if it only matters what occurs in front-page consumer electronics. All of the big companies he names are quite innovative in commercial software and hardware in systems like industrial control, telecommunications and finance that are too complex and specialized to make the splashy tech news. Occasionally news of some big company innovation like IBM's new mainframe makes it to the front page, and reading about the history and technical details of an achievement like that gives some realization of the magnitude of technical progress and innovation going on behind the scenes.
Explorers discover or invent things. Pioneers are early adopter to integrate and make useful these inventions. Settlers reap and create a bussiness ecosystem around the places proven by pioneers. Apple has mainly been a pioneer, and microsoft a settler. Apple did not invent the GUI or Dynamic Memory, or Switching power supplies, or Post script or the Mouse. But they did pioneer the use of those technologies. Microsoft and dell/compaq settled those. They did not invent or truly pioneer MP3 players but they did advance that sufficiently to call it their own and then they settled it. Apple did not invent unix, but they did pioneer moving it from the etherial workstation market to the consumer market and now they have settled unix in the consumer market.
Other than their pioneering in search, Google is purely a settler in every market they occupy. Unix on devices, e-mail, documnet process, thin clients (aka "the cloud"). If you want to call google a pioneer then you have to think of it as a meta-pioneer: integration is really what they are about. But That is almost the definition of settling.
Microsoft did pioneering work in a few areas such as windows GUI on embedded devices. You might say that was apple or palm however.
Apple to it's credit actually does a lot of exploration you don't ever hear about. ARM processors? Power-PC processors? Firewire? Conformal Batteries? But they don't really play that angle up a lot. Lately I've been really impressed with microsoft's investment in the visualization field so maybe they are starting to innovate again.
I also suspect that Microsoft has a shot at becoming a settler in the "cloud" field. THeir new Azure technology seems to be just what bussinesses of many different sizes are going to need to go to managed IT.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Anybody who's worked at both ends knows this. Big companies don't do much organic growth because the small markets don't generate enough income and it's too hard to know what the big markets will be 3-5 years down the road. It's cheaper and safer just to let the market place itself out and then buy a promising company rather than invest in developing something and then probably end up buying a promising company because they have better technology or started from a somewhat different premise.
whos this moron? I thought slashdots for geeks? Not a Justin. Bieber loving teenagers.
Safer in what way? There are very good arguments for investing in the big companies like IBM, Coca Cola this is how Warren Buffet works and how he got so rich - read the Intelligent Investor by Graham (Buffets mentor)
Working for or investing in a VC company has a greater reward but also a greater risk. -I did not lose money on my BT share save scheme in one particularly good year people made $80,000k – unfortunately not me.
But I lost $1,000,000 on paper when the vc backed company I worked for in 2000 went down and that company was a coop, so I had a bigger sweat equity share than the average employee of a vc backed firm does by a long way.
Google Earth, aka. Keyhole EarthViewer 3D, you masochistic whore of a slashdot poster.
You know it is BS when they trot out the iPhone. Please explain to me how the iPhone is at all innovative. It is a touchscreen smartphone. Not only had I seen those before, I'd seen lots of them. The smartphone market was well established when Apple came in. They may have done theirs better than some others, they may have presented it in a package more attractive to consumers but those are not innovations, those are good design and marketing.
An innovative product is something that is new and different. It is something that people didn't think about before but now go "Oooo, I see a use for that." For example the microwave was an innovative product. It cooked food in a completely different way, using a different technology.
Apple hasn't been in to innovation much at all these days, but the iPhone is the worst example of all. It is their least innovative product, and an example of them going in to a well established market. None of that means it isn't a good product, or a popular one, but you need to separate those from innovative. After all, LCD TVs are an incredibly popular product these days, but certainly aren't innovative, we've had LCDs around for decades.
Unfortunately I think too many Apple fans drink the marketing kool-aid and think that everything Apple does is "innovative". They feel like that matters, for some reason, that somehow it isn't ok to but a product just because it is good and you like it.
The advantage of being big is being big.If you instead spent it on 100 small new innovations with no real interdependence, you're no better off than 100 small companies. The whole value is in being able to deliver integrated total solutions the smaller competition can't, it's the only thing justifying the bureaucracy and overhead of being a big company. Mostly they compete not head-to-head but almost like a game or RISK - plenty effort being made to support the borders and juicy cash cows in the center that nobody else manages to serve because it requires interoperability with everything else.
So yeah, almost all the innovation happens in small companies that are bought out. But that's where pretty much all the total failure is too. Big companies have their problems too but most of them never really go under except as a brand, they get bought up by somebody else if they're not doing well. And it's a little easy to say big companies don't innovate to stay big, for example Intel has been the 800lb gorilla in the chip market for quite some time now, but they've done everything but stand still. Even the few times they've taken a wrong path and AMD has caught up on them, that's because they made the wrong choices, not because they didn't try to innovate.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ok, first of all, how are you going to talk about 'startups' doing all the 'innovation' then go on and on about Apple, a company that's been around since 1977? Oh, wait, I forgot. Everything before OS X 10.0 was just a dark phantasmal nightmare of beige plastic and doesn't count.
Second of all, the likes of Apple don't create core routers capable of moving 322 terabits per second. They're also not creating electronic chess grand masters, are they? Nope. But at least they're shiny!
Disclaimer, I'm writing this on a MacBook Pro that I'm fairly fond of. It's a nice machine. It's hardly ground breaking or innovative. It has some nice features, and it looks pretty, but frankly I, think being able to move 322Tb/s through a router is a little more earth shattering than a fucking music player.
Big companies acquire and market, small startups do the real R&D. Increasing reliance on IP which means increasing reliance on government lobbying by the large corporations? At least FCC/FTC is no FDA...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Startups exist to either (a) do something wonderful or (b) begin a process of concentrating vast wealth and material resources.
Corporations AKA "behemoths", OTOH, exist to cement and maintain a successful concentration of wealth (for the execs and shareholders, not so much the rank and file).
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!!! This is the funniest thing I've read in years. Apple hasn't counted as a startup company in twenty years!
What earthshaking things have the giants done? Let's see...IBM's technologies underlie your high-capacity hard drives. Yeah, those ultra-high capacity drives? IBM developed the technology to record 1Gb/1" square. IBM patents more of its own stuff than any other company in the world, and tons of stuff rely on their development work. Cisco? Ever heard of the Internet? No, they didn't invent it, but without them it would not perform the way it does today.
Now, Apple's iPod? An iterative improvement on the original Walkman. Oh, wait...that was Sony, another giant company, that innovated the personal, portable digital storage media.
The references are all to hardware products. What about Gmail's innovation to get 8gigs in a free account? It used to be hard to get 50mb in your attached account. Innovation is not limited to physical products. I love most of apple's stuff, but this is awfully dismissive. It's an assessment of goals based on a narrow definition.
Is that innovation is often something that you can't see, because it applies to early tech. It happens behind the scenes, and you don't see the results for many years. For example is a scientist invents a process for using carbon nanotubes to produce sub 11nm processors right now, engineers won't be able to develop that in to a workable fab solution for probably a half a decade or more. Then once it is workable, it will take time to design a CPU using it, and build fabs to produce it. By the time yo have the 11nm CPU in your home, the technology is 10 years old.
Also it doesn't seem innovative on the surface. "Oh look, someone made a faster CPU, because that hasn't happened for the past 40 years." You don't see the massive innovation behind that faster CPU.
Consumer products are not on the cutting edge usually because you don't want cutting edge. The cutting edge is expensive, and riddled with problems because it is new. You want tech that has been developed and tested, that is easy and stable to use and can be purchased cheaply. Nothing at all wrong with that, it just means that you rarely see an innovative consumer device.
I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
GE, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemical, Intel, ARM Holdings...and most other large companies with big R&D budgets. All "tech" companies like Apple do is repackage technology developed and sold to them by companies like those I just listed and market them. Apple is an advertising and UI innovator. Good for them. The iPod isn't a game changing technology. It's a UI made possible by the R&D of true scientific innovators.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Don't know why this an "Apple Story", but ignoring that part, the article suggests an interesting premise; are startups better bets? More likely to innovate? Sure, I can buy that, startups are often founded around one or two ideas that none of the established companies are currently offering. Safer? Probably not, if one is thinking of investing, while there are exceptions established companies are more likely to play it conservative and far less likely to go belly up. Thing is as someone who is currently working at in a startup company working on a, imo anyway, potentially revolutionary product, the end goal of the vast majority of technology startups is simply to develop a product to the stage were you can get your patent portfolio purchased by a large established company. Who would then go on to taught the innovation as there own and develop it for mass market. If we could leave aside the Apple aspect. What does Slashdot actually think. Are small flexible startups better able to truly innovate? Or are large companies with, huge R&D budgets those pushing the boundaries? I can think of examples to support both sides.
If you want pound for pound revolutionary change to society, Google Maps has done way more to change our lives than the iPod, which is really just the next step on the evolutionary chain started by the Sony Walkman. Incremental, my ass. It has single-handedly democratized the way we interact with location and geographical information.
The iPhone was pretty revolutionary, though, touching off a revolution in how we integrate handheld devices into our social lives. And GMail is mostly a souped-up Hotmail that sucks slightly less.
Also, both Google and Apple began as startups with revolutionary products, and both have had hits and misses over the years.
I have no idea what the point of the original article was. None of its assertions sound remotely true.
He's being held hostage at Apple HQ. His job is to post slashvertisements to help combat stuff like this.
While Google's myriad diverse products are either ignored for convenience or brushed off as incremental, the author doesn't seem to notice that there might be something incremental about the four Apple products he mentions. Maybe he should try putting them next to each other?
He accuses the other big companies of buying their innovations, and forgets that Apple bought the idea (and dev team) for the iPod, and bought the OS and took the browser that it need to scale the iPod up to become iPhone and iPad.
Perhaps the author just wrote this ridiculous article to stir up controversy and get attention? Perhaps what is happening here is that people who don't understand technology only value innovations that they can put in their hands (helps if they are shiny too).
I would say that it takes more innovation to create diverse products like Go, Earth, Goggles, and Wave, then it does to buy the idea for the iPod, and it is the iPod that leads directly to each of Apple's four innovations.
with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
A - nothing "game changing" about ANY of those.
MP3 players (both hardware and software) existed for years before iPod.
So did mobile phones - many of them far better and more innovative than iPhone. FFS how many generations was it before iPhone was able to use MMS and copy/paste?
And iPad is nothing more than a big iPod. Again... tablets have been around for years before that.
Yes, Google did develop a nice email system and some mapping software, but these were incremental innovations.
B - Seriously? Some mapping software?
Was there actually something like Google Maps and Google Earth before Google released those? Something that I'm not aware of?
For free, might I add. Just like that "nice email system" that made mailbox sizes a thing of the past.
When was the last time Apple or MS gave away anything like that for free?
And C - ScuttleMonkey is basically contradicting himself.
First he goes on how patents are bad and tosses around an example of Apple and "over 1000 patents" connected to the iPhone.
Then, he goes on about patents being inherently bad for the "innovators" - and again tossing around an example of Apple as an innovator.
Well gosh darn! Apple must be magical like their commercials claim.
Not only is it an innovator, but a behemoth who is an innovator AND one that is immune to the patent-poison too.
And then he ends it all on a piece de resistance of this whole ordeal by making patents OK - but only if you are a startup.
Simply put, if we are serious about lifting the economy out of its rut, we need to focus all of our energy on helping entrepreneurs.
Provide them with the incentives (tax breaks and seed financing); education; and infrastructure.
And gear public policy--like patent-protection laws--toward the startups.
Not sure how is that supposed to work though.
Only startups get to patent things?
"Behemoths" like MS, Apple, Google, IBM etc. will not be allowed to buy patents? Or startups?
What good would it do to a startup then to patent anything unless they can sell or license it to make much needed cash?
And what will happen to a startup that grows into a "behemoth"? Google was a startup too about a decade ago.
Should startups and "behemoths" REALLY be forced to choose between making a profit and innovating - through legislation?
Gee... I wonder which path would they choose.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The only tech company I can think of that consistently innovates is Nintendo. From the analog stick, to the rumble pack, to motion controls. Nintendo is always out front with new and interesting ideas.
I'm sorry, but this is garbage.
Summary: "Apple is awesome. Everyone else sucks."
What could have been a valid point gets derailed by blatant fanboi blinders. Apple is NOT an innovative company either. It's an innovative spin doctor. They are good at convincing people they must have a trimmed down, stylized, and monetized versions of established technologies. iPod? MP3 players. iPhone? Smartphones. iPad? Tablets. iTunes? Napster.
Further, Apple is just as into buying up established tech and upstarts to inject life into its glossy image as everyone else (SoundJam MP). It even buys open source projects when parts it requires are at risk of being GPLv3'ed (CUPS). Hell, if it were not for FreeBSD's license terms, there probably wouldn't even be a OS X or iOS at all.
Putting Shinola on things is a far cry from being innovative.
Organizations and other social constructs by their very nature are geared towards stability and survivability. The larger they are, the more conservative they get.
Large organizations are inherently hostile to radical thought and behavior which are necessary for innovation. Their best strategy is to use their endless resources to search and buy small start-ups rather than to futilely try to innovate in a self-defeating environment.
I'm sorry, did we wake up in 2010 and forget the last 30 years of software development? Google continues to reinvent itself and encourage innovation, did we all forget what life was like back when Altavista was your best bet for a search engine? Did we forget that huge improvements in storage, artificial intelligence, and data mining have brought the world together with technologies like instantaneous automatic translation between a few dozen languages? The last 10 years have seen some of the most impressive free software ever released, and they're a giant corporate sponsor... Is someone living under a rock?
Was there actually something like Google Maps and Google Earth before Google released those? Something that I'm not aware of?
Yes. Google obtained that technology by acquiring Keyhole in 2004. Google Earth is just Keyhole rebranded. Keyhole had the zoom-in from orbit, the ability to fly over terrain, and the smooth dynamic switching to higher resolution data, just like Google Earth has now. But it was a pay product, one that cost about $79 a year. There was an NVidia promotion; a free version that only worked with NVidia graphics cards. I had a Keyhole subscription in my DARPA Grand Challenge days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoundJam_MP iTunes was not an apple innovation either...
today is spelling optional day.
This article presents valid data about the nature of ALL startups, then proceeds to extrapolate the data to tech startups. I don't think that there's a correlation between the general business data and tech, specifically. If anything, I would imagine that tech startups waste more money and create fewer jobs than non-tech businesses.
I don't respond to AC's.
Proof please.
Anyone who's actually done the legitimate math has found that Apple products are only a minimal amount more expensive ($100-ish) than a comparably built device from another company (they are more expensive, but minimally so). The problem is very few companies actually make devices that compare to the feature set that Apple offers by default. In order to get a comparable machine - a machine that has everything that the Apple machine offers and not just the same sized harddrive, RAM, and processor - one needs to add on numerous additional features that push the price up to a very comparable level.
But, hey, it you have proof that shows I'm wrong, feel free to post it and prove your claim. Until then, I'll just chalk your comment up to the typical anti-Apple hyperbole that is all too common lately.
Google is a data mining and advertising company. So when they give you "8 gigs free storage" it's for their benefit, not yours.
Innovation isn't dead at the big companies. I'm astonished at the new and Innovative ways large companies cut costs, layoff employees and sell out their countries all while operating above the law and governments that support them. It's good work if you can get it. Innovations happen at the business and ethical levels, not just technologies. Managers with MBA (me before anyone) degrees study these business complexities in great detail.
--edfardos
it is like when the local sports team gets a new stadium. all the money used for it would be economically better off given to small businesses and start-ups.
...
The ones that make it anyway. Do your research. A better statement would be: "If big money was made off of a company, that company was more likely a start up than a behemoth when the investment was made". A safer bet would be index funds. But most start ups fail, don't they? The keyword is safe. As in all sectors, to win big in tech, you'll have to take some risk, which by definition is not "safe".
HP ProBook 4720s Notebook PC - i7 CPU, 8GB ram, 500gb 7200rpm HD, AntiGlare, 3yr support: $1948
MacBook Pro 17": i7 CPU, 8GB ram, 500gb 7200rpm HD, AntiGlare, 3yr support: $3348
That seems like WAY more than $100 difference.
Plus, AppleCare support SUCKS ASS!
Why?
#1 No accidental breakage coverage.
- My wife's macbook LCD was broken by my kid, they wanted $750 to replace the LCD. Screw Apple.
- We bought the LCD on our own and I repaired it for under $85.
- I have dropped, crushed, etc my HP and Dell's with accidental replacement coverage and they replaced or fixed no questions asked.
#2 To get any sort of support and replacement you need to goto an Apple Store.
- If I want, I can have a goon come out and hand deliver a part or replace it.
#3 For most repairs, the laptop is shipped out for repair.
- My wife's piece of crap macbook spent over 2 months at the repair depot in 6 different repair issues, in the first 12 months owning it. Bad MB, and serious overheating issues, random poweroffs and blackscreens.
- We evenually filed a lemonlaw case against Apple to have it replaced with a new one. The new one too had overheating issues, but at least wouldn't randomly shutdown
#4 No "you keep the drive" support option.
- If I DO have to send my laptop in for repair, I do not want to have over all my sensitive business and personal material with it.
- With the case of my wife's laptop, and others, Apple has wiped the HD and reinstalled the OS just for trying to diagnose issues such as random reboots. This was done without asking. Luckily, I had backups of everything on her system.
Other Reasons Apple is not Pioneering?
- iPod copied the design of players already out, and even removed features those had which are beneficial
- iPhone was just another smartphone, except it was the only one that could only run 1 app at a time.
- iPad, out of the box, is way behind on performance and ability of other tablets that have been out.
- 'Earthshattering' iPods/iPhones/iPads: no true usb storage support options. Limited embedded hardware codecs. No ability to email attachments from the mail app.
Yes, I own an iPad. If I couldn't have jailbroken/rooted/crosscompiled cli apps from linux over to it, I wouldnt have bought it.
Yes, among all the laptops and systems we own, we have a macbook for my wife. Yes it is one of the largest purchase regrets I have made in the last few years.
Not very surprising for anyone who understands a free market ( what we don't have ) : this is corporate welfare at work.
Stealing and exploiting other people's ideas can be a pretty safe bet if you have very expensive lawyers.
It's a common observation that small companies hire more people than big ones. This is a myth. The small company jobs don't last as long. The numbers on people hired are easy to get, but the longitudinal studies which track workers over many years tell a different story. It's necessary to distinguish between career progress and churn.
Most startups fail. The median life of newly formed businesses in the US is about three years. (That's pre-recession.) Most venture-funded companies fail. (From talks I've been to by VCs, the most likely outcome is what VCs call a "zombie" - not successful enough to pay back its investors, but just barely able, after downsizing, to pay its current bills and keep operating. Many dot-coms ended up in zombie mode, limping along for years.)
There's a long-term effect that's even more troublesome. Knowledge, as an economic resource, may be mined out. The cost of obtaining new knowledge can exceed its commercial value. Big corporate R&D labs doing basic research, as GE, AT&T, Xerox, HP and IBM once did, are a thing of the past. That trend peaked in the 1950s and 1960s. Venture capital took up some of the slack, but even that is no longer working. Venture capital funds, as a class, have lost money each year since 2000. That's new; from 1970 to 2000, most VC firms were profitable.
All this discussion and debate over innovation begs a question (perhaps in true Socratic style): what is innovation?
There are products being released every year that one-up their predecessors in terms of features, appeal, and usability. Is this innovation? To some extent, I would admit that it is a form of innovation; ideas are being created and (re)combined to produce new and (sometimes) wonderful things.
At the same time, it is my opinion that none of this "Apple vs Microsoft vs Google vs {fill in the blank}" is truly groundbreaking innovation. What technology has been produced that has fundamentally altered the way the world works? Some of the things that come to my mind when that question hits are the printing press, electricity, the telephone, manned flight, wireless communications, the integrated circuit, and the internet.
What technology has been invented/produced recently (say, a decade or so) that has made such a fundamental shift as these? (Honestly, if you can think of one, please post a reply. I'd love to hear your opinion)
(((dB)))
Specifically, startups don't provide "earthshattering innovation" a lot.
Because there are a lot of startups, yet quite rare that I feel the earth shatter. If we are talking 100 new startup companies per year (a very conservative estimate) each producing one earthshattering innovation per year I should enjoy an earthshattering every 3.65 days. That is clearly not the case.
"Well established"? Smartphones were a niche market before the iPhone, and only exploded in popularity (and continue to grow dramatically) after the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Windows Mobile was far and away the largest smartphone platform; where is it now? And as to your assertion that the iPhone was not at all innovative, please show me the touchscreen smartphones before the iPhone that had a UI designed for a touchscreen device, not a desktop OS shoehorned into a mobile device. Please show me a smartphone that had a mobile Internet experience comparable to iPhone. Please show me even one of the "lots" that you've seen that had such easy access to a large and diverse collection of applications. Oh, and please show me the plethora of touchscreen Android devices that existed before the iPhone. If in your view the iPhone was not innovative, how would you classify the Droid X and HTC EVO, et al?
Congratulations. You just described the iPhone and iPad. The hardest part by far in consumer electronic design is not the features, it's the interface, and if you think that Apple's success with iPhone and now iPad are due to just good design and marketing, you need to take off your hate-colored glasses and stop with the feature-checkbox mentality. It's all well and good for technically minded persons and tinkerers, like many (most?) Slashdot readers, to think that it's fun to have to trim the spinnaker, strap the cat to the buttered toast, and change the dilithium crystals just to check their email, but for the average non-tech-elitist Joe and Jane, it's completely unacceptable.
Most people only think of innovation as occurring within their narrow range of interests, and for geeks that means that anything with electrons or logic flowing though it will make them jizz their pants. How many Slashdot readers would consider Dell to be an innovative company, much less one that had a seismic impact on computing? And yet it was Michael Dell's commercial and production innovations that resulted in the commoditization of the personal computer and made them widely affordable to the broad public, including most people here I'd wager. Demystifying existing technology for the average user and presenting them with easy and intuitive ways to interact with their data is Apple's genius, and it is true innovation at work, despite what you might think.
Good point, but not half the battle Google is fighting with Google Books. Apple has always been the best at slapping a tuxedo on something, then taking the lion's share of the credit. You want real innovation? Try Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
It's appalling the consumer slant on this thread. Innovation is equally valid in business models, work processes, and fundamental physics (such as the first blue LED and much of the work IBM pioneered on magnetic storage). Google's business model was spectacularly innovative. The core realization was how little revenue is generated with each click and finding a practical way to scale into a dominant market position on that basis. Google's mission critical innovation was driving down the cost per click delivered by building data centers on a scale no one had previously contemplated.
Apple's mission critical innovation was monetizing PR. Apple invested more than a decade proclaiming that RISC was going to mop the flop with x86. The Apple PR fodder was wrong. The x86 architecture had few fundamental performance limitations compared to any other architecture. It was ugly, Intel had to work a lot harder to extract the potential than with a cleaner design, and it comes at a cost in power consumption. Steve, repeat after me, "I was wrong." He sold the belief, and his loyal followers got more sex as a result. "My photoshop transform is faster than yours." Not that different than selling a fat man a 10lb carbon-fibre bicycle. He's excited by his purchase, because *someone else* could rock the equipment. There are more Linux desktop PCs out there than competent Photoshop users. A lesser man would have benchmarked kernel compiles, thinking that this was actually useful. That's what makes Steve such a genius.
Jobs returned to Apple with the inspiration, "you know what, that PR trick works great, even if you're sometimes selling the truth".
The term "innovation" is worthless these days. Microsoft beat it to a painful death. In the mind of the court, monopolistic business practices (such as patents) are socially permissible if they promote innovation and the greater wealth of society. It became a Microsoft speaking point to spew forth the word "innovation" at every opportunity, since monopoly requires such a pretext to legally exist. I can't recall Microsoft elaborating on exactly what was innovative about these many products. The Genuine Advantage was usually left unstated. The last innovation where I give MS full credit was the Siamese twin architecture bonding the OS and the browser into codependent symbiosis. It wasn't entirely true, but that never stopped Steve.
One needs to step back and take a structure view of innovation. In the modern world, with ubiquity of 90% of fundamental knowledge, most innovation takes place in a densely populated grid of related ideas. As the grid becomes dense enough, you end up with an innovation curvature. Anyone clever enough to follow the curve can iterate into the useful local maxima. This is high dimensional space, so you don't have strong locality. One discipline is not far away in this space from another. Often three or four disciplines are perched on the edge of the innovation curvature. If one discipline doesn't detect the opportunity, another soon will. Innovation becomes less an act of personal heroism than an inevitability, within an increasingly narrow window of uncertainty.
Instead of backing off on the social promotion of monopoly (i.e. patents) we're instead modeling innovation on high velocity trading where the critical distinction between small success and great success is a 3ms faster reaction time.
Filing a patent costs money, so the timing of a patent application needs to be based on market analysis. The decision to patent some minor cool way to exploit an accelerometers in a user interface is a matter of timing. Ten years ago, it would have taken an act of c
Who is this new hero called Startup and why is he automatically better than Behemoth?
I was just thinking about this very thing yesterday. I swear sometimes I think google has tracking cookies in my head. On the other hand this very thing had me thinking now that im at brick wall for where to get the capital I need. That this really should not be so hard to find. The products I wish to create derive from very original ideas. There are not alot of people that have what it takes to put in what is needed to get a working business model off the ground but for the few who do. Financing is the hard to secure. If I could get the capital I needed it would only be a matter of time till product launch. So at any rate this point is frustrating because the bigger companies secure financing so easily, and they should be the ones that have the capital on hand to expand their business model. At any rate, if anyone knows a good investor, somebodyamazin@yahoo.com.
Really? You think those 4-5000 patents they are granted each year are just patent spamming? Just because they arn't all that shiny in the consumer market doesn't mean they don't invent or revolutionize.
I will rarely criticize anything as harshly as this, but, it has to be said: some of the analysis in this article could be used as a chapter in How to Lie with Statistics.
For example, the article cites Tim Kane's "analysis" that shows that startups were responsible for all US job creation since 1977. His proof of this is to take all the net jobs created by firms existing for one year or less and compare that to the net job creation of companies existing for more than one year.
Seriously, what kind of a piss-poor business can't manage to last a year? The least successful businesses I've ever seen, those one-off restaurants that crop up and then die, manage to last a year before their owners realize they're throwing away money. So, basically that data set lumps together a whole bunch of positive numbers in one category, and dumps all the negatives in the other.
Now, the analysis in the cited article does get more nuanced than that, and it does, eventually, explain what I just said. But, it's very, very easy to get a misleading opinion from that presentation, and the linked article seems to perpetuate that misperception.
So suppose a company wants to do something about energy efficiency. They invest $10 billion dollars in R&D, and invent an amazing new room temperature superconductor. It works without caveats, it is just a wire that can pass a near infinite amount of current. The process for making it isn't that complex, so it doesn't cost all that much. So they can make it for $0.50/meter. They add $0.50 more to recoup their R&D and it sells for $2/meter to the end user.
Ok but now say there's no patents, so anyone can do it. they look and say "Oh that's not hard to do," and start making the wire. It also costs them $0.50/meter to make. However they've no R&D to recover, so they can get it on the market at $1/meter. Now the original company is fucked, they can't compete on the lower price, they've got $10 billion in R&D to recover. They lose a massive amount because they were the ones willing to take the risk and initiative to develop something new.
While it may be easy to say "Well screw them, we take it for the betterment of the world," consider the real result is that the first company would just never invest the dollars in R&D in the first place. If they know that the invention would just be taken, why bother? Instead they concentrate on just making things with existing technologies. Maybe do a bit of cheap development, but mostly you want to just produce, since creating just means you get it taken away.
So long as the economy is fundamentally a capitalism, which it is in every free country, then you have to have something to help protect inventors. Not saying the US system is the way to do it, but you can't just have it where inventions are free for the taking.
Not to mention the multiple innovations in dealing with and indexing obscene amounts of data in the back end. mSQL just isn't going to cut it, you know? That's impressed me beyond words: The back end has radically changed and it just keeps working.
The redundancy and failover are stunning and I don't think you get that without innovation.
The exact implementations may not leak out but the rough ideas do and we all benefit from that. Hadoop anyone?
While I generally agree with the article, I think Google’s maps are awesome! I use it often in my work. I do think there is a lot of innovation there.
Rubbish. If you have the machine sent back to Apple 3 times for an issue on AppleCare they ship you a brand new machine instead. I have supported close to 30 Macs in my computing life, and dealing with AppleCare has always been excellent for me - and I have dealt with some lemon-on-arrival machines.
I also had Apple go out of their way to ship me extra parts on a machine (a gig ethernet card) so I wouldn't have to take a work machine out of production to send it away for a repair (this was on a regular AppleCare support contract, not a business one).
Plus, your HP probook is lacking firewire (although does have e-sata), a weird off-centre trackpad that reviewers have said is in an awkward place and also buggy when in use, and crucially, a plastic case. My config came to $2266 (when I eventually found it on HP's store - business store only it seems! It's like they don;t want to sell you this stuff), after I tacked on the accidental damage cover in addition to the 3 year warranty. HP will only let me fit 4GB of RAM into it too - are you sure it has space enough for 8GB?
So, still dearer by a distance (ie, more than $100) but still not completely comparable.
'Now let's talk about innovation. Apple is the poster child for tech innovation; it releases one groundbreaking product after another.
[citation needed]
There's nothing particularly earth-shattering about any of the products they have released. The iPad is inferior to a 2001 tablet PC by HP. The iPod is an MP3 player in a shiny case. And the iPhone is just a cell phone with a touch screen - palm devices have had those for a long time.
What Apple is good at is marketing. So good, in fact, that they convince people that their products are revolutionary. When actually they're just black, shiny and expensive.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Youre are bitching about firewire? really?
Who has used firewire in the last 5 years?
Ohh wait, that's another crap technology that Apple had to have because they lacked support for other technologies.
And yes, on the list,there is an option below for an additional 4gb.
I was comparing apples to apples. Advanced support is not by Apple standards so adding accidental breakage was not included in the price. They simply dont have it.
As always, users doing apples to oranges comparisons. And this apple has a worm in it.
Mine was totally comparible.
Someone want inform the digitizor admins?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
put batteries in any way you want. INNOVATION!
How strange that it is configured that way in the options. You would think it would be listed in the dropdown box for "how much memory do you want in your custom laptop" where the biggest amount you can select is 4GB. I checked Crucial and it does indeed have 2 slots so you can go to 4GB. So, for my last post, just add on the cost of a 4GB stick to that price.
And "who uses firewire?" - a lot of people. Talk to anyone in the pro audio or pro video fields and you will find a large number of firewire users. It's hardly a "crap" technology - it is far superior (if a tiny bit more expensive to implement) than USB2 for the task it was designed for - high speed serial I/O. There are also many people out there using firewire hard drive enclosures. Any home user who wants to edit home movies on a camcorder with an "iLink" (Sony's name for the 4 pin firewire port) on their camera (not confined to Sony models) will need a firewire port on their machine, unless the camera has alternate means of data transfer (for a MiniDV/HDV camera, that's unlikely).
You'll also note that Apple didn't "lack support for other technologies" when they introduced firewire on their machines, and then made it a standard feature across the range (until very recently with the lowest MacBook where it was removed). At the time there was nothing to compete with firewire at the same price bracket. When USB2 came along, they implemented that too (they were also one of the first manufacturers to ship USB on their machines too, creating universal connections for the keyboard and mouse).
Re: accidental damage
You can't play it both ways - you specifically said that you could get your laptop repaired through accidental damage. If that is the case, you *must* add that cost on, whether Apple offers it or not - otherwise, your cheaper price for the HP is dishonest, since it *doesn't* feature accidental damage cover (and yet you claim you can get it repaired as such), and is thus in the same boat as the Apple machine. You chose to make that a point about how HP's warranty was better, so you have to add it on.
I also forgot to add on the "keep the drive" support option - you said you wanted that, but it costs to have that option with HP. I didn't add the cost. You also stated that Apple "didn;t tell you" about wiping the HD when the machine goes in for AppleCare - they do tell you, it's in the procedures and information, and they strongly advise you to back up data (if possible) before sending it in for repair (and advise you to keep backups anyway, even when the machine is working fine). They have disclaimers and warnings (it would be a liability if they did not).
I'm not arguing that the HP isn't cheaper - most PC laptops are cheaper. I am merely taking issue with your assertion that you are making an Apples to Apples comparison. It's closer than most (who just link to some $300 Dell with crappy parts, compared to an iMac or something), but it's not quite there.
So what? Innovation is way overrated. I'm not saying it's not important, but what is more important is being able to manage and sell. Sell sell sell sell. Be a salesperson and you'll have a way better reward to risk ratio that an innovator. You can always just buy CP/M and resell it as DOS. Learn to sell shit and have people pay diamond-like prices if you want to become rich and make the world a better place too.
they have had their monumental failures too. But Tha Apple ][ worked because the community added hardware and software to a 'standard' platform. Mac worked because people didn't have to type, and iPod/iPhone, iPad works because Apple provides a whole platform from start to finish with a reasonably well built product. it's only 3.
... at the level of a startup. I'm not even sure Dell ever was truly innovative (and if they were, they've definitely exported it out of the country, now). Intel really once was, but now days all their real innovation is in the very challenging and very expensive effort to keep making chip components smaller (e.g. 32nm, 22nm, 16nm, etc). And Google, which has been very innovative, is already on its way to that point (as clearly seen by things like buying out other innovations, and its changing stance on things like Net Neutrality to one favoring big behemoths). I guess I'm glad I've thrice turned down advances from Google recruiters and work for yet another startup (this time, for once, right from the beginning).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Now let's talk about innovation. Apple is the poster child for tech innovation; it releases one groundbreaking product after another. But let's get beyond Apple. I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple--with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad. Google certainly doesn't fit the bill--after its original search engine and ad platform, it hasn't invented anything earth shattering. Yes, Google did develop a nice email system and some mapping software, but these were incremental innovations.
Groundbreaking products? Game-changing technologies? The iPod is an mp3 player, iTunes is a media player, the iPhone is crap with apps, and the iPad is an over-sized joke (replacement for a laptop? please.). The fact that the author dismisses Google's mapping software as an "incremental innovation" is fucking hilarious. Google's mapping software is far more impressive than all four of those Apple products combined.
i dont rely on your prognose on startups but twitter did, i think twitter invented a great idea
Ok, now..
What's the speed/type of that RAM, what's the speed, number of cores, and last-level cache of the processor? What's the type (LCD? LED? Something else?) of the screen? What's the case made of? How long does the battery last? (the real time, not the marketing time, for either company), how much does it weigh, and how well does it fit in your backpack?
It's BS either way though. 17" laptops are for rubes. You can get nearly the same amount of performance out of (in apple's case 13") smaller machines, and still have a big screen when you need it: both machines, I assume, will output to a monitor somehow.
If you need $2-3k worth of processing power/screen capability, you need a desktop.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What makes this comparison funny is that without all the networking innovation that Cisco has done, none of the Apple products would all that effective. Streaming Audio? Access to AppStore/iTunes... Quite a bit of the service providers and "them internet tube things" are cisco products...
Oh yeah and most of your online banking transactions run on IBM systems.
Apple innovated ways to do Marketing.
Remember the colored iMacs? Previously there were beige boxes.
Remember the white ear buds? Previously there were black ear buds.
Remember the macbook's built in handle? Previously there were no handles.
Remember OSX? Previously there was Linux.
I had both a CD Mp3 player and a USB-stick one long before Apple even announced iPod.
Both cost me far less than an iPod might have, both still work just fine (but mostly gather dust) and both use off the shelve batteries.
As well as their music management (or for that era I should say file/directory management).
If you really need your own music collection managed for you, music management is the least of your problems.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I can't believe that the iPad is being compared to the forefront of search engine technology. What happens under the covers at Google may be invisible to you, but it is built on mountain of innovation. Comparison to a simple gaget is off the scale in terms of absurdity.
but not different enough to threaten their cash cows ... that supplements their existing product line.
Apple is great at that. Look at the iPhone. New iterations of their existing product that never threatens their laptop / desktop computer segment.
Apple is actually great at killing products when they are at the height of popularity. Your example is nonsensical because smartphones and computers don't really overlap... but you have forgotten that even as the iPod dominated the portable music player scene, the iPhone (and Touch) are eating into that market rather rapidly.
iMacs were selling really well when they changed the form factor totally. And laptops are also changed before sales really have started to slack off.
Apple is doing so well exactly because they are doing what you say they do not - compete against their own products. And they do so explicitly, I remember an interview somewhere that said something like "We want to be the company selling the next product that replaces our most popular one".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Holds more stuff" isn't game-changing.
It is when all the competition can hardly hold anything, at least not with something you can put in your pocket. There is a huge divide between pocketable devices and not... you need to study up on the tipping point sometime because that's eactly what game changing does, is put something over that tipping point.
The other thing you forgot was at the time you could actually load that 5GB device is under four hours, unlike anything else with as much storage - thanks to firewire. So that was a factor as well (though later improvement to USB canceled that out).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Looking at the economic impact, the iPod was a game-changer and Google Maps was not. The iPod made tens of billions of dollars for Apple. Google Maps was innovative from a technological point of view, but how much money has Google made directly from Google Maps?
From an economic point of view, technological innovation alone is not enough. It needs to drive a lot of revenue to create impact. Google's search technology was a game changer because it is handing Google tens of billions of dollars. Maps is not. Gmail is not.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I agree with everyone. Stop being a Apple fanboy. Just because they tend to make the shiniest, most advertised items doesn't mean they have the greatest innovations. IPAD is hardly a brilliant innovation a year after the Kindle and like 5 years after tablet notebook PCs were streamlined (albeit still not that prevalent). IPOD had the scrollwheel; iTunes was all right, but hardly brilliant as many people still prefer to use other programs even though it's more difficult to sync up with their ipods that way. Thin, expensive notebooks made with a metal shell is a neat toy for those who can afford it; it is not a tech innovation.
I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad
False challenge. none of those products are game changing in and of themselves. None of the products mentioned are technical innovations, they are all copies from someone else's work. These products are are examples of terrific marketing and and understanding that modern life is becoming more about style over substance.
Apple doesn't really sell technology products, they sell a "style" and an "appearance of superiority".
Apple is very good at giving people what they want. Unfortunately it seems that people these days want selfishness and ego stroking. The very fact that they put "i" infront of all their product names demonstrates their selling of selfishness.
eg. iPod - a pod of sound designed to keep others out of your bubble and away from the "i"
-- posted from my apple iPad.
I think Wadhwa is biased by his startup background and confuses marketing breakthroughs with real scientific and technological innovation. From my experience (in the biotechnology sector), almost all real innovation takes places at universities, research institutes and larger companies. Startups are very useful for commercializing innovations, especially discoveries made at universities (which is how Google got started), but they are rarely innovative.
And how Apple's products are "earth-shattering"?? They mostly suck....
Apple does not claim it is accidental damage coverage, and it's specified in the agreement that comes with the APP that it does not cover accidental damage. You do know how to read, right?
Wrong again, in Norway for instance, there is no Apple Stores at all. Yet, there are repair shops that are authorized to repair Macs. All you have to do is find an Apple Service Provider and they can fix it for you.
Buy a new one then, if your data is so important to you and you believe you can save it, then buying a new drive is not expensive.
If it's not shutting down when 'overheating', then it's not overheating.
Battery life, display resolution, building materials, display hinges, etc. Let's see full specs, not just these worthless figures.
-- Linux user #369862
The iPod was another mp3 player. iTunes is a nice service but so is XBox Live and Google Maps. The iPad is another tablet PC with the marketing push to give both platform and software at the same time. The iPhone doesn't seem to be inherently different from a Sony P800, except that for several years worth of incremental technology improvements.
Mainly Apple is about presentation, marketing and integrating services and products. All worthwhile things but nothing groundbreaking.
Apple is the King of "busytech" and "overtech". When are people going to wise up?? We NEEDS this stuff?? High tech consumer electronics companies have cleverly culturized their products with the breathless help of media companies, making them must have items, like a diamond engagement ring from DeBeers, or that baseball hat from "your" sports team. Young children have powerful computer-phones for texting nonsense to each other minutely at high monthly cost. A woman I work around who doesn't make that much money told me that her children have a PSP, XBOX, WiII, and expensive modern cell phones. She uses none of it. She barely uses a computer: BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T NEED ONE. Mindless busytech-buying puppets. Use what you actually need. Pay for what you actually need. Grow the hell up. All of us.
E Proelio Veritas.
So, the iPad is groundbreaking but Google Maps & Earth is not? Free navigation that was actually use-able? Before that, Europe had viamichelin.com which varied in quality on a monthly basis and some other Java-based crapgeds.
What about Google Mail? Does anyone remember the state of free web-mail before Google?
IBM had a ton of earth-shattering innovations. PCs with truly interchangeable parts that spoke open standards, anyone? What about the AS/400 and its precedesors?
Apple is the poster child for tech innovation; ... I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple ... These [other] companies constantly acquire startups and take advantage of their own size and distribution channels to scale up the innovations they have purchased.
Apple is extremely good at pretty product package and slick marketing. They're not what I'd call innovators, especially considering that in the last 22 years they've bought 29 companies to use their technologies in Apple products.
The freedom is unparalled (most of the time), the environmental perks are astounding and the work can get really interesting, really quickly. Only two little issues with them: they don't pay that well in the short-term (most of the time), and they are usually really, really risky. Some places are like a rollercoaster; riding high one minute, then close to bankruptcy in the next. The stability isn't incredibly better at corporations or mature companies, but the pay is far more stable (and higher) and the workload is more predictable.
It doesn't help that working at Google and the like is like working at a startup, except with more money, influence and free stuff. At least that's what I heard, anyway.
Survivorship bias.
Copying another company's product is not all that innovative, even if a few features are added.
Apple's innovations is changing markets. Music and cell phone companies are different because of apple.
Want to buy major label songs for about a buck. Apple made it happen, before itunes nobody would do that. Now DRM free even.
Want to buy an App for your cell phone from a company that isn't a cell phone company? Apple made it happen too. put such fear into other companies they're all running to android which lets you do the same thing on other networks. Verizon aggravated with Google for bidding on spectrum now is a google partner.
Ultimately the consumer wins in these situations which is a good thing.