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Netgear CEO Says Jobs's Ego Will Bite Apple
AcidAUS writes "The global chairman and CEO of home networking giant Netgear has launched into a scathing attack on Apple and its founder Steve Jobs, criticising Jobs's 'ego' and Apple's closed up products. At a lunch in Sydney today, Patrick Lo said Apple's success was centred on closed and proprietary products that would soon be overtaken by open platforms like Google's Android."
Like a couple of decades ago, where Microsoft and IBM boomed into the market? Seems history does repeat itself.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
There's nothing like kicking a man when he's down is there. Seriously, why complain about his influence just when he's left to "focus on his health"?
JOBS vision to create "cool" Macs instead of the old beige/bland Macs/MP3s, basically saved Apple from the same fate that hit Atari and Commodore. Plus he had the vision to create the sleek, easy-to-use iPod.
Else we'd all be talking about the bankrupt former company called Apple, instead of today's thriving near-number 1 company. Jobs is still leading the company in the right direction and giving it that cool factor which appeals to consumers.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
I don't usually respond to AC's... but Mac market share is not increasing. MacBook market share is a bit, but not at any sort of alarming rate, and the iPhone is barely big enough to be considered a contender for top spot and isn't moving upwards.
without saying anything much.
Like anyone can even know that
When was the last time that anyone made money by betting against Steve Jobs?
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Netgear's stock has increased in price by 100% since it went public. Apple's stock, over the same time period, has increased in price by over 3100%.
Now stock price isn't everything, but it is to these people...
Actually, Apple's currently the third-place player in the smartphone market, after Google and Symbian. (Apple's hardly going to fail in that business, though. Even six months ago they were making about half of the money in the entire mobile phone market.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I don't care much for Apple or it's products for exactly the reasons stated in TFA. The closed nature of the offerings usually locks me out of doing something I considered basic, that I wanted to do. Little or no reprieve from this is often offered. It's Apple's way, or the highway.
But the fact is, this attitude has been nothing but good for them from a business standpoint. Most consumers don't need or WANT options that they consider complex or confusing. Time and again it has been proven through sales that people want simple. People want 1 click, 1 button, no chance of screwing up. When people are more confident with their product right out of the box, they like it more. And Apple is great at giving people something they feel comfortable using the moment they turn it on.
Why would Apple change this? It feels like sour grapes to me. Developers have a hard time, but consumers are happy. In the end, Apple cares more about it's customers than it's partners, which is the right choice to make from a business standpoint. The only way Patrick Lo is going to be proven right, is if people stop buying Apple products. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Yes, iOS-based devices will be overtaken (in terms of sales, and number of users) by Android. That seems pretty clear now, and the Android folks should be proud of their achievements.
But Apple will continue "succeeding", in terms of making bucketloads of money. Consider the computer segment - Apple occupy a small, significant niche in the market, and make a healthy profit from it. I think that's where their iOS devices are headed. People who want Apple products will always have them, and everyone else gets to choose their OS and hardware.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I'm sure that Verizon thing won't change the iPhone's market share at all...
In the practical sense, I don't see why Android is considered more "open" than iOS. I realize more of the OS components for Android are fully open source. However, developers are still subject to the rules of the Android store. The phone manufacturers are carriers still have the final say on which features of the OS are actually shipped intact. Users still have to jailbreak Android phones to side-step these artificial limitations. Maybe I'm missing some critical bit of information -- and if so, I'd love to be corrected -- but I don't see much of a difference between the "openness" of the two platforms when it comes to practical usage.
This guy from netgear talks but he should remember that this is Steve's invention let him do what he wants with it. So you have two choices, one that is closed and one that is open tell this guy to buy the one he wants to buy. I've thought about the smartphone market and I can't convince myself anyone else would have butchered the thing from the beginning. Mind you I realize Apple did not invent the smartphone or pioneer it but he did do a great job of it while most others had their heads up their asses. Something in my gut tells me without Jobs kick starting this market the way he did we would have been stuck with programs that wouldn't of even loaded, some nasty monochrome screen and a brutal 16MHz chip powering the whole thing. What Jobs did do is make a consumer expect something out of their device and their purchase, they expect the developer to be in some way responsible for their programming, they expect some sort of fluid UI, they expect the device to do what is claimed rather than reliving 3gp type video and brutal audio. He might not stay the king but he has made confidence in a product and now a market that did not exist before him and for that at least I have to say thanks for bringing us this far.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
From the article:
"Ultimately a closed system just can't go that far ... If they continue to close it and let Android continue to creep up then it's pretty difficult as I see it."
Lo said the industry had "seen this movie play several times", pointing to the Betamax vs. VHS video format war, Mac vs. Windows and various proprietary networking protocols that at one stage tried to compete with the now dominant TCP/IP.
In each of the above cases, the more open platforms won more market share. However, Apple has bucked this trend so far with its closed ecosystems for the iPhone and iPad.
"Right now the closed platform has been successful for Apple because they've been so far ahead as thought leaders because of Steve Jobs," said Lo.
"Eventually they've got to find a way to open up iTunes without giving too much away on their revenue generation model."
The author is positing that the closed model you are so impressed with needs to change if they want to survive Android. Unfortunately, Jobs' ego will not allow this and they'll most likely end up in the same realm as Microsoft -- financially great but viewed as a 'has been' and opportunist by the community.
My work here is dung.
Depends... if Ballmer had said the exact same thing, it wouldn't be AS true. In this case since someone who loves Android says it, it's a "gotcha".
Lets take a look
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=AAPL
Market Cap: 309.64B
P/E (ttm): 18.75
EPS (ttm): 17.92
vs
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=NTGR
Market Cap: 1.22B
P/E (ttm): 26.91
EPS (ttm): 1.27
Mr jobs is obviously doing "SOMETHING" right ..
And by the looks of the numbers , mr netgear should worry about his own house , before he starts looking into others.
Heard the same thing about iPods vs. MP3 Players, Macs vs. PC's, and before that about Apple II's vs. CPM. There was a five year stretch where Apple wasn't doing so hot, but it turned out this was because they weren't being proprietary enough... once Steve brought out the iMac, nuked the clones and axed compatibility with obsolete or inefficient standards, they've been selling exceptionally well, and delivering a much thicker profit margin than competing profits.
That's not arrogance, that's good business sense.
It'll be the economy. The US is poised by end of year to have the same debt:GDP ratio that Greece had when catastrophe struck there. The US is teetering on the edge of another great depression because our debt levels have reached a point where they're choking both the public and private sectors.
Apple does not make products that will fare well in a very bad economy. The iPhone, for example, forces the user to pay a king's ransom for a new battery every two years or so or buy a new one. Apple doesn't make decent computers which can compete in the low end market (where many users will be forced to go by the economy); their idea of "low end" is a $900-$1000 laptop, not a $400-$600 laptop.
Apple won't be alone in this area. I think Oracle will end up getting hurt even worse as companies that used to throw expensive enterprise apps at every problem have to choose between payroll and expenses like using Oracle for a database that's barely more than a bit bucket. The US IT industry as a whole will get humbled.
I used to be "go for the open platform" guy, but now I own iPhone and I wouldn't change it to any other Android phone. Openness comes at the cost of diversity and incompatibility
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Michael Dell (10/6/1997): ""What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives. [http://news.cnet.com/Dell-Apple-should-close-shop/2100-1001_3-203937.html#ixzz1CccaByog]
And just because it is too easy, another one from the oracle of all that is IT, Dell. This time from CEO Kevin Rollins (1/17/2005):
"It is interesting: the iPod has been out for three years and it is only this past year [2004] it [has] become a raging success. Well those things that become fads rage and then they drop off. When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman – a rage, everyone had to have one. Well you don't hear about the Walkman anymore. I believe that one product wonders come and go. You have to have sustainable business models, sustainable strategy."
So, now the venerable Netgear, whose footsteps make all in the industry tremble, has announced the demise of Apple. Projecting just a tad, perhaps? :)
Scraps?
In another story here on /. we learned that Android market share has grown to ~30%, Nokia's Symbian has ~30%, iPhone has ~15%, and RIM has ~15%
They have a virtual monopoly on the MP3 player market.
1) No they don't.
2) Lot's of computer companies have had "virtual monopolies" in the past: wordperfect, ashton tate, lotus, netscape, and novell; to name a few. Where are they now?
Smartphone makers are fighting to the death for the scraps the iPhone leaves behind
Hardly. Adroid sales are roughly equal to iPhone sales.
Just the Apple name is good enough to sell anything
Dead wrong. Apple has had lot's of failures in their history.
Even desktop computing is swinging Apple's way with more people moving to Macs.
Who are you kidding? Windows absolutely dominates desktop computing, and will do so for the foreseeable future.
..isn't the apple already bitten??
So, regardless of Jobs, there is realistically no way Apple can ever fail as a company.
I think that's overstating the case. Apple is in no danger in the foreseeable future, for exactly the reasons you present, but "never" is a long time. If they started to really screw up (ala, the Sculley years) they'd have 5, maybe 10 year of padding before it started to show. They could easily be on the verge of bankruptcy again in 10-12 years if the right combination of events occurred. Note that I'm not saying it will happen, or even that it's likely to happen, but Apple is no more immune to screw ups than any other company.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
wtf is up with "Custer committed Siouxicide." at the bottom of the page. is that supposed to be funny?
This is true... between from about 3 to 6 years ago. These days, everything has "MP3 players" in them. Every smart phone and quite a few not-so-smart phones too. Hell, even USB memory devices are also MP3 players as well.
Apple relegated itself to niche markets at every turn. The PC market was overtaken by business machines made by IBM and then by clone makers. Did it mean Apple died? No. They maintained their fan base just as they always have. If Steve Jobs were a "greedy bastard" he would have and could have beat them all by making machines and software that are more enterprise friendly and enterprise ready. He didn't and he won't it seems. He sees something better in the way he does things now, but more people reject Apple and its projects than crave them. They are certainly no longer out of the price range of most people. No... it's partly because of that pesky "critical mass" monster that Microsoft created... partly because Apple doesn't care to compete in that market.
One thing I am pretty certain of is that once Jobs is gone, Apple will change in a drastic way. Another thing I am pretty certain of is that Jobs has already lived longer than I expected him to. I expect him to kick the bit-bucket any time now. I don't think we will have to wait long to see what Apple will become next.
Not on a global scale. It's about as important as Germany getting the iPhone in the grand scheme: quantitatively significant, but not qualitatively important.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
The cover image is great [If you can't see it, it's of the Netgear CEO holding a Netgear branded phone that I would guess was won in a claw-machine game.]
You actually can do well with closed environments iff you are willing to make sure that you can provide one stop shopping for the end user and create an ecosystem that works well. Apple had that until recently, but the cancellation of the Xserve with no real replacement destroyed the environment apple once had. If you cannot get rack mounted servers that just work with macs then there is no reason to get macs and less of a reason to get iPhones and iPads etc. Not pairing up with oracle or some other provider to give Xserve users a real choice was probably steves biggest mistake since coming back to apple IMO.....
Monstar L
Steve Lo wishes he had the industry influence (control) Steve Jobs has. He doesn't. Maybe this is why: 'Asked whether he was concerned about reports that the world would run out of internet address within weeks, Lo compared the issue to the shift from 2G networks to 3G networks and beyond. "It's disruptive, but we love it - everybody has to buy something new," he said.'
Actually they're not. AppleTV (an iAnything if ever there was one) has been pretty much DOA until recently - Xserve was killed due to lack of sales - (you'd think the corporate fanboys in Hollywood and New York would have lapped those up?!)
How is this still debated? Not everything Apple touches turns to gold. Your meme is defective.
What cycle, exactly?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Lo said: "Steve Jobs doesn't give me a minute!"
Call the waaaaahmbulance.
"What's the reason for him to trash Flash? There's no reason other than ego," he said.
If he really can't understand the big deal with Flash -- which has been discussed to death -- I don't think he has either the technical background or business acumen to understand why Apple has made their decision.
Maybe instead of worrying about other companies he could focus on his own product support -- I own a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and have found it underpowered... can't even stream multiple streams at once. Heaven help you if you try to use the included FireFly software while you're copying a large file to the NAS... it just can't handle it. It's best described as a NAS for a single computer... unless you actually want to do 2 things at once with it.
NetGear products are cheap to mid-range products and a bit more attention to detail would help differentiate them. Netgear needs someone to fixate on getting it right rather than getting it out the door.
People assume Apple sells to fanboys at their peril. Nokia, to read their media statements, assumed that the iPhone was a cut-back phone they intended to sell to iPod owners. If they'd appreciated that Apple had its sights set on their entire customer base they probably would've reacted a bit more urgently.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
...Whiners keep on pointing out the Mac vs. PC-situation as a failure of Apple, and they keep on talking about how Android is going to do the same with iPhone. Well, if we looked at the computer-business, we would see that Macs have something like 5-10% market-share, but they out-earn just about everyone else. HP is the company with biggest market-share in the PC-business, and Apple out-earns them in the computer-business. Reason being that HP sells lots of dirt-cheap computers at razor-thin margins, while Apple really competes only in the $1000+ market, where profits are fatter.
And it should be noted that Macs are outgrowing the PC-market, so not only are they laughing all the way to the bank, they are actually gaining market-share. Add to that the high customer-satisfaction-ratings.
If that is a "failure", I wonder what a "success" looks like....
iPhone has something like 15-20% market-share, and out-earns everyone else. So how exactly are they "doomed"? because Android is outshipping them? And that's a "failure" because.....? Why is it that people expect Apple to gain iPod-like market-domininace, if they get something less, it means they have failed? Do people think that there can only be one "success" in the market, while everyone else are "failures"? That either you utterly dominiate the market, or you are a failure? iPhones are selling like crazy, and Apple is earning big bucks from their phone-business. I'm honestly at a loss at trying to see the "failure" here....
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
If by "Fan base" you still mean Universities and school systems who are still under contract to replace Apples with more Apples.
I don't usually respond to AC's... but Mac market share is not increasing..
Sales of Macs have increased faster than sales of PC's for several years in a row. That means that Apple's market-share is increasing.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
A closed system might be ok right now. There are plenty of consumers who don't want to deal with extra options and functionality in their tech products...for now. But what about the coming decades, when a majority of consumers will have grown up in the digital age. I'd expect they would be more tech savvy and able to handle (and appreciate) more open systems like Android.
That article is so insightful it could have been written two years ago. Seriously, there's nothing new in the article (except I now know who Netgear's CEO is, which I suspect is the point). Jobs blah blah, Apple blah blah, Open blah blah Flash blah. He's just an attention whore using popular keywords to get free publicity. When I want a unique insight on technology trends, I have to admit Mr. Lo just ain't the first name I think of and this article doesn't change that.
bah.
They have a virtual monopoly on the MP3 player market.
Your statement is virtual truth.
Facebook says there are 75 000 people that have them and regularly upload content with them.
Patrick Lo could use some lessons in this area. While some of what he says may be judged to be relevant or possibly insightful, the way he says it is incredibly insensitive. When someone is suffering ill health, to say "Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform" is cruel.
I'm sure it'll have some positive impact, but how much is still up for debate. Personally, I see more more opportunity for people who were stuck on the iPhone to now switch carriers from AT&T to Verizon (no change in iPhone user base), than people already on Verizon to be switching from an existing Android or Blackberry device to an iPhone.
I'll admit, as a former iPod Touch user that pretty much HAS to use Verizon (no other carrier has a signal where my house is), Apple once had a chance to get me on board. At this point though, I've already went with the Android alternative, and I've acclimated to it now. Just for kicks the other day I picked up my iPod Touch again and I was flat out amazed and just how much I disliked using it now. Everything on my Fascinate feels better. The apps, the features - Android simply works better for me at this point.
The iPhone's only use to me now is to serve as competition so as to ensure that Android software and hardware development doesn't stagnate.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I don't usually respond to AC's... but Mac market share is not increasing.
Ironic that your post has the factual correctness of an AC. Try to find a quarter when the Mac market share was NOT increasing greater than the overall computer market (ie increasing relative to the market)
http://www.9to5mac.com/30393/apple-breaks-through-10-us-marketshare-for-the-first-time-since-the-early-90s
Yeah right... Consumers couldn't care less if anything is proprietary as long as, from their perspective, it just works. Windows and the iPhone are both proof of this.
And at this point, Jobs' ego is a selling point for Apple.
Yeah, I agree with him. Fire Jobs, save the company.
Apple: Market Cap $ 309 bn
Netgear: Market Cap $ 1 bn
(src: Yahoo Finance)
He's just jealous.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
I don't believe it's Jobs' ego that will bite Apple--it's his absence. That's been proven to be the case once before. Hopefully, Apple will have learned from that example and is doing everything they can to avoid it (perhaps developing cloning technology?).
Jobs has already been gone for a while before, when he was out for a long time to get the liver transplant. Things proceeded smoothly.
At this point Jobs has totally baked in the culture at Apple to produce the products we have been seeing. Now possibly in ten or fifteen years, if the vision is weak or falters, you might see them start to list. But they have a huge base of success in many, many fields and it would take a while to really screw that up.
You can see this in the stock, it faltered some - but the first time Jobs left it took a huge dive instead of the small haircut we saw this time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't have a single Netgear item in my house that still functions, everything I've bought from them either fails to meet my expectations and is returned, or dies shortly after the warranty expires. I have many Apple products that went to the "still works great but I got a newer one" bin. You can complain about "closed" being a reason not to buy Apple products, but I think "It's a POS that will fail quickly" as the main reason I'm not buying Netgear.
Are you kidding? You need to read a little more tech news. Macbook market share has absolutely exploded over the past few years and is growing constantly. Macbooks hold a rather large corner on the notebook market, especially in colleges.
The iPhone is also getting bigger all the time. The various iphone models are probably almost the biggest single selling models of smartphones out there. Not to mention the verizon deal that's about to happen.
What's the big deal with open?
Firstly Android development is not open, the code is developed in private and then published when done. Not open!
Secondly, you can't choose what language to develop in when creating Android, you have to use the Dalvik VM and use libraries for any native code. Not open!
Thirdly, if open source was so desirable we would all be using Linux now, OSX and Windows would be dead. The opposite is true.
I don't care much for Apple or it's products for exactly the reasons stated in TFA. The closed nature of the offerings usually locks me out of doing something I considered basic, that I wanted to do.
I don't see this point as correct.
For the Mac platform, it's certainly not correct. I bought an OS X system a while ago exactly because it did allow me to do more advanced things easily, because the UNIX core was built in. It also ships to this day with X11 support!!
For iOS, Apple ships by default in a way that is simpler for most people to understand and use. But there too you have plenty of choice for advanced options; when jailbroken, no platform is as hackable as iOS - primarily because of the easy injection of custom code into applications written in ObjectiveC. Android hasn't really appealed to me not because the development frameworks are not quite as advanced as OS X, but also because I can modify any application in the system rather than having to write an application from scratch to do something I want.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Each time? What killed them the first time around was the removal of Steve Jobs.
And was there another time after that?
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I'm not an apple fanboy in the least, but I own a slew of Apple products. I straight up despise a lot of the business practices of Apple.
The fact of the matter is that while Apple is dirty and selfish, they make better consumer tech products (in their categories) than just about any other company out there. They're also constantly at the bleeding edge, releasing things that no other company has been able to do, or at least "do right." People are willing to pay a premium for a product that's worth it.
Don't confuse fanboyism with common sense. Steve Jobs fanboyism (as a cult following) ended a long time ago. Everyone recognizes that Jobs really only cares about money and power. He just happens to make and release good products as a method to get both.
Patrick Lo should focus on his own company's prospects for success. Netgear is not in the same class as Apple on any financial level:
Netgear
Apple
I think the CEO has more important things to worry about in his own back yard. Apple would have a very far way to fall to be as paltry as Netgear.
Meanwhile, the arguments between iOS and Android platforms have all the hallmarks of a discussion of one fanatical religion over another. The points used are not as they are represented. In the end, neither camp is swayed by the other. Obviously the market is big enough for multiple platforms. I do think it's interesting how often Apple is touted as headed for spectacular failure. One would think, given the number of times that has proven to be inaccurate, there might be a little more skepticism at the predictions.
I would pay more attention, if Netgear was competent in their own area of expertise at least, and could create a wireless router half as good as Airport Extreme. It's freaking embarrassing when Apple sells the only decent option as far as dualband routers are concerned, and it's a side thing for them.
Jobs I only in his 50's dude.
Jonathanjk.com
"Today the entire scenario seems to be playing out again in the mobile market."
Yes, and no.
Yes, the vast array of manufacturers producing Android phones will soon overcome Apple's iPhone. There is no doubt about that. However, the stakes aren't nearly the same as they were.
In the original PC wars, different platforms were fundamentally incompatible with each other. The stakes were all-in. Their applications had different data formats and their hardware read different media formats. Networking was rare, and somewhat cumbersome. There was no simple way of getting data between each of different platforms. I clearly remember the hoops I had to jump through to get a simple text file from a Windows 3.1 machine over to a Mac System 6 machine. If everyone you knew, in business or personally, went to one platform, there was great incentive for you to follow them to that platform. Otherwise, you were essentially a pariah.
Now everything important is interoperable. All of these devices work with the same internet technologies (Flash aside). All of your photos, videos (except for this WebM nonsense), and documents can be read and worked with on virtually any platform. If you can't easily transfer your files physically, you can easily send them over the net. Being on a different platform than your friend or business associate is not nearly the same roadblock it used to be, so there's plenty of room for alternative platforms, suited to different tastes and needs, to flourish.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Sure, we're anti-Microsoft. And a lot of people here are anti-Apple, anti-closed-source, anti-patent-troll, anti-evil. But a lot of people aren't one or more of those anti's, too. There is no overmind.
But, as for this article -- maybe we're "anti-piece-of-shit".
This is /Netgear/ we're talking about here, you know. Apple has plenty of faults, and plenty of problems -- but this guy's throwing stones in his glass house that's full of shit. Come on.
Over seas (IE> Not in US) Nokia is still very very popular
To add to this, there is a Nokia market store, Ova or something, I forget since it's been a few years since I last used my N95 and went to Android
Apple is doing well now for the same reason they had die hard fans even in their worst days.
They make well integrated products.
This time round they had the aptitude to not price themselves out of the market, and have gain much market share and developer support.
Android is trying to repeat Windows success, but price wise they don't really have the advantage at the high end unlike in the PC vs Mac situation of the past.
The poor QC on some Android products is going to hurt them.
The stability of certain Android phones leave a lot to be desired. HTC is probably the only ones doing a decent job of it, and well Motorola.
Fortunately "Android" isn't a brand name like "Windows", most people probably don't even know they are running Android, and will judge a phone based on it's manufacturer.
But on the developer side, on the other hand...
The huge variety of hardware to test against seem to be giving developers a headache, along with extra work trying to get their apps to run decently.
Why they have so much problems I have no idea - things seem OK on Windows which hardware is almost as diverse.
Another issue I have with Android is the OS updates...
Anyhow, while many here may despise Apple's control freak tendencies, it is currently giving them the advantage when it comes to smoothness of user experience due to tight integration and control they have over their phones.
This will no doubt continue to help Apple's reputation.
Do you have any idea how many people Apple employs doing HW/SW R&D? care to compare that to other companies?
Do you think that the all those billion dollar products just fall from the frickin sky?
I don't see how Apple fanboi == anti-Microsoft any more. Microsoft still gets heat as the "evil empire," blah blah blah, but I don't see it as Apple's archrival any longer. Frankly they won their point on quality over quantity.
As for hypocrisy, well, the Netgear hype sounds like wishful thinking. As the commenters here point out, you can't just say open platforms rule when Apple has so thoroughly proven that in some cases closed does very, very well. I don't like the iPhone/iPad monopoly on philosophical grounds, but I don't for a second doubt it can be successful if handled well. The iPod provides a very profitable example.
Apple's record speaks for itself; TFA is selectively ignoring it.
but for millions of people out there the difference is night and day.
Do you even read what you write? People buy Apple products because they are, frankly, pretty awesome. If they continue to be awesome post-Jobs then people will keep buying them. If not, then they won't.
How's DD-WRT working out for your business, Netgear?
Wait, so this jackhole is telling us that a company using one mans ego and personal prejudices to make technology decisions, instead of examining and evaluating the market on its own merit, will lead to poor marketplace performance?
He sure has a unique insight. Someone should give him a blog.
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its restating the obvious. what happened with PC ? how was the computer scene before ibm started allowing liberal use of their PC format ? what happened after that ?
mo different with mobile.
Read radical news here
Hard to compare because there are no models which have feature parity - so you have to consider price and function tradeoffs.
iPod Shuffle: 2GB, walmart.com price: $44.99
Sansa Clip: 2GB, walmart.com price: $39.98
Stats:
Sansa: 2.2 x 1.4 x 0.6 inches; 0.8 ounce weight; 1" diagonal display; FM Tuner;
iPod: 1.14 x 1.24 x 0.34 inches; 0.44 ounce weight; no display; no FM Tuner;
Both claim roughly the same 15 hour playback battery life.
Bottom line - If you want an FM tuner and a display, then the Sansa is definitely for you. If you prefer the smallest package possible, the shuffle wins. A five dollar difference is certainly significant, but probably not a deal-breaker if you have the $40 to drop on a portable music player to begin with. We're not talking a critical life support function here.
Going up their range, if you want bare-bones playback functionality, Sansa's offerings are definitely much cheaper, but they also don't have the touchscreen and app store features that Apple does when you get into the Nano & Touch models. Sansa appears to be focusing on a different market segment, which frankly appears to be a small part of the market. A few reports from mid-2010 reference an NPD paper that shows Apple with a 76% share of the MP3 player market, and mentions that Zune has less than 1% - this suggests that, at best, Sansa has 22% of the market (assuming that Microsoft, Apple, and Sansa were the only players in this space, which they are obviously not). More realistically, I'd guess Sansa has around 10%. Apparently enough to be lucrative, but they're not doing anything new or different in the way of design - their models look more or less like a classic iPod - and they lack the app store and touchscreen capability that's made the iPod Touches such a success.
Sansa appears to be focusing on the stripped-down lower-margin end of the market, which I suspect that Apple is more than happy to let them play in. The Zune, which is more of a feature-for-feature competitor, has captured Microsoft 1% of the market. Not exactly a competitive threat.
Apple will actually gain a huge amount of new customers, including me. I think Google has done some great things with Android, compared with what existed before. But when I set up an Android phone for a customer, it is far more painful than when I set up an iPhone, which is no work at all.
I feel most of the fault lies with the hardware vendors. The hardware is mostly crap compared with iPhone, but worse, the available Android versions and the methods of upgrading? Ridiculous! App installation isn't too bad, but depending on the app, finding where the app went can be frustrating.
Most people don't want to have to deal with all of that crap. The only reason I haven't switched my phone is that I have a business with multiple people/phones and I never had time to get the whole thing worked out. Prior to this announcement, I was waiting for a lull to switch to AT&T. Now I don't have to, and yes, it's gonna be all iPhones.
Now, I will agree that they are not close to perfect, and sync options suck if you are using Thunderbird/Seamonkey (which I would like to have). But the experience is so much nicer and more relaxing on an iPhone that it doesn't matter (and most people don't use Thunderbird).
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
He has pancreatic cancer dude.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There's a whole lot of engineering effort and industrial design that goes into making a great product--and it is incredibly expensive, which was the point of the original post. Apple spends a lot of money on development and other companies try to piggyback off of that. Some moron responded that Apple doesn't (in fact) spend any money on R&D--they just polish other peoples work and do intense marketing--which is so outrageously stupid I can't believe I even bothered responding to it.
And then you responded saying something equally stupid about garbage collectors--all caught up now?
Jobhova should never be written out fully, lest one blaspheme. The proper form is J*bh*v*
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Well there are some dual-band routers that work well with DD-WRT, but that's one step away from the "it's open if you jailbreak it" argument...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Yes of course, the only thing more hackable than jailbroken iOS would be, like, an open source mobile OS that didn't need jailbreaking at all!
You are missing the point. How could I add one button into an existing Android application to do something specific, or to add a small bit of custom code that slightly changes the behaviour of one aspect of one application?
I can do this easily on a Jailbroken iPhone, but there's no amount of unrooting that lets you do this so easily on an Android system.
That's why I am saying the iPhone is better for actual hacking even though it's less open by default. And being less open by default means it's also a better system for users that would never want to hack the device.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't know why this guy is even talking about Apple anymore. Surely iPhone was destroyed by Android in 2009 as originally scheduled, same as Linux destroyed the Mac during The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, which if I remember correctly was around the time the iPod came out, which of course itself was immediately made obsolete due to its lack of Ogg Vorbis support and the fact that it had no wireless.
The other day I mentioned iPhone to a friend and he was like, "that is so 2008!" Good times, good times.
I read SMH regularly but it's articles like this that have me looking elsewhere. Some days it's like reading the Sensationalism Morning Herald. How "scathing" is this attack?
Oooo, bitter. Nope, it's another beat-up of a minor event.
The rest of the article (Apple is doomed, closed never works, blah, blah), is vacuous, unoriginal dribble. And yet this article gets published, and then to my shock, gets posted on /.!
* Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool *
I think by fan base he meant desktop publishing, scientific, radiology, video, and other niche markets that depended on decent graphics. Trust me, in the 90's, Microsoft's products just weren't up to task.
Apple has always looked at certain niche markets and produced the "killer apps" for those markets. In the early days, it just meant having the hardware that could do it and then developers would make the actual "killer apps". Now, it means they actually have to produce some of their own software. They still control some key points of the video market, outdoing Adobe's products. Moving into other niche markets such as mp3s, phones, TV, etc isn't that far from what they have been doing, producing good hardware, OS and if need be software to fulfill a market's needs.
Same as the original Windows vs Mac battle. Windows won with Lotus Notes. Who knows what Android will win with.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
What I've noticed is that people who bitch about closed and inflexible just means that devices can't do things the way THEY want the machine to work. Which is fine. Everyone has their preferences, that's how life is.
However, there's a whole lot of hubris and a whole lot of arrogance with that position. It's close minded and doesn't celebrate the here and now. Paradigms have changed in a huge way. Giant VIMRC files have given way to modern IDEs. Virtual terminals have given away to multiple XShell sessions. Having to support that paradigm cruft IS bloat. I'm happy to see some of it going away. Even if I still love vi.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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I don't know crap about this, having been a serial entrepreneur of several successful companies, which I sold and then retired. Apple is on very shaky ground at this point, and though I might not like Mr Jobs or idolize him -- He's serious business as a human, and I hope he gets better ASAP, like I would anybody. It's no fun being sick and being faced with one's own mortality, as I know from personal experience, and less fun yet when you realize that a lot of people truly depend on you being around to make their lives go as well.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
What the hell does Netgear have to do with Apple? Why is Netgear voicing an opinion on the CEO of a company they aren't even competing with? It's like the President of Uruguay coming out of left field with a scathing criticism of the Prime Minister of Thailand. What's going on here? What do you possibly gain by this apart from making Steve's list of people he doesn't like very much?
__thread is not part of any C/C++ standard.
Actually, the equivalent functionality (although with a slightly different keyword name) is in both C++0X and C1X
On Mac OS X, gcc supports the POSIX standard way of doing the same thing: pthread_setspecific
This loses lots of optimisation opportunities, which is why thread-local storage was added to C and C++ in the latest standards. It is also horribly inefficient if you are storing a small amount of data, because you have to allocate a pointer in thread-local storage and then malloc() the small data structure.
Or, you can use the Intel C/C++ compiler and linker on Mac OS X instead of gcc.
Which doesn't help, because although the Intel compiler supports the syntax on other platforms, the OS X loader doesn't support it, so ICC rejects it.
Or, since all of the relevant code is open source, add support for non-standard extensions like __thread yourself.
Unlike *BSD and Linux, you're very unlikely to have patches accepted upstream in OS X. And, seriously, 'fix it yourself' is your answer? Didn't the Apple slogan used to be 'it just works'? I guess Linux is ready for the desktop if this is the new standard that we're judging OS X by...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I also think it could be a big problem for Apple if Steve Jobs isn't able to lead anymore, but not because he lends some sort of cool hipster vibe to the product line. His cool hipster vibe isn't the reason that the iPhone is an incredibly easy to use, reliable and polished piece of hardware--it's because he has an unbending focus on making incredibly easy to use, reliable, and polished pieces of hardware and software.
Netwho? I had literally forgotten about this brand because they do not exist here in Japan. These days in Tokyo it is pretty much impossible to forget who Apple is due to the popularity of the iPhone and Apple's portable computers. Not to mention that Apple's retail stores in just about every important shopping district in the country. After looking at netgear's website to refresh my memory they seem to be just another manufacturer of generic stuff that does nothing interesting, does not look nice is probably only differentiated from the generic Chinese stuff by the branding sticker. Now that I know that Patrick Lo is ill mannered enough to do this little routine against someone who is absent for health reasons, I have even less reason to ever be interested in netgear.
Yeah but even AppleTV shifted 6 million units which is no small amount, for an Apple product it's a complete flop, but compared to many products it's a decent figure. The original MacBook Air is similar in that you could fairly argue it was a flop relative to Apple's successes, but still shifted more units than your average laptop manufacturer manages with a specific model.
I think that was really his point- even Apple's shit products sell decently because Apple has a core of fanboys that will buy anything Apple no matter how crap it is. The times Apple succede are when they manage to sell beyond that core to the mainstream as they did with the iPod, and iPhone. I'm not sure if the iPad is really there yet but suspect it will be.
Apple could release an iTurd which was just a turd with an Apple logo stamped on it and it'd still shift 6 million units, and a core of people would still queue at the stores on release night.
Most companies that sell electronic gadgets have to really fight to sell 6 million units of a product, these companies will be envious of the fact Apple can throw something arguably worse out and still shift 6 million units without even really trying because of the core ultra-loyal fanbase. It's this core fanbase that really helps their more succesful product move too- the original iPhone only shifted 6 mill units, but as a quality product that was enough to set the ball rolling, whilst originally it was only really Apple's core fans that went for it when others saw it they too bought into it. In contrast, whilst these same folks bought the Apple TV and the MacBook air those devices just weren't compelling enough to catch on with the mainstream public for greater mass market sales.
Had pancreatic cáncer, now he has complications from the treatment. Don't mean to be pedantic.
Jonathanjk.com
Netgear CEO Says Jobs's Ego Will Bite Apple
There's no place like
I had to ditch my netgear wlan router after a year because it all but melted down. The interface when it worked was a study in how not to write a UI. I found quickly that Netgear was not my friend as a user, so I find it more than mildly amusing that the founder is complaining about Apple. Apple's wlan router interface has issues, but for plane jane uses, it's superb by comparison. Apple's focus on 'closed' began as a focus on 'easy to use' which it was and always has been. The fact that it's also /lucrative/ is due to the failure of Apple's competitors to offer an acceptably simple 'open' alternative.
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
What does the average consumer require? He needs a celphone, an address book, a music player, a notepad, email, sms, and the ability to key in responses or initiate a message. Above that are dodads, (toys that raise the cost of the device from a value of $200 to $800. What do you get for 600 extra dollars? Certainly not the ability to change batteries when the built-in one fades away. The IPOD, and family are an example of American Waste..
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada