Apple Versus Google Innovation Strategies

porsche911 writes "The NY Times has a great story comparing the top-down versus bottom-up innovation approaches of Apple and Google. From the article: '"There is nothing democratic about innovation," says Paul Saffo, a veteran technology forecaster in Silicon Valley. "It is always an elite activity, whether by a recognized or unrecognized elite."'"

Comments

There is nothing democratic about buzzwords

[Anonymous Coward]

It is always an elite activity, whether by a recognized or unrecognized elite.

Google is moving toward Apple's model already

[jmcbain]

Google's current CEO, Larry Page, took Steve Jobs' advice to heart and is cutting the bloat (e.g. Google Wave, Google Labs, etc. have all been cut in the last several months). That means less 20%-time projects from engineers who have no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs.

Re:Google is moving toward Apple's model already

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac OS and iOS only exist because of engineers, not management.

"It's not the consumer's job to know what to want"

[Chemisor]

Apple's philosophy resulted in their products being used by millions. Google's philosophy has produced search, gmail, and pretty much nothing else that anybody uses. The results speak for themselves.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

Because search and gmail aren't used by millions?

apple does market research

[alen]

ipod released only after there was a market for MP3 players
iphone released after some phones got the ability to play music files, access email and surf the internet. WAP had been around for years
tablet concepts had been around for years as well

Apple's innovation is to find a new market or one in need of a new product
make a list of all features currently available or wanted
pick one or a select few thought to be the top features and do them better than everyone else
add in the rest of the features over the next few years

apple has never released a brand new unique product that no one ever has

Re:apple does market research

[rjstanford]

apple has never released a brand new unique product that no one ever has

And, of course, neither has Google. They took existing ideas that were rapidly becoming seen as vital and did them in a more cohesive, higher quality way then their competitors.

Just like Apple did.

Re:apple does market research

[ultramk]

While I agree in some aspects... I have to disagree in others. For example, while MP3 players existed before the iPod, the market largely didn't: there were three main types of machines out there, big HD-based nomad-type players the size of paperbacks with gigs of storage, CD-MP3 walkmans, and small flash-based players with only 16 or 32mb of storage (only enough for a handful of songs). I only knew one person who actually owned an MP3 player before an iPod, and I was smack-dab in the middle of the target demographic at the time. The reason for this is that all the options had big flaws:
- The big Nomad-type players were heavy, fragile, had terrible interfaces, expensive, and could only run off battery for a little while. Even worse, they were all USB 1 based, which meant that transferring music was incredible tedious.
- The CD-MP3 devices could hold a lot of music and were cheapish, but they also had terrible interfaces, were as big as a discman, and went through batteries super quickly. They also required a whole additional step of burning off what you wanted onto CDs ahead of time.
- The little stylish flash players were neat, portable and had good battery life, but only holding 5 or 10 songs made them a complete joke.

I really think what Jobs' method was, was to look at a class of products and say "OK, here's what exists. Why do they all suck so much?" ...and in the process of answering that question, create a new device that gets right to the heart of the problem and addresses it instantly.

Re:apple does market research

[Mithent]

Apple provide the features that most people want, and make them easy-to-use. The iPod came out with fewer features than the competition, but most people didn't want an interface cluttered by FM radios and audio recorders and other optional features. They wanted to play music, and the iPod made it very easy to play music. Apple don't try to please everyone, but you get a long way by pleasing the majority.

The alternative strategy is to try to please everyone by offering every conceivable feature and making everything highly customisable. This is great for the minority who want the lesser-used features and want control over every aspect of the experience, and this is the route that Google take with Android. I prefer it, I have two Android devices, and I would never trade them for iOS ones. But to the average user, all this ancillary stuff is, at best, superfluous, and at worst, gets in the way. The average person wants a phone that has a button they press to get Facebook, and the iPhone OS UI is little more than a grid of buttons you press to get to stuff, compared to Android's highly customisable but undeniably more complex homescreens and widgets.

Apple innovation is focused on experience and ease-of-use, Google innovation is focused on features and engineering.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

What? I clearly remember the time before Google where you couldn't google anything. Back in those days, you could not access a site unless one of your friends had told you the URL. Or find it in that directory, what was it called, it had this funny name, like a joyish yell? Yihaa?

Re:apple does market research

[jellomizer]

When was the last time you really saw a brand new unique product?

You got a Rock, You smash you hand it hurts, your enemy comes after you, you smash him with the rock, you win. Lets get a bigger rock, lets attach a stick to that rock. Lets sharpen the point of that rock, Lets use lighter rocks that throw better. Lets use an other stick to throw that rock and stick further, Lets put a vine to an other stick and use that to fire the rock on a stick. Lets add some feathers so it flies smoother.....

You were walking over a log you pushed it and a heavy object on to of it moved much easier, you use the the log to move other heavy objects, you get more logs and move it. You use the large part of the log and put a heavy stick in the middle and moving things is a little easier you put something around the Stick to stop it from slipping off, you get an animal to pull the wagon....

Innovation is not coming with something brand new and amazing it is incremental steps improving the original product. Then finding a good niche for your improvement.

Re:apple does market research

[lurch_mojoff]

There seems to be ongoing confusion between innovation and invention. What you describe as Apple's innovation is what innovation is in general -- you start with an existing thing and improve it some way. Coming up with something completely new is invention and I don't think either Apple or Google do a lot of that.

Re:apple does market research

[w_dragon]

Apple created one thing that didn't exist before that is what really saved the company. It wasn't the iPod, it was the thing that actually made the iPod useful for most people. Apple created iTunes. They actually got license agreements to sell songs online, legally, for a price that people would pay. That was why everyone bought iPods, because they could play music that you could purchase legally without having to rip a CD. Combined with the original iPod being a pretty good MP3 player they were able to pretty much claim a monopoly in the MP3 player market, which allowed them to keep improving the iPod and eventually led to much of their current product line.

Re:apple does market research

[alen]

apple didn't create itunes. they bought a company that sold music management software and renamed it. there were two at the time. SoundJam and something else. don't remember the names. I think the first one said no to a buyout and the other one said OK and iTunes was born. forgot the details but that was about it.

Re:apple does market research

[alen]

and there were online music marketplaces before. apple tied to a product and made DRM music a safe buy.

the ipod was a good product and unless you're a bored tech boy trying something new every month there was no reason to switch and "lose" your music

Re:apple does market research

[NatasRevol]

Eureka?

Re:apple does market research

[dfghjk]

So he introduced a product that had marginal battery life, low capacity for a hard drive system, and only supported the Mac because it was "reserved for the superior customer experience". The original iPod sucked, too, and much of that was available technology of the time. Don't forget, additionally, that the iPod was developed by an outside company and purchased by Apple. Apple's dominance of mp3 was due to money, being a big name in an emerging market, and a commitment to incremental improvement. Apple was the IBM of mp3, it succeeded because of who it was, not the superiority of its product. That came later.

Re:apple does market research

[YojimboJango]

I hate to do this to a +5 insightful, but you're wrong.

The first iPod that came out was in direct competetion with the nomad zen. The zen had a longer battery life (14 hours vs 10 hours), bigger harddrive (60gig vs 20 gig), usb1.1 and firewire (the iPod only had firewire), a tuner, and a microphone, and worked on windows, osx and linux (the iPod was a pain on osx and a nightmare for windows). I will give you that the interface was a step up after you got your music on it, but viewed side by side, and dollar for dollar (as I did back then), you'd have to wonder what people were smoking when they bought an iPod. They were not competing with cd-mp3 players at all, and they didn't start competing with the flash players till years later.

The only thing they at had at first had was white headphones and a bunch of monocrome dancing ads, but, as history has shown, marketing beat out the technically superior product. It wasn't till about 2005 that the iPod actually became the superior product.

Re:apple does market research

[jdgeorge]

What? I clearly remember the time before Google where you couldn't google anything. Back in those days, you could not access a site unless one of your friends had told you the URL. Or find it in that directory, what was it called, it had this funny name, like a joyish yell? Yihaa?

True enough. There were "Internet search" sites, but they all totally sucked. Google completely changed the way we look at the internet by producing a search engine that provided accurate, relevant, fast results in a clean, usable interface. Because of Google, URLs are all but irrelevant to most internet users. Need to find Apple innovations? Google "Apple innovations". Information about cabbage? Google "cabbage".

Re:apple does market research

[Gilmoure]

Slight quibble: iTunes Store.

iTunes software was some music organizer application they bought and rebranded.

Re:apple does market research

[Cro Magnon]

I vaguely remember a search engine called "Dogpile" I'd guess that it was probably called that for a reason.

Re:apple does market research

[Cro Magnon]

True enough. There were "Internet search" sites, but they all totally sucked. Google completely changed the way we look at the internet by producing a search engine that provided accurate, relevant, fast results in a clean, usable interface. Because of Google, URLs are all but irrelevant to most internet users. Need to find Apple innovations? Google "Apple innovations". Information about cabbage? Google "cabbage".

Once, my machine went kablooey and I lost several URLs. I found all the lost sites with Google.

Re:apple does market research

[rylin]

The original iPod had 5 or 10GB of disk.
It wasn't until the Zen that NOMAD got firewire.

Thanks for playing!

Re:apple does market research

[doom]

Close:

pick one or a select few thought to be the top features and do them better than everyone else

Really what they do is convince everyone that they're doing it better. If you have any trouble with an apple product, obviously that's you're fault, everyone knows that they're so easy to use. Clearly you need to get in touch with the Tao of Apple.

Re:apple does market research

[awyeah]

Apple's justification for originally only supporting the Mac was that they thought it would help drive Mac sales. I don't know if it did or not.

Re:apple does market research

[doom]

True enough. There were "Internet search" sites, but they all totally sucked.

Well no, actually they didn't. You needed to know what you were doing, and have some skill at refining searches and so on, but altavista was a pretty fucking amazing innovation.

Also, much as I like google's search, it's worth remembering that what they do has some downsides: they make it very easy to find the same kind of stuff that everyone else wanted to see when they did a similar search. That circular definition of quality creates the same sort of problem you see everywhere else in the culture, where the popular is popular because it's popular, and the big stay big because they're big.

Since we're on the subject of innovation, how exactly does a new site get established in a post-google world where no one will see you down there on page 17 of the search results?

(Answer: you game wikipedia with self-promotional edits, so that there's lots of buzz about you in the top ranked link on google... )

Re:apple does market research

[ultramk]

I disagree. The original iPod had excellent battery life compared to equivalent devices. It was also tiny compared to HD-based systems, and had vastly higher capacity compared to the flash systems. The firewire connection ensured that it was quick to charge and load, and let it double as a hot-swappable HD. As far as it being Mac-only... Apple hadn't ever made a Windows device before, and why would they? Nobody really anticipated what a game-changer this would be for the whole industry. The iPod wasn't "developed by an outside company" either. Apple contracted with two different outside companies that had more experience in the consumer electronics area, but that's not the same thing, and much of the work was kept in-house. It's not like when they were just selling Canon printers with an Apple badge on them. ...as far as succeeding because of "who Apple was", in 2001 they were "that company who's going out of business". Everyone knew it. It was just a matter of time.

Re:apple does market research

[ultramk]

Ah, you're closer but no cigar. The original iPod was at first only available as a 5gb, although they eventually bumped it to 10gb. :-)

Re:apple does market research

[YojimboJango]

Runs off to check wikipedia...

Ok you were right, there was a version of the iPod released in november 2001 that was actually much worse than the one I remember. Also yes, it was the Zen that had firewire. That is what my post said. The Zen technically competed with the second gen iPod (released 9 months later).

I probably never considered it because it was impossible to use if you didn't own a brand frickin new mac with OSX 10.1 (which came out in september 2001). It was the second gen iPod released 9 months later that let you use a windows box to put music on them, and it was a long while after that (iirc) before someone hacked it to allow linux.

So my bad. You were right, the very first iPod was so terrible that it completely fell off my radar, and it was the second itteration that I had hands on expirence with, and rejected as an overhyped fashion accessory. Seriously, the first gen iPod only worked if you had a brand new iMac to go with it. There's a bad product and then there's pants on head stupid.

Re:apple does market research

[doom]

Apple created one thing that didn't exist before that is what really saved the company. It wasn't the iPod, it was the thing that actually made the iPod useful for most people. Apple created iTunes. They actually got license agreements to sell songs online, legally, for a price that people would pay.

Before iTunes, there were places like eMusic (I used to work at one of the many incarnations of it before it started getting bought and traded around). eMusic had cut deals with every indie label in existence, and was selling subscription-based access to a collection of drm-free mp3s... they would've loved to carry the major labels products, but they couldn't talk 'em into playing.

The critical thing that Apple did with iTunes is they talked them into it. That's it. You can argue that the DRM plus pay-per-download model was the key feature, but I submit that the important thing was that Jobs could talk you into using shit for shinola, and he turned his reality warp field on the majors, and away he went from there.

Techies always want to believe that technical capability is key, the people who bought a product always want to believe they bought Quality... you're all ignoring the obvious though, which is Steve Jobs psychic powers.

Re:apple does market research

[painandgreed]

The only thing they at had at first had was white headphones and a bunch of monocrome dancing ads, but, as history has shown, marketing beat out the technically superior product. It wasn't till about 2005 that the iPod actually became the superior product.

I think what they had was iTunes which did everything. Now I didn't need to use one program to rip CDs, another to play them, and manage all the files myself. I just put in a CD and clicked a button and it was in my library, could be played on my computer, and would be copied to my iPod once I connected it. I certainly don't remember it being a nightmare on OSX, but exactly the opposite. However, I didn't actually get an iPod till the 3rd gen. One thing that really helped the iPod, was that it never stood still. Every year a new generation came out with new features, by the 3rd gen, I knew that it would eventually replace my trusty PDA by eventually having all the features my PDA had. (My phone took that spot before the iPod Touch came out however.) This also gives people a reason to upgrade even if their old one is still working. Not because they just want the newest and shiniest, but because they actually have new features that can be used.

Re:apple does market research

[stewbacca]

I suppose Apple invented the idea that sentences in English begin with a capital letter and end with a punctuation mark.

Re:apple does market research

[stewbacca]

Not to bust your joke, which is pretty funny, but it was called Dogpile because it is a metasearch engine...a punny name for a nerdy architecture.

Re:apple does market research

[stewbacca]

I'm dubious that Apple had any weight to throw around in the early 2000s. They were almost dead by 1999. The iPod single-handedly saved the company. But other than that, nice revision of history you've provided.

Re:apple does market research

[stewbacca]

I hate to do this to a +5 insightful, but you're wrong.

The first iPod that came out was in direct competetion with the nomad zen. The zen had a longer battery life (14 hours vs 10 hours), bigger harddrive (60gig vs 20 gig), usb1.1 and firewire (the iPod only had firewire), a tuner, and a microphone, and worked on windows, osx and linux (the iPod was a pain on osx and a nightmare for windows).

When I was 18 I cared about tech specs, because, well, I was 18. By the time the iPod came out, I had matured beyond obsessing about tech specs and bought the better overall product, the iPod, because there's more to a device than its specs.

Re:apple does market research

[stewbacca]

More importantly, iPods actually got better with each generation. Whatever happened to Nomad?

Re:apple does market research

[jdgeorge]

True enough. There were "Internet search" sites, but they all totally sucked.

Well no, actually they didn't. You needed to know what you were doing, and have some skill at refining searches and so on, but altavista was a pretty fucking amazing innovation.

Altavista may have been better than what came before it (was it really better than Lycos, other than indexing more pages?), but compared to Google, it really did suck. The amount of time it took to craft a search that found what I wanted on Altavista was ridiculous compared to finding the same information with Google. Altavista provided Bablefish - that was the piece that made them relevant to me after the appearance of Google.

Since we're on the subject of innovation, how exactly does a new site get established in a post-google world where no one will see you down there on page 17 of the search results?

(Answer: you game wikipedia with self-promotional edits, so that there's lots of buzz about you in the top ranked link on google... )

No, you have content on your site that's relevant to searchers. If you don't have content, people won't go to your site. Also, instead of gaming Wikipedia, you learn about this new-fangled "social media" thing, and start a community around your product/subject of interest on Facebook, Google+, etc. If you have something that interests people, social media can attract lots of attention.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

iPod didn't require OSX 10. The original worked with Mac Classic (aka OS 9). Any 2 year mac had firewire and could run OS 9.2
The iPod used a 1.8" HD while the rest were using 2.5 Laptop HDs.
Zen came out after iPod.

Re:apple does market research

[tachin1]

Well, I remember at the time, I thought like you did, its overpriced, no way I'm getting one, cant copy the songs back to the pc...

But, I had just traded up from my rca flash based player to an Archos 5 gig, 4 AA batteries driven monster, and I was pretty happy with it till it broke :(
Somebody offered me a good deal on an Ipod, about half price, still pretty expensive for me, but i figured what the hey, I can always sell it if I don't like it...
Screw the specs, the experience of listening to music on an Ipod was so good! I still remember updating my Archos player with the rockbox firmware and that made it easier to listen to music, but it was still clunky and slow. Along came the Ipod and it was all about the music.

True, they weren't competing with the flash based players, but once you got used to listening to music on the Ipod, everything else was a mess. I'm not trying to say you're wrong, not at all, I'm trying to say that the hype was true, it really was about the user experience, specs had nothing to do with it, thats why they were able to dominate the market even wen it was just so expensive, it was really worth it.

Re:apple does market research

[mlts]

Google improved search engine capability. Pre that, search engines had a text bar, then a bunch of categories underneath that might have something relevant if you drilled down enough. Searching via keyword would get some results, but likely irrelevant.

Then there were the pop-up ads that pre-Google search engines had, where unless one had a tool like the Proxomitron, a hosts file, or some anti-popup utility, searching for something became an object of clicking for stuff, then having to quit out of the web browser and come back to deal with all the excess windows.

Before that, you took your luck with the command line and Archie.

Re:apple does market research

[vakuona]

And that is why you are not, and will never lead a big company. Anyone who compares an iPod to an mp3 player that came before it, or even many that came after it, is deluded. I did own at one point a Cowon iAudio M5. And then I bought an iPod. Wasn't as good as the first iPhone even. The Zune might have come close.

And your priorities are really weird if you think it is more important to get the bit where you put music onto a player right, than the interface you use everyday. I hardly sync my iPhone nowdays, and hardly synced my iPod back in the day. The user interface is the most important part of an mp3 player. That is the part you have to deal with every day, many times a day. The syncing is not nearly as important.

The iPod was best because it was the most usable product, by a distance.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

As was askjeeves, hotbot and alltheweb.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPod was not developed by an outside company and purchased by Apple. That was iTunes.

Re:apple does market research

[arose]

Pagerank was pretty unique actually.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to other HD based players, yes, maybe 5GB was small, but the device wasn't the size of a brick.

And if 5GB so small, how is it that a decade later it's still typical for music players to ship with 8GB if not less? SD slot is no excuse, shouldn't the maker have shipped it with more storage to begin with?

Re:apple does market research

[doom]

I never used Lycos, but as I understand it Alta Vista introduced automatic web spidering (which is how they beat the original version of Yahoo).

Saying "Alta Vista sucked" because it wasn't better than something that didn't exist yet is a throughly warped historical perspective.

No, you have content on your site that's relevant to searchers. If you don't have content, people won't go to your site.

Actually no, the "content" on your site doesn't much matter, what matters is whether you can include some key terms that don't exist on all the already higher ranked pages. If you do succeed in jumping on something fast, you have to climb PageRank mountain faster than the "journalists" at the various already-higher-ranked sites can spew "content" vaguely related to what you've been contenting about.

I'm glad to hear that the marketroids have all moved on to "social media", and that wikipedia is now safe.

Re:apple does market research

[mattack2]

apple has never released a brand new unique product that no one ever has

A pre-assembled personal computer that does color graphics out of the box with no add ons.

Re:apple does market research

[evilviper]

Well no, actually they didn't. You needed to know what you were doing, and have some skill at refining searches and so on, but altavista was a pretty fucking amazing innovation.

Absolutely not. OP is 100% correct. Search engines were steaming piles of crap before Google. The only way you were sure to find what you wanted with Altavista or any of the other search engines around at the time, was to know EXACTLY what you wanted, and do a search so specific that you get exactly 1 page returned... End of story.

It was the culture at the time, everybody on the internet before 2000 knew it. Doing a book report on Hippos? The first search result is going to have a decent name and blurb, and when you click-through you'll find it's actually a hard-core porn site. Domain name squatting wasn't the nickel and dime industry that it is now... Companies were paying MILLIONS to get the shortest domain names (why do you think Disney uses "go.com"?), and their namesake domain names, because YOU COULD SEARCH FOR THE COMPANY BY NAME, AND NEVER FIND THEM IN ANY SEARCH RESULTS. That was the internet. The internet was at the mercy of incredibly crappy search engines. We had sites like dogpile that queried multiple search engines just because, the results from each of them were a crapshoot, and it was hoped that one of the 5 you compared might have one hit on what you wanted in the first page of results... It didn't work, but people were that desperate.

A couple years ago I was debating the same thing here on /. So I went over to AllTheWeb.com (which was one of the last throwbacks) and demonstrated the problem. Search for "Slashdot" and hit #3 is Goatse.cx. That was the caliber of search engines in the good old days.

Re:apple does market research

[jrumney]

The little stylish flash players were neat, portable and had good battery life, but only holding 5 or 10 songs made them a complete joke.

Before the iPod nano, flash players almost universally used removable storage (MMC and SD mostly). So they were only limited by the memory sizes available at the time, and it was easy (though expensive) to carry a pile of memory cards just as you would a pile of CDs.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*

there's only one thing apple did different to competitors

advertise

oh sure you'd see occassional stuff in a pc or gaming mag here or there
but apple put up posters, bought tv spots, product placement
hell, during the year the "i'm a mac" campaign came out, appl espent over $300m on advertising

but think about it

ipod
macbook
iphone
ipad

in each case there were small companies with existing products
apple swoops in, produces a comparitively 'basic' and 'simpler' unit
then advertise the crap out of it EVERYWHERE

Re:apple does market research

[Xest]

Biggest problem for the Nomad was they had no iTunes, so it relied on users being technically competent enough, or unlazy enough to be arsed to rip their CD collection or download pirated music.

That was never going to work long term. People inherently want convenience, and the iPod gave them that, as much as I hate it, because personally I thought my Zen was a much more awesome device than my iPod, but then, I was one of those with an MP3 library big enough to appreciate it.

Re:apple does market research

[dangitman]

So he introduced a product that had marginal battery life, low capacity for a hard drive system, and only supported the Mac because it was "reserved for the superior customer experience". The original iPod sucked, too, and much of that was available technology of the time. Don't forget, additionally, that the iPod was developed by an outside company and purchased by Apple. Apple's dominance of mp3 was due to money, being a big name in an emerging market, and a commitment to incremental improvement. Apple was the IBM of mp3, it succeeded because of who it was, not the superiority of its product. That came later.

Wow, that's almost 100% incorrect, yet you get modded up. What the fuck?

Re:apple does market research

[jdgeorge]

I never used Lycos, but as I understand it Alta Vista introduced automatic web spidering (which is how they beat the original version of Yahoo).

Saying "Alta Vista sucked" because it wasn't better than something that didn't exist yet is a throughly warped historical perspective.

No, I say Altavista sucked because I used it a lot, and it frequently didn't return relevant, useful results. Lycos also sucked for the same reason. Yahoo was actually better than the others, in a way: They categorized a lot of significant Internet sites, so you could find stuff by navigating their links even though their search wasn't very good.
Google was the first search engine that didn't suck (that is, it returned relevant search results almost always in the first page). These days, Yahoo and Bing also don't suck.

No, you have content on your site that's relevant to searchers. If you don't have content, people won't go to your site.

Actually no, the "content" on your site doesn't much matter, what matters is whether you can include some key terms that don't exist on all the already higher ranked pages. If you do succeed in jumping on something fast, you have to climb PageRank mountain faster than the "journalists" at the various already-higher-ranked sites can spew "content" vaguely related to what you've been contenting about.

I'm glad to hear that the marketroids have all moved on to "social media", and that wikipedia is now safe.

If you don't have content on your site, nobody will care, whether that "content" is code, text, or pictures. Some text is necessary to explain what the non-text stuff is.

The point of my social media comment is that if a social media "someone" (e.g. Linus Torvalds, Neal Patrick Harris, etc.) thinks that your stuff is cool, you'll get visibility.

Ultimately, if nobody cares about what's on your site, it doesn't matter how high your search rank is. If you have something interesting, people will get interested. But "gaming" wikipedia may not be the most effective way of getting the attention you want.

Re:apple does market research

[Anonymous Coward]

The first iPod that came out was in direct competetion with the nomad zen. The zen had a longer battery life (14 hours vs 10 hours), bigger harddrive (60gig vs 20 gig),...

So you're saying that the iPod had less space than a Nomad?

Re:apple does market research

[doom]

No, I say Altavista sucked because I used it a lot, and it frequently didn't return relevant, useful results.

Got it, you and I were just using different internets, that's all. Or maybe I knew how to do boolean searches.

But "gaming" wikipedia may not be the most effective way of getting the attention you want.

It would be nice if the people who were doing it would come to that conclusion.

Elites

[gmuslera]

Needs one kind of elite to innovate, and another kind of elite to monopolize, shut down, put trivial patents around that innovations or other "innovative" measures to avoid them to succeed.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[sureshot007]

I hope you are trying to make a joke, because I'm pretty sure that a few people use google search and gmail for a couple things.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Joehonkie]

Way to downplay those two items, which are used by millions, and conveniently ignore Android and Google Maps, among others.

The problem with top-down

[elrous0]

Apple got away with top-down because it had developed an incredibly strong brand, with incredible customer loyalty. Part of this was based on the intense focus they had/have on image control and artistic design, part of it on the almost cult-leader-esque charisma of Steve Jobs, and part of it on their conscious cultivation of their "hip underdog" status (even as they became anything BUT an underdog).

Very few can pull that off. And it takes a lot of work over a very long period of time.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:The problem with top-down

[ultramk]

Really what you're saying is just a variation on "Apple fans are all deluded fools who buy everything because it's cool." Of course, that kind of ignores history: Apple wasn't the cool brand by any stretch until the last 12 years or so.

The reason that over the years Apple was able to make and retain such intense customer loyalty was because they chose to focus on making sure that every aspect of their products made the user's life a little bit easier. When you see--in a thousand little ways--that someone has gone to the trouble of trying to make it easier for you to do what it is you're trying to get done... intense loyalty is a natural result.

The difference between the Mac OS and Windows (back in the old days at least) was that Windows was designed and engineered to sell to IT buyers and CTOs--not the users, while the vast majority of Macs were bought by the person who would use them. The difference in priority showed.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anthony Mouse]

Very few can pull that off. And it takes a lot of work over a very long period of time.

Not only that, Apple has made its billions by being very good at identifying a market where the existing participants are not meeting the needs of consumers, then entering the market and using its clout to exert leverage over the existing participants who are fouling things up.

Think about it: Before iTunes and the iPod, the RIAA had been ruining the consumer experience in the market for digital music. Before the Mac, Microsoft had been ruining (and continues to ruin) the consumer experience in the personal computer market. Before the iPhone, AT&T et al had been ruining the consumer experience in the smart phone market.

They're all markets where some dastardly monopolist or cartel had been putting their foot up the ass of anyone who tried to innovate in those markets, and Apple came in with enough money and influence to tell them to pound sand and yet still get what they want.

The problem for Apple now is that when you're at the top, there is nowhere to go but down. The incumbent monopolists they've humbled and profited billions from are still around, and they don't really like playing second fiddle. They're going to be fighting to reclaim their power, either (as Microsoft has) through various dirty tricks, or (as the telcoms have) by opening up the previously tightly controlled market to more open competitors like Android that they can subsequently exert more influence against, or (as the RIAA has) by lobbying Congress to screw over the entire tech industry with unconscionable legislation.

That's a lot of fronts to be fighting at the same time, especially when you're the new incumbent with everything to lose and little to gain than what you already have.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Gilmoure]

Nope, everyone who's ever purchased anything at any time from Apple is obviously a handlebar mustached, penny-farthing riding, latte sipping esthete with too much money and no knowledge of anything related to computers. They don't even open the boxes they bought but just show them off at fancy parties, with everyone gathered around their $5000 dollar coffee table and sound like the dad from Wild Thornberries.

Re:The problem with top-down

[chrismcb]

Really what you're saying is just a variation on "Apple fans are all deluded fools who buy everything because it's cool." Of course, that kind of ignores history: Apple wasn't the cool brand by any stretch until the last 12 years or so.

Apple has always been "cool" or did you forget the Macintosh, and the 1984 Superbowl commercial?

The reason that over the years Apple was able to make and retain such intense customer loyalty was because they chose to focus on making sure that every aspect of their products made the user's life a little bit easier.

Apple products are no more easier or harder to use the Microsoft's. But Apple has done a tremendous job building up a cult like following. That is why they retain such intense customer loyalty. People didn't line up because the products worked, they lined up because it was "cool."

Re:The problem with top-down

[Kartu]

Apple wasn't the cool brand by any stretch until the last 12 years or so. Neither was it remotely as popular. But I recall the "fastest computer" with IBMs CPUs bogus ads and iZealots defending it.

Re:The problem with top-down

[CAIMLAS]

The reason that over the years Apple was able to make and retain such intense customer loyalty was because they chose to focus on making sure that every aspect of their products made the user's life a little bit easier. When you see--in a thousand little ways--that someone has gone to the trouble of trying to make it easier for you to do what it is you're trying to get done... intense loyalty is a natural result.

Yet, they haven't done this, per se. In some ways, it's been a symptom of their own efforts, but for the most part it hasn't even happened. There is not much Apple has done which has been innovative or even all that useful which was not done before.

The answer is in two words: black turtlenecks. Quite simply, good, consistent marketing, a cohesively uniform product/corporate image, and trendy products naturally appeals to trend-setters (and those who appeal to them). Remember the "I'm a Mac" commercials, and how incredibly stupid and low-brow they were? They appealed to common people who buy consumer products. They're the reason why flashy sports cars which have a reputation for running poorly have, in the past, sold so well: people cling to image when they are image focused. They don't care if it works well, just that it works and looks cool in the process of it doing so.

The fact that the rest of the tech industry was flagging at the time when Apple was coming out of the closet was a fortunate coincidence. Everything was stagnant at the consumer level, basically waiting for the next step in evolutionary change: Fisher Price XP was out, Vista was on the horizon but not terribly promising unless you were a fanboy; the MP3 player market was expensive and very much a small market due to the technology humps that needed to be overcome to use the devices effectively; and later, there weren't many feature phones which were capable of doing what the iPhone did (or, at least, which were marketed like the iPhone was).

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

One really good example of this is how apple allows you to drag and drop directly from applications. Have a word doc open you want to attach to an email? Just click the icon in the document's title bar over to the window for your email message (you can cmd-tab if you need to), and let go. The document is attached. Want to post a photo from iPhoto on your friend's facebook wall? Click upload photo on facebook, go to iphoto, and then drag the photo over to the "Choose file..." button and release. Done!

I tried using Windows 7 the other day and nothing remotely resembling these features existed. You have no idea how frustratingly inefficient that makes moving files from one application to another.

Re:The problem with top-down

[stewbacca]

Apple products are no more easier or harder to use the Microsoft's. But Apple has done a tremendous job building up a cult like following. That is why they retain such intense customer loyalty. People didn't line up because the products worked, they lined up because it was "cool."

This is the most immature, disingenuous post I've seen this month.

I'm 42 and very much not cool and have mostly Apple stuff (I have 1 HTC phone and a Windows 7 pc, in addition to a plethora of Apple stuff). I also teach people how to use computers and to say Apple products are no more easier or harder than Microsoft's is an insult to my career field.

Re:The problem with top-down

[stewbacca]

Oh boy, I could go on forever, but here's a short list:

Ever install a Mac app vs. a Windows app? Pretty painless on Macs, and sometimes painless on Windows but sometimes disasterous.

Ever UNINSTALL a Mac app vs. a Windows app? Yeah, no contest, because, well, you don't uninstall apps from a Mac.

Ever try to rename an open file in Windows or move it?

Ever try to edit video on a PC running Windows any version?

Ever seen the directions for connecting to a wi-fi signal in public hot spots for Mac vs. Windows?

Ever try to get a wireless printer working on either?

Ever try to move user data from one computer to another with either system?

How about burn a cd? Why did it take Windows 10 years to be able to burn a cd from the desktop right in the OS?

Re:The problem with top-down

[zzsmirkzz]

Really what you're saying is just a variation on "Apple fans are all deluded fools who buy everything because it's cool." Of course, that kind of ignores history: Apple wasn't the cool brand by any stretch until the last 12 years or so.

You just proved his point. They weren't very big/relevant until about the same time, when they became cool.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

"...and part of it on their conscious cultivation of their "hip underdog" status"

Why stop there? ...and part of it on the account of fantastic customer service, and part of it on reliability of product and product support, and part of it on quality of the materials, and part of it on obsessive focus on just the most important features and refining their every detail, and part of it on emphasis on user's experience that technical benchmarks, ...

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has done a great job of enabling the iNept population to think they know how to run a computer.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had as much trouble figuring out how to do something on OS X (oh, you need to click on this non-descript image that isn't a button to add a partionton, totally easy!) than on Win 7. I'm not personally invested in either, you are, if your career hinges on OS X being easier you will never admit otherwise. So what value is there to your opinion?

Face it, Apple has thrown UI consistency out of the window a long time ago. It might have been crappily consistent in cases (yes, delete all the data on that floppy) but at least it was consistent. Now that it isn't anymore they don't deserve the credit for it. Pick a career that doesn't require self-dilusion.

Re:The problem with top-down

[arose]

Ever try to use part of a disk for Timemachine? I'd also ask if you've ever lost documents in iWork, but Apple recently came out with the unprecedented invention of autosave, so I won't.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

sometimes disasterous

Yeah, like your command of written English. Good thing you only teach computers.

Re:The problem with top-down

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, rubbish. The PC enthusiast and home user market is way larger than Apple's and always has been. And why not? It's great being part of the PC ecosystem with the immense availability of peripherals and attendant drivers for just about any need or hobby. All the great games I can play and software I can run.

I remember with joy my first Windows PC (running 95) with a Pentium 166 and S3 Virge card. I was able for the first time to experience MPEG1 quality videos - running on my PC!

Re:The problem with top-down

[shilly]

This cult-like following meme is getting a bit out of hand. Of course there are many many people who could be considered part of a hardcore Apple fanbase. Lots of them right here on Slashdot. They probably number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. But Apple products have been bought by tens of millions of people, or possibly even hundreds of millions. They are not part of any cult of Apple. They probably aren't that passionate about the products. They just quite like their iPhone / iPod / iPad.

Re:The problem with top-down

[stewbacca]

Yes I use a part of a disk for timemachine. I use one disk for 4 timemachine partitions (for four Macs). It's not as hard as you are trying to bait me into arguing. By the way, what is the Windows equivalent of Timemachine again?

Re:The problem with top-down

[arose]

It's not as hard as you are trying to bait me into arguing.

It's not as easy as it should be either. Remind me, how does one recover from a power failure in iWork '09 again?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

... Google Maps, Android...

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[0xdeadbeef]

The results speak for themselves.

Yes, you people scream "monopoly" about Google every chance you get.

Not Even Close

[eldavojohn]

Google's current CEO, Larry Page, took Steve Jobs' advice to heart and is cutting the bloat (e.g. Google Wave, Google Labs, etc. have all been cut in the last several months). That means less 20%-time projects from engineers who have no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs.

Where do I even start with this? Okay, 20% time still exists. Eliminating projects that resulted from it just means those engineers can move on to new ideas or join other projects. Saying 'less 20%-time projects' doesn't really make any sense. That perk still exists ... it's possible his strategy was to disassemble those bigger teams so that they get more engineer hobby projects to pick from. If Page was taking Steve Jobs' advice, the 20 percent perk would be eliminated completely and Page would be walking around instructing people what the consumer wants.

The fact that you think that engineers have 'no experience with product development and more polished projects from the top management and PMs' makes me think you are either management or you live in a fantasy world where management has tricked you. I am a software developer, I do agile development. Guess what? The engineers can do all of what you just listed too! Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway! What does 'more polished projects' mean exactly? Who has always done the polishing and development? It wasn't management and I've often found their direction is a coin flip.

Re:Not Even Close

[Synerg1y]

Agile's been around since the early 2000's, it also coincides with the cutting out of middle management in IT (no more Phil Lumbergh). If anything software development has picked up since, no more bloat in the process, so if anything adding layers of management to "polish" projects killed projects rather than helped them in the 90s. Not sure what OP's OP is talking about, but cutting the bloat has more to do with axing products (that were once 20% time probably) with no future than stopping innovation at google as far as I can tell.

Re:Not Even Close

[Taty'sEyes]

Thanks, learned a new word: foist Seriously

Re:Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

makes me think you are either management or you live in a fantasy world where management has tricked you

This. Perhaps not in this person's case, but I see all the slobbering over Jobs and only one thing occurs to me... he's every manager's dream icon. He knew what people wanted more than anyone else, and everyone else just handled the mechanical details because that's what they're paid to do.

For years management has been convinced that the people below them are dumb, have no vision, that (s)he is the "real person" that knows what "real people" want. Everyone wants to think they're Jobs, who they think is some guy that pictured the awesome products in entirety, and all the other people just shut up and made it happen the way he wanted.

Nobody really talks about the people that did the really great work. There's very little mention of Jonathan Ive around the offices of america. They all want to believe that one guy, that imaginary proxy for themselves, knew what to do and everyone just did the dirty work... resulting in many of the worlds most successful products for real people. It's a convenient personal defense for someone that knows they're not actually trained in any real skill... "I have vision".

I don't buy it for a second, and nobody I know could fill the shoes of that story character.

Re:Not Even Close

[iluvcapra]

If Page was taking Steve Jobs' advice, the 20 percent perk would be eliminated completely and Page would be walking around instructing people what the consumer wants.

The present Google operation is so engineer-centric that they're afraid to even decide what color blue they should use without submitting it to the Cloud for arbitration. The point isn't that the Cloud would give you a bad result, but that their internal groupthink is so strong that they can't even tolerate individual decision-making. Somebody wanted to make a CSS border three pixels wide, and he had to make an empirical case with evidence and metrics. This isn't about agility, it's ideological and engineers trying to stake out a higher moral ground than creatives or commercial interests.

The whole "eliminate middle management" and "bottom-up" "agile" approach is totally valid in a lot of circumstances, but to be honest I think the open source movement and the whole "cathedral and the bazaar" mentality has totally politicized any conversations about business management. Developers have been blowing their own smoke for so long that they've basically constructed an internal value system where if a product requires marketing, it's not worth making, and if a project requires management, it's not a good project to do, and if the customer doesn't like the deliverable (cuz there weren't any PMs advocating for him) the customer should RTFM.

The consumer isn't even part of the equation, it's really just a semantic battle over who gets to claim to be the more honco technologist. Google makes tons of money, and Google gives the outward appearance of making money in the "right sort of ways," the ways that most people have made prior commitment to support, so Apple making lots of money is challenging. But it's not a mystery in a business sense, nor even really in a technological sense. It's a moral problem people have, and they use terms like "agility" and "innovation" to frame the moral debate.

What does 'more polished projects' mean exactly? Who has always done the polishing and development? It wasn't management and I've often found their direction is a coin flip.

Engineers are way too fast with the "I don't understand this, therefore it must be stupid, arbitrary and redundant" judgement.

Aside:

Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway!

I don't think you understand elasticity of wages. Not having middle managers doesn't mean you get paid more, it means your firm charges the customer less -- laying off programmer middle-managers doesn't suddenly make programmers in demand or curtail their supply, it's actually the opposite, because all those PMs and partner engineers are looking for work and can probably do your job too, and would be happy to take less than you to do it.

This might have the knock-on effect of making your firm more competitive and keeping you more consistently employed, but the marginal gain of eliminating redundancy does not accrue to the remaining employees. There's a reason the guy that's paid with stock options does the firing: he's the one with the unbounded upside.

Re:Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they innovate so much that most of their products are results of acquisitions, including Android, Maps several components of Google+ and many more.

Don't get me wrong. Google is a fantastic place to be if you are an engineer, even with all the assholes in management positions, but an innovative company it is not.

--
Jordyn Buchanan

Re:Not Even Close

[Dog-Cow]

Jobs wasn't just a visionary. He was a visionary that could communicate his vision to people that could turn it into reality. I've yet to meet anyone like that.

Re:Not Even Close

[CAIMLAS]

The biggest difference I notice between Google and Apple in an area where it really matters is this: how they treat problems and shortcomings with their services/products.

* Apple: There are no problems with our products. All of our engineering, design, and software efforts are perfect. If there's a problem with your application it's not our fault. If there is a problem, it's probably your fault.

* Google: if there's a problem or missing feature in a major product (Gmail, calendar, search, whatever) they're working on "improving" it, with no ETA on the horizon. If it's in something with minor use, it's sooner trashed/gotten rid of than fixed. They've mastered the domain of the "simple but elegant" web UI, and everything hinges on that.

Honestly, of the tech titans out there, Microsoft seems to be one of the better ones right now when it comes to actually eating their own dog food and making their shit work. I've been quite impressed (even though I don't even use any of their products anymore, personally or professionally). They're doing a lot to win back the hearts and minds they alienated during the era of Microsoft Suck.

Re:Not Even Close

[datavirtue]

They've mastered the domain of the "simple but elegant" web UI, and everything hinges on that.

I suggest you crack open an Adwords account and STFU. Adwords is an abysmal clusterfuck that is far from elegant and simple.

--Google fanboi

Re:Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn where are my mod points......

Re:Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't confuse what I said as a slight against the real man. Clearly he was a brilliant guy that did have remarkable talent. What I'm saying is that it takes the combined vision, experience, skill and determination of a whole lot of talented people to do what Apple has over the last decade.

I'm also saying that elevating him to god status is a convenient way for managerial types to convince themselves that they're also "visionaries", where everyone around them is holding them back. As you pointed out, nobody is Steve Jobs. But even less-so the Jobs we've made up in veneration.

Re:Not Even Close

[doom]

The present Google operation is so engineer-centric that they're afraid to even decide what color blue they should use [stopdesign.com] without submitting it to the Cloud for arbitration. The point isn't that the Cloud would give you a bad result, but that their internal groupthink is so strong that they can't even tolerate individual decision-making.

Yes, pity the poor Designer. In the good old days they'd let you push your Brilliant Designs out on the world whenever you wanted. Now they make you prove it isn't going to screw things up with some A/B testing first. Oh, what a world.

Re:Not Even Close

[doom]

Consider yourself lucky. Many people who were privileged to meet Jobs wish they weren't.

Re:Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

MS "eating their own dog food"... Funny that you mention this because every part of their development process is the opposite of your statement. The biggest one was MS recreating the ribbon interface item from the Office suite for other apps and then still not having it available for developers to use in their apps and when they offer it via MSDN it's a licensed library from a 3rd Party which is not even close to what was used in Office.

Re:Not Even Close

[Anonymous Coward]

> Okay, 20% time still exists

hahaha. You must be an intern or new hire or something. Do YOU have a 20% project? No? Would YOU have time for an extra project? No? Anybody on your team? Really? Your TO-DO list is 50% more than you can possibly finish this quarter? Yeah, thought so.

A lot of the perks exist only to be attractive to potential candidates, which is fine. What puzzles me, is how many continue to drink the cool aid after a year or more of employment. I guess you believe free food everywhere is actually beneficial to you and your health as well...

Re:Not Even Close

[eulernet]

Okay, 20% time still exists. Eliminating projects that resulted from it just means those engineers can move on to new ideas or join other projects.

Wow, you don't understand human, aren't you ?
Let's talk about cognitive dissonance.
On one hand, Google encourages people to start new ideas, during 20% of their time.
On the other hand, Google cuts the new ideas, and buys external companies that have new concepts.

How do you think the engineers feel ? Of course, they won't trust Google for encouraging them of having ideas in their 20% time. If they have an interesting idea, the best way is to quit Google, set up a startup and sell it to Google. Of course, who would bother giving ideas to Google, when you see what they do with that.

What Google shows now is that they don't care their internal innovation. Basically, nothing good can come up from Google, so they'll buy any kind of technology from outside.

I am a software developer, I do agile development. Guess what? The engineers can do all of what you just listed too! Not having that BS middle management means we get paid more although we have more responsibilities but those responsibilities were already foisted upon us when something went wrong anyway!

I'm an agile developer and coach. It seems that you didn't discover the hidden truth of agile: management doesn't want to be agile.
Management is the new bureaucracy: you try to live without them, and they try to justify their existence.

I bet that you are using Scrum, Scrum is a gift for management, since the team manages itself ! The team changes, but why would the management change, when they can continue to work with their old ways.
Read the interesting article here:
http://targetprocess.com/rightthing.html

BTW, try to read William Edwards Deming: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edwards_Deming
He's the father of agile, back in 1950. And nobody listened to him until 1990 !

Re:Not Even Close

[PintoPiman]

The present Google operation is so engineer-centric that they're afraid to even decide what color blue they should use [stopdesign.com] without submitting it to the Cloud for arbitration. The point isn't that the Cloud would give you a bad result, but that their internal groupthink is so strong that they can't even tolerate individual decision-making.

Yes, pity the poor Designer. In the good old days they'd let you push your Brilliant Designs out on the world whenever you wanted. Now they make you prove it isn't going to screw things up with some A/B testing first. Oh, what a world.

Thanks for making us engineers look friendly there mr doom.

Re:Not Even Close

[iluvcapra]

I guess I could accept this if there was some sort of way to "prove" a designer did the job, but sorta by definition a designer's performance is subjective. When a designer gets pushback like this, it isn't about getting evidence, because that's impossible. It's really the engineers making a power play, and saying, in so many words: "My job is objective and requires proof, your job doesn't, therefore your contributions are worthless. A shell script could do your job."

It really isn't restricted to designers either. Marketing, public relations, sales, human resources, upper management and the "suit" jobs of all stripes basically get the same overt or covert treatment. People with authority over the engineers get malingering and minimal compliance, and people collaborating with the engineers get disrespect and obtuseness (like "Well we have to A/B test six different borders widths...").

there are different kinds of elites

[Trepidity]

Yes, some people are better at some things than other people are, so in a sense "elites" always exist. But they can be organized quite differently, in particular when it comes to openness and boundaries, or what you might call a welcoming versus elitist mentality.

For example, the Homebrew Computer Club was an elite in a sense, but an elite that was: 1) open in a literal sense to anyone who in good faith wanted to come and participate; and 2) open in a cultural sense to educating people and spreading knowledge. It wasn't an elite in the elitist sense, of a closed club that wouldn't let you in if they didn't deem you worthy. If anything, they represented the opposite type of hacker, the hacker evangelist who actively wants to spread the good word, knowledge, passion, and skills.

There are some modern organizations that operate similarly, aiming for high quality of community and discourse (so part of the "tech elite"), but without the exclusionary/attitude sort of aspects (so not "elitist"), like Noisebridge, the Hacker Dojo, and the SuperHappyDevHouse hackathon/parties.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, amazing. Someone who doesn't search on Google or use Gmail.

On Jobs and consumer market research

[Tablizer]

When asked what market research went into the company's elegant product designs, Steve Jobs had a standard answer: none. "It's not the consumers' job to know what they want," he would add.

This is misleading. Jobs usual answer was closer to, "Customers really don't know what they want until they actually use it."

He liked to quote Henry Ford:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'faster horses'."

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[Tablizer]

Note that it's questionable whether Henry Ford actually spoke those words. But the saying stuck in marketing lore.

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[RevEngr]

Jobs and Ford also agreed (for quite some time) on:

"You can have any color you want, as long as it's black."

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[jedidiah]

...which is also untrue. The Model-T came in many colors.

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[shadowrat]

This is misleading. Jobs usual answer was closer to, "Customers really don't know what they want until they actually use it."

Anyone who has ever developed software for anyone else comes to this conclusion at some point.

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[RevEngr]

...which is also untrue. The Model-T came in many colors.

...as will the iPhone soon, undoubtedly.

I own a 1913 Model T, which I believe is the first year that they were only available in black. According to the same source, it's not known whether Ford ever said that quote or not, and it is true that:

"In the first year, Model T Fords were not available in black at all, but only in Gray, Red, and Brewster Green."

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[softwareGuy1024]

According to wikipedia, he quoted himself as having said it in his autobiography.

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[stewbacca]

It's the concept in graphic design that people know when something looks better than something else, but they can't explain why, they just can tell.

Same thing goes with a lot of Apple stuff. People don't know what they want until they see a good example of it. It defies "supply and demand". There was no demand for the iPad...Apple created demand where there was none by showing the consumer what they didn't know they wanted.

Re:On Jobs and consumer market research

[Tablizer]

My understanding is the Ford preferred to paint them black, although did dabble in other colors. They were able to perfect the chemistry of the black color so that it would protect the body well. Even if the car was later painted a different color, the coating of the black paint underneath still acted as a protectant, giving the car a reputation for durability.

Apple is not wholly top down

[SuperKendall]

Do you honestly think every single feature of every single product Apple releases comes from the top?

The facts are that Apple has a lot of smart engineers. Major product directions (like producing an iPhone or AppleTV), sure that comes from the top. But within the confines of a product people at all levels are coming up with ideas.

Now ultimately those have to be approved by people at the top, but I do think a really successful project needs a handful of people to control direction, or you'll have an explosion of features which may confuse or not mesh well. But innovation can still happen at any level.

Re:Apple is not wholly top down

[tlhIngan]

Do you honestly think every single feature of every single product Apple releases comes from the top?

Exactly. One of the neat features in 10.3 was Expose, which started as a simple hack to Quartz Extreme (the GPU windowing system at the time, which didn't include GPU-based compositing). It was kind of a basic thing - since the windows were just textures in memory, they could certainlly be manipulated like a normal 3D scene. All Expose did was rearrange and rescale the windows around, letting the GPU handle the details of scaling and video processing (it's why you could still see the movie playing while it was invoked - the GPU was doing all the heavy lifting).

Steve Jobs saw that and made it a priority feature. Of course, the initial implementation he saw probably was nowhere near as what came out in 10.3, but still.

Of course, not every idea or feature makes it in, especially those that don't work very well or are clunky at best - Apple's got a habit of dumping features that they couldn't get working right until someone can come up with a way to do it properly.

Re:Apple is not wholly top down

[Gilmoure]

So... you're saying they have really good editing skills?

Re:Apple is not wholly top down

[Skuld-Chan]

I read in an article once that Steve actually dictated what was served in the company cafeteria - sure spaghetti and meatballs wasn't his invention, but it was sure his idea that day.

Re:Apple is not wholly top down

[gmhowell]

I read in an article once that Steve actually dictated what was served in the company cafeteria - sure spaghetti and meatballs wasn't his invention, but it was sure his idea that day.

"My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious. "

That's at least as reliable as your statement.

Re:Apple is not wholly top down

[Xest]

I actually agree with you on this, the most prominent example is of course Jonathan Ive - the guy wasn't always at the top in Apple, the reason he got to the top was because he came up with some good designs.

This article is a fail on so many levels, and it suffers from the flaw that many Apple fanboys do - it sees Jobs as some mystical god, from which every section of Apple's success came. Obviously that's bollocks, he was a shrewd businessman and marketer, but the idea for products from which he could decide what to invest in and market very much came from folks further down the chain a lot of the time.

In this respect it's no different to Google - whilst some ideas come from the top, plenty don't, so trying to play them off as some how different in this respect is stupid, they're really not. Both firms have ended up with products as much from acquisitions, ideas from the bottom, and ideas from the top as each other.

Right, the 'Openness of Apple' Really Got Me

[eldavojohn]

Needs one kind of elite to innovate, and another kind of elite to monopolize, shut down, put trivial patents around that innovations or other "innovative" measures to avoid them to succeed.

Heh, I got some laughs out of reading this article as well:

Yet Apple has also repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences as exemplified by the visit that Mr. Jobs made to the Palo Alto research center of Xerox in 1979. He saw an experimental computer with a point-and-click mouse and graphical on-screen icons, which he adopted at Apple. It later became the standard for the personal computer industry.

Is "adopted" the right word here? It's funny how some people consider that same "influence" to be stealing.

In 2010, Apple bought Siri, a personal assistant application for smartphones. At the time, it was a small start-up in Silicon Valley that originated as a program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon. Last year, Siri became the talking question-answering application on iPhones.

So those are you examples for 'repeatedly displayed its openness to new ideas and influences'? They "borrow" and idea and then they buy up and assimilate a start-up? Well, if that's your frame of reference, Microsoft excels at openness too! I know this article is not even trying to be exhaustive but Android isn't even mentioned once. I don't understand how Apple can even be called "open" when compared with Google's offerings to everyone.

Re:Right, the 'Openness of Apple' Really Got Me

[rjstanford]

Is "adopted" the right word here? It's funny how some people consider that same "influence" to be stealing.

Of course, the fact that Apple did, indeed, pay Xerox for those ideas, makes it hard for most people to see it as stealing. They got an amazingly good deal because Xerox didn't value what they'd developed. Again, not stealing.

Re:Right, the 'Openness of Apple' Really Got Me

[Anonymous Coward]

Is "adopted" the right word here? It's funny how some people consider that same "influence" to be stealing.

Of course, the fact that Apple did, indeed, pay Xerox for those ideas, makes it hard for most people to see it as stealing. They got an amazingly good deal because Xerox didn't value what they'd developed. Again, not stealing.

So very very very wrong.

Re:Right, the 'Openness of Apple' Really Got Me

[NatasRevol]

How is buying $1M of pre-IPO stock not paying them? They made about ($29-$22/$22)M dollars or $318k on the first day from that agreement.

Re:Right, the 'Openness of Apple' Really Got Me

[Gilmoure]

They also misinterpreted what they saw. Jobs thought that he saw overlapping windows and insisted that the Apple engineers figure out a way to do this. Later on, they found out that Xerox stuff didn't do overlapping windows. So Apple did manage to code something new. Once. But it's not like they got OS source code from Xerox, so they could write a GUI app and then incorporated some of that code in Mac OS.

general business vs. the pursuit of knowledge

[recharged95]

Top Down == innovation for the sake of business (value)
Bottom Up == innovation for the sake of knowledge (evolution)

Hasn't changed for thousands of years if you think about it. Aside from the power hunger dictator once in a while.

Re:general business vs. the pursuit of knowledge

[Superken7]

That is a VERY interesting thought! Wish I had modpoints.

Re:general business vs. the pursuit of knowledge

[iluvcapra]

So in other words, we live in the greatest time to be alive as consumers of knowledge, but I should be shorting GOOG?

Re:general business vs. the pursuit of knowledge

[GLMDesigns]

I have to disagree with that. A lot, if not all of bottom up innovation had to do with business. Gutenberg, for instance, was in business. So was James Watt (Steam Engine), Robert Fulton and 1000s of others. Sam Walton in the 1960s was bottom-up innovation. Walmart making executive decisions in 2011 is top-down. Top-Down is when executives/politicians/rulers with money and clout make decisions, it routes through the bureaucracy and is built. Bottom-Up is the entrepreneurial spirit in action.

Re:general business vs. the pursuit of knowledge

[Ryanrule]

A lot of the people you mention were essentially both the top and bottom at the time. Hmm, I think I saw that video a few days ago...

Re:general business vs. the pursuit of knowledge

[GLMDesigns]

None of them were in any position of power when they started. Gutenberg NEVER had power or riches. James Watt wasn't born poor but that doesn't mean his inventions are not to be classified as bottom-up. When a large corporation/government makes a decision and then implements that decision that is Top-Down. When an individual, on his own, without the backing of government or large institution develops something that is Bottom-Up. There are some developments that can be considered in the middle. Tim Berners-Lee work at CERN can be argued both ways. He was working at CERN so it's Top-Down (my opinion) but a counter argument is that he developed it independently with a few others and then presented their work. Clearly Larry Page and Sergey Brin's development of Google while students are an example of bottom-up - even though they were at Stanford.

Motivation

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

Fun video on motivation studies that appeared in my Facebook feed today. Interesting for anyone who wants to give it a watch. Big companies and small alike deal with encouraging innovation and motivation in their own ways. http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

If somebody brings up...

[srussia]

the Cathedral and Bazaar meme here, I'm gonna call a GodWin.

Re:If somebody brings up...

[dkleinsc]

the Cathedral and Bazaar meme here, I'm gonna call a GodWin.

You just did, so GodWin!

And seriously, it's not a meme, it's an essay by Eric S Raymond which seems to capture pretty well exactly why Paul Saffo is completely wrong.

Re:If somebody brings up...

[Nadaka]

Its also a book that expands on the essay.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[scumdamn]

• Search
• Gmail
• Maps
• Android
• Google Talk
• Google Plus
• Google Voice
• Google Docs

Your argument is invalid.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[forkfail]

You left out their biggest seller: advertisement.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[johnlcallaway]

His philosophy speaks to why I don't buy Apple products .. lack of choices. While some lament the Android phones and it's associated plethora of choices, that is exactly why I prefer to my only choice being black or white. But I like to analyze and comprehend the impacts of different configurations. I know what I want Mr. Jobs, I need Apple to make devices I want with the options I want. And one of those options is ... lots of options and price ranges. Until then, I'll continue to go elsewhere.

It's almost like people buy Apple because they don't want to have to think .. it's safe. There have been moments when Apple had true advantages in specific markets, such as graphics design. But for the most part, Apple products were perceived as easy to use and dependable and really were more about packaging existing technologies into better containers that true innovation. Jog button, mouse, GUI interfaces .. all existed before Apple added them to devices.

But Apple did it in a way that meant no thinking was required. Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject. And swiping to unlock. Pinching to zoom and unzoom. And holding a button down to power off. Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive.

need new killer product family every 5 years or so

[peter303]

Billion dollar revenue products that redefine the company. Google has had about three: Search, Adwords, and Android. Apple has had about six: Apple-2 , Mac/laser-printer, iPod, iPhone, iPad. Apple had a drought in the 1990s that nearly killed it. MicroSoft has been mostly living in the past the last decade. Every has to continually innovate to avoid Kodakization.

brainless organization

[gadget junkie]

I think that the whole Article is based on a false premise, i.e. that the two approaches are different, while in reality the Apple model is a (successful) subset of the Google model.
In Google, no committee or burocracy has control of the creation model, same as in Apple. in Steve Jobs' Apple, only one person had the control of the innovation process; in Google apparently no one has it, it seems a bit like trying to see in the dark by tossing ping pong balls and hearing the sounds.

They DO have one thing in common: no one is tasked of "organizing the process", so the burocracy priesthood, "fill the proper form", " there's no time at the next committee, we have quarterly reports; would june next year suit you?", is nowhere to be seen, or rather is firmly put into place as a service to the cutting edge part, design, production and marketing. The parts of the company that are usually overpowering in a normal organizations are simply not there on a decision making level.

Incidentally, and I quote "John Kao, an innovation adviser to corporations and governments" has a sysiphean task; It's the existence of these layers that makes the organizations wilt in the face of change, not their inadequacy, so I think his business card in my view should state "lost causes" as a specialty.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[gumbi west]

Google Voice, is this for real? I've never called someone and had google voice answer (I use google voice, so I know it scares callers away, but I've never even heard what it says).

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[gumbi west]

Hey, 1994 called, and they want their objections to apple back. "using the trash can to eject"? seriously?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[swillden]

Google Voice, is this for real? I've never called someone and had google voice answer (I use google voice, so I know it scares callers away, but I've never even heard what it says).

I don't think many Google Voice users have it do call screening. I know I don't.

Paul Saffo is an idiot

[king neckbeard]

Democracy in the sense of distributed power is precisely what leads to innovation. Telecommunications and an educated public are two of the biggest factors in innovation. The more people are able to share, copy and build upon the innovations made by others, the greater the amount of innovation we have.

top-down / bottoms-up - it's all in the context

[RevEngr]

There's a subtle thing here that I think often gets lost in discussions of this nature. The fact is that much (most?) innovation is "top-down" in the sense that there is one person holding the entire idea in their head that ultimately drives its attainment. That person might be a team of one, in which case they are just managing themselves, or they might have 20 people reporting to them that they can direct.

Whether you consider the resulting innovation top-down or bottom-up really depends on the context of that person within their organization. (And if you are in the organization, it depends on your own position in relation to that person).

Consider a manager in a company like Google who has 20 people reporting to her. Imagine that this manager has a vision of some innovation she believes she can achieve through the work of her 20-strong team, and so she manages the team in an extremely hierarchical and directed way in order to achieve it. She sets goals for individuals, she approves all design decisions, she vetoes any aspect of the project - at any level - that she doesn't like or that don't fit into her vision of how the result should look.

If the result of this process is ultimately perceived to be some Great Innovation (say, something like Google Maps), then outside observers are very likely to point at this as an example of why "bottom-up" is the best way to get innovation. After all, the manager was low-level, and was operating outside the direct influence of upper management, such that the innovation "emerged" rather than was designed from the top down.

Yet this same scenario tweaked such that the manager is instead the CEO of a 20 person company suddenly looks like the epitome of "top-down" hierarchy a la Steve Jobs. People will point at the CEO and say that she is controlling and hierarchical. But, again, if the result is good, this will be used as an example for why top-down hierarchies are "good" for innovation.

I've witnessed this directly in my own career. Several years back, as the lead of a team of ~20 people, I developed "innovative" new products that were not dictated by upper management of my 2000-person employer. It was seen as 'bottom-up' innovation in the organization, even though I was fairly hierarchical with the team and driving them to my vision. No matter, it was 'bottom-up' because I was innovating without being instructed by my bosses. Flash forward to being CEO of a 40+ person company with a ~20 person product/engineering team. The same characteristics that brought me success and the perception of "bottom-up" success at the large company are now perceived as "top-down" and controlling in this organization.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[jdgeorge]

Hey, 1994 called, and they want their objections to apple back. "using the trash can to eject"? seriously?

Yes it's an obsolete issue, but it's mind-bogglingly non-intuitive.

Many people who understand how things work are baffled by some current Apple UI choices. Not that this means Apple's choices are wrong; they're just not intuitive to everybody.

Apple products aren't right for everyone. That's all.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that Maps, Android, Google Voice and Google Docs are all based on products of companies that Google bought rather than products that they developed. And Google Talk is an XMPP server and client application. If this is what passes for innovation in your book, I'd have to agree with GP. The only item on your list that's an original creation other than the two already mentioned is Google Plus. And the jury is still out on whether that will be successful.

However not including AdWords in the list of successful products is extremely negligent on both your parts. It's among the most successful web products of all time.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I know nobody read AC posts :) , but here it goes anyways...
I have freeBsd and slackware on my computers and I get any choices I want , but for my iPhone I fire up virtual box and use iTunes. Why ? Because it works, my previous laptop was a MacBook and it just worked. Choice is great, but so is a product that does what you expect. Does anyone else remember the headache it used to be to get modems and X running well back in the day?
If you want stuff to just work there are trade offs, but in apple land you seldom have to worry about drivers and IRQ conflicts, it's like BMW vs tuner cars. Sure you can make your Honda have 700 hp and heated seats... If you have the time and desire. Sometimes a polished products that works as advertised and does what you expect with out tuning or tweaking or recompiling is nice. Not perfect, maybee not the way you would have done it, but you just turn it on and works

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Kartu]

Same as with Apple. Multi-touch, Siri, heck, CPU design, had to buy all those companies.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[flimflammer]

So in your infinite wisdom you take something old and use a joke that's even more overplayed to get your point across? Seriously?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

People buy Apple products because that is their choice. You don't buy Apple products because that is your choice. Apple is one of many choices and hopefully there will always be many. Apple makes their products for people who want what Apple has to offer and not for someone else. Apple gets a lot of things right and they also make mistakes but it usually isn't for a lack of trying to make the user experience better. Apple is happy with the profit they get off of a small percentage of the desktop and laptop market. People who prefer a Windows-like or Linux-like experience don't want Apple and Apple doesn't want them. So why isn't everybody ecstatic? Why all the vitriol ? It's just an effing machine for craps sake. If their products don't do what you want done or don't do them well enough to suit you for the price then buy something else and let the market sort things out. It's as simple as that. People have different values. It's a beautiful thing until someone starts implying that people with values different from theirs are somehow defective.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[datavirtue]

There are a bunch of people that are straight loco over Google docs. Google Maps? Pwns. Google Earth? Gee let me think. Google Analytics? Yeah, no one uses that. Should I keep going? Your dumb.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Talk
Google Plus
Google Voice
Google Docs

Nobody uses them. And they will go the way of Google Wave soon. Google Plus will take a little bit longer but Talk, Voice and Docs will be dead by this time next year.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[swillden]

I have a slashdot stalker!

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

Every product in that list except the first 2 were developed by companies that Google acquired. Your point being?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[stewbacca]

I'm pretty sure I use Google Maps on my iPhone by default.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[stewbacca]

Take Google Docs out of your "nobody uses them" list. I think I know more people now who use Google docs instead of MS Office.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[stewbacca]

I know what I want Mr. Jobs, I need Apple to make devices I want with the options I want. And one of those options is ... lots of options and price ranges. Until then, I'll continue to go elsewhere.

You are free to do what you please. Nobody said Mr. Jobs was FORCING you to buy into their business model.

It's almost like people buy Apple because they don't want to have to think .. it's safe.

You say this like it's a bad thing? Just because it's not what YOU want, doesn't make it bad. And one of the reasons it's safe is because of a long history of shit that just works.

... I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like ... swiping to unlock. Pinching to zoom and unzoom. ... Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive.

Seriously? Apple devices provided affordance, which is defined as presenting a device in such a way that it's use is obvious. Think of a pair of scissors. The big hole is for your fingers and the little one for your thumb because the design affordance dictates that is the only logical way to use them. How else would you unlock an iPhone when the only options are: a round button at the bottom, a rectangle button at the top right, two volume buttons, and, wait for it....a big GUI thingy that is just begging to be swiped to the right that says "Slide to Unlock" and is animated from left to right?

And you are complaining about pinching to zoom? You ever try using a non-multi-touch Windows phone and Google maps? Yeah, good luck with that.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[doom]

Look, a lot of people continue to rave about the astounding design ability and amazing ease-of-use of apple products. An example of a design screw-up works as a counter-argument, even if it's old and fixed in some way. In fact, you could argue that the fact that it was fixed is an acknowledgement that it really was a design screw-up.

And in general "we've heard that before, that's so *old*" is not actually a counter-argument.

Re:need new killer product family every 5 years or

[Renderer of Evil]

Billion dollar revenue products that redefine the company. Google has had about three: Search, Adwords, and Android.

Search and Adwords are intertwined. You can't really separate them if you're talking about these products in the context of revenue creation.

Android, on the other hand, is a net loss for Google. 2/3rds of search traffic on mobile comes from iOS devices for all that marketshare Andy Rubin keeps talking about. Android development costs + Motorola acquisition put the entire project in the red by about 15bn+.

Google doesn't have 3. It has only one product that generates billions. All roads lead to Adwords and that's 97% of Google's revenue.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[tachin1]

"I know what I want Mr. Jobs, I need Apple to make devices I want with the options I want. And one of those options is ... lots of options and price ranges. Until then, I'll continue to go elsewhere. "

My first reply to this is nitpicky: Jobs is dead.
I assure you that you do not want lots of options and certainly not price ranges, you want one device, that has features that are useful to you and also features that you want, even if they are not useful, you want one device, just one. I'm convinced you will not go and buy the whole range of Iphones available just because you want lots of options. What you probably mean here, is you want something that's within your price range.

"...But for the most part, Apple products were perceived as easy to use and dependable and really were more about packaging existing technologies into better containers that true innovation"

I don't understand what the problem is here.

"But Apple did it in a way that meant no thinking was required. Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject"

The weird part is that, thats not the correct way to eject, I always got the feeling that it was added in because some people are too lazy to RTFM (Or the help files anyway) and they figured, well, people keep draggin the disc to the trash, make it eject the damn disc already... Which would be pretty smart. :)

"And holding a button down to power off"
I hope this is not the way you turn your pc off... And last time I checked, all phones work the same way, hold a button to power off...

And one more thing...

"Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive."

I don't see the problem here. Is the benchmark intuitiveness? Or is this just comparing Apple products to some kind of platonic ideal of a device in a perfect world?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[flimflammer]

I think you've misunderstood me man, and that's probably my fault. I was calling into question his use of the ancient "199X called" joke as being a ridiculous comment to make while at the same time complaining about the age of a complaint.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I made the jump from iOS to Android: Choices. Apps are cool and help fill in some gaps, but in a lot of areas, you use what Jobs (or these days, Cook) gave you, or deal with it.

Blocking incoming numbers? Ad blocking? Blocking by IP or a hosts file? Copying files to/from a machine where you don't have admin access to install iTunes? Removing a game without destroying the save game? Running multiple Exchange instances in their own apps so work contacts don't spill over to home contacts? Logging into a machine via ssh, grabbing a file, encrypting it, and E-mailing it?

Only way to do those things is to jailbreak, and all it takes is one goof forcing a restore, and one likely is stuck at the latest iOS version which easily patched the JB exploit.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[tholomyes]

His philosophy speaks to why I don't buy Apple products .. lack of choices.

That's actually why, growing up in the 90s, I preferred Apple products: I was worried we were all doomed to a beige box Windows future and Apple was the only bastion of "choice" where choice didn't represent "Windows" but still actually ran a modicum of software needed to interact with the Windows world.

But for the most part, Apple products were perceived as easy to use and dependable and really were more about packaging existing technologies into better containers that true innovation.

There's a good article from a recent New Yorker that speaks to Jobs' real genius as being exactly what you said: not an innovator per se, but a tweaker and a refiner:

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution. That is not a lesser task."

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Truedat]

His philosophy speaks to why I don't buy Apple products .. lack of choices

If you had said you refuse to buy apple on the grounds that they are bullies then I could buy that, but I don't understand the "lack of choice" argument, could you explain?

The way I see it, if you see the market as one which includes all phones, then surely the existence of Apple handsets enhances your choice - greatly so because the also ship with their own unique operating system. So on that basis wouldn't you consider including them in your "round-robin" upgrades over the coming years?

On the other hand if you take the stance that its actually the individual vendor that must be considered on a case by case basis. In which case is there some minimum number of models that should be offered by a given vendor in order to avoid your boycott?

Just wondering.

Obligatory xkcd

[Truedat]

Hey, 1994 called, and they want their objections to apple back. "using the trash can to eject"? seriously?

http://xkcd.com/875/

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Sponge Bath]

It's almost like people buy Apple because they don't want to have to think...

You probably meant this as an insult, but the wording is accurate. People buy Apple products because they do not want to be *forced* to know the smallest technical details as if they intended to build the product themselves. If someone is technically oriented, they can still have lots of fun digging into things like the free Xcode IDE with modern LLVM based compilers and git source control.

It's nice to have the choice of just using a product and being able to dig into the technical details if you want.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Wovel]

The crash can turns into an eject symbol when you drag something that ejects. It has done this since at least tiger. All Macs also have an eject button on the keyboard.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[treeves]

Trash can to eject X makes sense if you think of it as "remove X from the computer" (i.e. if you don't know too much or think too much about what is actually happening).

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

a big GUI thingy that is just begging to be swiped to the right that says "Slide to Unlock" and is animated from left to right?

I assume that you've never seen a new iPhone user swiping their phone across the desk to unlock it,and looking puzzled?

It is not intuitive. The very fact that it has a prompt and animation reinforces this.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

Which word of the on-screen instruction "slide to unlock" gave you the most trouble?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[doom]

"I think you've misunderstood me man" No, actually I just attached my comment in the wrong place. Sorry.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Dr Max]

I saw that as well and it explains why i don't like apple. I know what i want from a device and don't like being told to like something else. Of course it also explains why apple is so popular, because a lot of people haven't got a clue what they want (the grandmother that is scared of computers) they didn't think they needed a smartphone till steve told them they did.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Dr Max]

Hell the iphone was designed by a Japanese company under contract.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[tofu2go]

His philosophy speaks to why I don't buy Apple products .. lack of choices.

Which is not a bad thing at all. Do a search for "Paradox of choice."

Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject. And swiping to unlock. Pinching to zoom and unzoom. And holding a button down to power off. Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive.

You just gave justification for giving Apple patents on those gestures--they're not as obvious as everyone thinks.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[mjwx]

Way to downplay those two items, which are used by millions, and conveniently ignore Android and Google Maps, among others.

Add Gmail to that.

Do any of you remember what webmail was like before Gmail...

It was shit in case you dont, think about what it's like to have no organisation (labels), a search function which couldn't find shit in a shit sandwich and spam galore.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[shilly]

How this can be marked insightful, I do not know.

Your argument conflates at least three distinct assertions:
1 you don't like lack of choice. You address this to a dead man. Weird.
2 Apple's products don't require you to think to use them. You seem to hint that you think this is a bad thing, but you don't explain why. I'm not sure why you'd think it was a good use of your mind and time to have to think about *how* to use a product, rather than thinking about *what you are using the product for*.
3 Apple's products are not intuitive.

1 Bully for you. Some people like lots of choice, and others don't. No doubt you have a different view from others as to what is a meaningful choice and what is not -- I suspect processing power figures higher up your list than device colour.
2 and 3 are just the teensiest bit contradictory, and you're not really very clear about what you mean by intuitive. For me, intuitive means "easily learned with a minimum of external support" -- and swiping to unlock and pinching to zoom, which you for some unstated reason class as idiotic interface choices, seem to fit that pretty well. My three year old can do both, and only needed to see them done once to learn the trick. That makes them more intuitive than putting on her knickers.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[shilly]

I assume *you* have never seen a new iPhone user swiping their phone across the desk either. I've never seen this, heard of this, found it on google, found it on youtube. I think you made it up. Especially as the actual text says "slide to unlock", which is pretty damned hard to interpret as "move the entire phone across a desk".

Apple fans usually not Jobs fanatics

[SuperKendall]

suffers from the flaw that many Apple fanboys do - it sees Jobs as some mystical god, from which every section of Apple's success came.

Actually it's mostly Apple Haters that credit Jobs with the whole success for Apple. Apple fans usually note that Apple's success is not due just to marketing, but in building products people really like to use - few I have seen credit Jobs alone with that success, since as you say Ives is also a large force there and there are as I said lots of other people involved.

I'd say Jobs was quite smart in knowing how to build a company that can come up with and ship great ideas, but the products themselves were huge collaborative efforts.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[PintoPiman]

You'll do well in life to remember that every sentence that begins with "you people." is followed by something stupid.

There's a set of people in the world that thinks Google has a monopoly. You have no evidence that GP is a member of that set. You're just making a sweeping generalization. There's team A that agrees with you and team B that doesn't and you've classified GP as Team B and therefore he holds all the other disagreeable opinions that you've seen. That's faulty reasoning.

Even if it weren't, Google's monopoly is in search and mail. GP already acknowledged that. GPs point was that, apart from search and mail, Google hasn't really had any hits. The claim that search and mail are monopolies doesn't conflict with that. Now, GP might be wrong in that Google does have other hits such as Android, but that's not the argument that you were making.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[PintoPiman]

It's almost like people buy Apple because they don't want to have to think .. it's safe.

To the extent that that's true, what if it isn't that they don't want to think, it's that they don't want to think... about bullshit product specs? Android phones advertise like muscle cars. Instead of HP, torque, 1/4 mile and 0-60 you get Ghz, core count, RAM, etc. Not ever car buyer cares about that stuff and that goes for computers too. When my mother is out to get a device, she wants something that will work, that will keep working, that looks nice, and that she can use. Apple's a known quantity there. Android might be or might not, but she'd have to do a ton of research to find out what to get and wouldn't end up with anything that, on her points of interest, was any better.

Imagine a world in which you had something else to do that interested you enough that you couldn't read every post that came out of Engadget. Say you had 2 hours to pick out your next computer or phone instead of an unbounded amount of time actively or passively researching on the internet. You too might go with something "safe."

Of course, there are plenty of folks who do think about computers, do do the research and STILL get Apple gear. I'm one of them, and you just insulted me. That's okay though, I'm used to it.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of nobody that uses Google docs. And of the people I know none of them know anybody that uses Google docs.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[shmlco]

"Some called it intuitive, yet I and others have stumbled over such idiotic interface choices like using the trash can to eject."

1994 calling? Try 1984 calling. Be that as it may, the disk to trash to eject mechanism was a shortcut. The standard way was to click on the disk and select "Eject" from the menu. Or Command-E. The select object, then select action metaphor that was at the core of the entire UI. Not that you should cut some of the first people attempting to design, implement and ship a consumer desktop GUI some slack or anything.

"GUI interfaces .. all existed before Apple added them to devices."

Barely. You should go through the list of extensions and concepts that the Lisa team added to the PARC interface, and that the Macintosh team added to the Lisa interface.

"And swiping to unlock. Pinching to zoom and unzoom. And holding a button down to power off. Sure, they make sense and are easy to use once you are shown, but that didn't make them intuitive."

Yep. Slide to unlock, with it's animation, is terribly unintuitive. Almost as bad as the idea of drawing some random symbol on the screen to unlock it. (grin) Scrolling through lists, tapping, pinching? Yeah, they're so unintuitive that my cousin's 4-year old latched onto them after seeing them done ONCE.

Holding down a power button to prevent accidental shutdowns? Yeah, NOBODY does that.

A definition of intuitive is "Using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning; instinctive." Once you've been shown once, pinching outwards to expand (stretch) an image is intuitive. You'd never, for example, pinch IN to expand. That would be counter-intuitive. It simply wouldn't feel right. Gestures become instinctive.

There's precious little that's so "intuitive" that someone can pick it up and do it with with no training or instruction whatsoever. Even using a hammer to drive a nail can require a demonstration by someone who's never seen it. I mean, does it make sense to try to hit the nail with the smallest face? Why not whack it with the broad side to insure hitting it?

It really comes down to how "little" training is needed. If I show you the gesture needed to scroll a list up on an iPhone, do I need to show you how to scroll it down? Do you try swiping side-to-side to see what will happen? That's intuitive.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[gumbi west]

fixed? Nothing has changed. You can still drag removable drives to the trash can to eject them, but the main method is still to select eject from a drop down. I actually think this was supposed to be a joke or perhaps easter egg.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[gumbi west]

"Many people who understand how things work are baffled by some current Apple UI choices." I'd guess that this is more like, "I don't know how to use a Mac as well as I know how to use my current OS, so I think it is much better." I think you have to take a few weeks to use an OS before you can judge it, and be sure to ask an expert when you are having problems. I appreciated Windows much more after I did this (though neither Gnome or KDE did much for me when I last did this--I just use the CLI on linux boxes now and wish they had Apple's "open" command and agreed on its name).

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[gumbi west]

How, exactly, does that work? It rings on several phones and they get deconflicted how?

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[swillden]

How, exactly, does that work? It rings on several phones and they get deconflicted how?

Whichever one you pick up first gets the call. That's the multi-ring feature, though, not the call screening feature. Vonage and, I imagine, some other VOIP providers also provide multi-ring.

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[gumbi west]

Just found it in voice, "Directly connects calls when phones are answered" as opposed to what I have it set to, "Announces caller and lets you listen as caller leaves a message." But I can't do the former because I want my home phone to ring too.

Anyways, my wife told me that if she wasn't married to me, she would just hang up when she got the confusing screening message, so the service is basically worthless to me (except for making it easy for my wife to text me).

Re:"It's not the consumer's job to know what to wa

[swillden]

Yeah, call screening has never been useful to me either.