Its not true. The web is filled with benchmarks on Apple products. Most products scored exactly the same. A few slowed mildly. The biggest difference was the iPhone 4 on 5.1.1 got a 393 while on 6.0 it scored 390 a full 1% slowdown.
Take a look at the report. Apple grew from 3.9% of all phones sold to 5.5% with sales growth from 17.2m to 22.6m. I'm having a tough time seeing why Apple fans should be worried.
Interoperability in protocol, data, schema and communication is the critical first step. The enabling principal is integration not duplication.
Possibly. Certainly there are examples of fairly complex data standards working on a variety of devices, like CDMA or GSM data on phones or cable data for televisions. On the other hand there are lots of examples where duplication became the means of standardization. Word and Excel became dominant, essentially a monopoly because: a) document conversion even though it existed was too imperfect b) non-duplication introduced substantial training costs
Again. The WordStar format was a standard that offered protocol, data, schema and communication. It lost first to WordPerfect and is now extinct. Microsoft built a huge part of their business historically on the fact that data conversion is complex and just having the data isn't enough.
I think a bigger issue today in terms of enhancing software interop are silos between vendors. There is not even a common language anymore: java,obj c,.net...
When was there a common language? I don't think it ever happened. Possibly C++ came close to becoming the GUI applications language but even at the height of C++, Visual Basic was easily in 1st place as an applications language and other languages like Delphi (Pascal) were hugely popular.
Things are moving backwards as each vendor does everything they can to enhance lockin. Apple does not allow apps which implement emulation or scripting languages.
Apple does allow apps that have scripting languages. For example Gambit Scheme, ND1, a huge number of Lua and Logo. What Apple does not do however is allow applications to share data between them except through very narrow protocols. And they are also restrictive and regulatory on usage.
It used to be the c compiler was available everywhere...
It was never true. Windows never had a system c compiler. On many Unixes getting GCC running was difficult and generally people used commercial C compilers that had vendor specific features. I'd say C being available with GCC is more true today than it ever was anytime in the past.
If you wanted to port you simply abstracted the environment specific interfaces and moved on to the next project. Before the i* meme we at least had an embedded java that worked more or less universally on most handsets...yes even the "dumb" ones.
Yes. Though it is interesting because now you aren't talking data portability but code portability.
You need metro for vector graphics? Really? Last I checked UI elements and fonts can be scaled from the windows control panel. They have been layed down and rendered in hardware as vectors for many many many years.
No they haven't. In theory Windows has supported a variety of DPIs, in practice you can't deviate much from 96. Try using Chrome on a Macbook retina with the higher DPI. The text looks terrible. All sorts of graphical elements make form factor assumptions in many applications and in the interface itself. Windows had to move from theoretically supporting UI elements to actually supporting them.
Its not even a particularly powerful laptop with a screen that folds backwards... There were "IBM" thinkpads with screens that twisted and then folded down over keyboard YEARS AGO and nobody cared.
Well first off somebody cared. The Fujis became the standard notebook for charting because of those features . I agree the standard x86, was low end cheap hardware without these elements. What's new to x86 is that the entire midrange has the features now. Going back to hardware being innovative is a huge change for the better.
Why do you have to choose between supporting existing systems and innovation? Why is it not possible to do both as MS has been doing all along for decades?
OK that gets to the core of the problem.
1) The accumulated computer culture that developed from the command line interf
How do you know what people will do regularly in the future? We know that some phone applications are crossing over, like Evernote. So clearly there is at least some desire. We know some desktop applications have phone versions that are successful: OmniFocus, Pages, Keynote. Google docs which you mentioned doesn't work well on phones and tablets but we know Google has been hit with repeated requests. Other things like calendaring and email not having the same applications is forcing custom synchronization.
I think the evidence is pretty clear people want to use not just the same data but the same applications taking advantage of the new form factors. The question is on average how close will they be.
There is a legitimate question as to whether Keynote and Evernote are exceptions or the rule going forward. But the point that:
Once a month when everyone else releases patches immediately?
Yeah. Microsoft has to balance patch sets being overwhelming for systems that need to test. Creating a schedule is useful for their customers to actually effectively keep up to date. An off schedule patch then automatically carries with it high priority.
Android doesn't support that. One can easily see Android applications that fall apart completely when you move from 3.5" phone to 7" tablet. Much less if you used them on a 23" touch desktop. I agree that Android is further along than Microsoft but that's something Microsoft wants to achieve.
As for the browser analogy. Browser code is data. Everyone supports moving data. It is moving applications that is the issue.
All of these "devices" are just the same guts/computers in different form factors.
Which is a critical first step.
The concept of "ubiquitous computing" is using intelligence to integrate and assist with aspects of the users *physical* environment.
Agreed. But that can't happen when software is tied to a particular small list of form factors.
By your measure Java is "ubiquitous computing".
Yeah that's fair. Java was a huge step forward in ubiquitous computing. I think the range of Java devices from the JavaVM phones, to Android smartphones to server, to Java applets running in browsers, to embedded systems running without interface is proof of that.
I would love to hear why metro is required for "Ubiquitous computing".
I said it in the very response. GDI has bitmaps and has GUI standards designed around bitmaps. One of the many things that needs to change is everything needs to be self adjusting vector graphics.
What hardware and why is it a huge step forward?
Take for example the Lenovo yoga with full ultrabook functionality and a snap hinge for tablet functionality. The HP envy all-in-one touch which work as all in ones or as large display touch systems, and at under $1000k! There was nothing like that 6 months ago.
Windows strength and brand loyalty stems from backwards compatibility and massive investment in existing infustructure and skills. Pissing it all away seems counterproductive and unlikely.
I think they are going to be able to migrate those skills and infrastructure. Very much the way Microsoft did with DOS. If not, if the only thing people like about Microsoft is legacy support, they've already lost. There is nothing to piss away, they are permanently a legacy vendor damned to falling marketshare and less and less relevance.
You are kinda addressing restrictions in different areas. GP was talking about software installation. Apple doesn't support freedom of hardware, they are in the hardware business. Moreover, things have gotten worse since the video subsystem in OSX has been diverging more and more from how it is organized in windows for laptops.
In terms of changing system functionality like cut-and-paste. Apple is terrible, Android is far better.
I'm not sure how Windows RT's lack of software is correlated with the restrictiveness or distribution.
No I have. Tilling is still rather primitive in Metro. You have advanced functionality like grouping and tilling but you don't have free flowing window management. I'm going to assume that once Microsoft gets application designers used to standard tilings they are going to offer more complex tiling commands to end users. Look at any of the tiling window managers for LInux like XMonad and you can see that tilling is not the problem.
So yes I agree this is a problem but it is one that can be solved quickly and I think will be. For now Microsoft wants to make the situation less complex for application designers by only forcing them to deal with 3 shapes. After that I suspect you'll be able to do a bunch of windows as stripes the size of the right stripe.
I agree and also used desqview. I think though this is a situation where age works to our advantage. Windows 95 type interface is not the entirety of our computer experience. We remember what came before and usually did other interfaces after. The win 95 interface was just one interface we used.
In this particular case there was almost a ten year difference in when it was used. Today where you would see the difference is much more on the server side of things. In an enterprise setup you have complex layers of software with custom written interactions between them. That is for enterprise there exists staff whose full time job is to support a single piece of software. In a small business environment while they might have an IT guy whose scope is broad, everything would fall under it. The interactions between the users are mostly peer to peer and there won't be a complex server setup.
The desktops though aren't much different. And that's what Microsoft is trying to maintain.
Who ships a fully functioning version of that today? Apple doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. MVS certainly doesn't.
You've mentioned a few technologies but not a complete solution that is for sale. Microsoft is doing what they typically do, take technologies that exist in isolation and packaging them together in q usable by the mainstream.
But as you can see phone apps have onscreen keyboard input. Apps like Evernote that evolved on phones use dozens if not hundreds of tags and the interfaces and a 3 dimensional filing system: folders x 2^(# of tags) x sequenced by time (labeled individually). So it isn't the case that all phone apps are simple. And obviously there are desktop apps that don't do very much and are simple. Certainly on average desktop apps want more density and more complexity and phone apps want less of both with tablets about 80% in the direction of phones.
The problem on my GPS is not that I have troubling hitting the buttons. The problem is that I have a non-intuitive interface using philosophy of design I have no experience with. That's the core issue, when confronted with a new interface familiarity would increase. And that is where Microsoft heading. Can you create interfaces which move seamless from less to more complex devices.
Take graphical scalability. Win32 apps have all sorts of bitmapped drawing capabilities. And to support those font handling and shaping needs to assume properties like a definite point size. To move to a scalability you need vector formats and bitmaps to become the default. Which means you need to rethink all sorts of menu structures and layouts. If you are going to do that, every application is going to need to rethink its GUI.
I understand the point you are making. And I agree the internals are different. But at the same time NT 4 filled the niche of Windows for Workgroups. NTVDM allowed NT 3.51/4 to replace Win 3.11 (WfW). They were functionally contiguous even if underneath the covers quite different.
OS/2 was 2.0 on up (a better windows than windows) would have been contiguous in the same way that NT was.
There's no ubiquitous interface in the real (physical) world, why should there one be for software interfaces to different types of physical devices?
Because the number of devices we need to handle is increasing. Using your example of planes, it is reasonable to assume a pilot will study an individual plane. You can't make the same assumption about a car. So car interfaces need to be more uniform than plane interfaces. Conversely helicopters go in the opposite direction since those are more specialized.
Well that suggests that they were poor interfaces, not that a GPS shouldn't have a simple interface.
I agree but one way to fix the "poor interface" problem is for me to have more experience and built in troubleshooting skills. Familiarity is how you achieve that.
I think Microsoft is probably going to have to yield the bottom 1/3rd of the market to do what they need to do. For price reasons as well. Far too many people like $500 PCs and you can't make a $500 PC with a touch screen, an expensive hinge, thin components, low weight, good battery life, expensive video hardware oh and a year or two from now double density pixels with real time adjustments (what Apple calls "retina).
Well that's not what I meant. By IBM I mean mainframe and mini.
In terms of the IBM PC the IBM PC was IBM's small business solution. People who owned small business bought them and used them for home functionality as well. Overtime IBM distinguished itself from other personal computers like the Commodores, Atari... with a business focus. IBM PCs were dominant in consumer and small business space years before they started playing a meaningful role in enterprise.
Well this is mainly sarcastic ranting. Ubiquitous computing is the idea of being able to run applications on a variety of devices. The same application on smartphone, tablet, laptop. And yes Metro was needed for that, GDI didn't have fully scalable graphics.
The demand of users quite obviously for years has been more touch and less complexity. The sales volume on phones and tablets proves what users want. The x86 platform has become a dead zone as upgrade times have gone from 3 to 5 to 7 to now 10 years. Sure those users who want to spend as little as possible while getting the moon are upset, who cares?
And yes I'm serious about the 2012Q4 hardware it is a huge step forward.
Make metro optional and allow RT apps to run within desktop windows and magically people look forward to upgrading.
Make metro optional and Metro just becomes a new style of GUI which is unsupported rather than the direction Microsoft is going. Like Silverlight and 800 other projects it fails. Balmer needs to establish the kind of credibility that Jobs did, he needs to make the message clear: Metro is the new Windows GUI and anyone who wants to have a windows application that can sell in 2015 is going to have a fully Metro version.
Slashdot Mirror
On your article the GLBenchmark Pro Offscreen, the 5.1.1 did better.
Its not true. The web is filled with benchmarks on Apple products. Most products scored exactly the same. A few slowed mildly. The biggest difference was the iPhone 4 on 5.1.1 got a 393 while on 6.0 it scored 390 a full 1% slowdown.
Apple's profits have been dropping like a stone? What planet do you live on?
http://static5.businessinsider.com/image/500dafd46bb3f71002000002-960/chart-of-the-day-apples-real-earnings-expectations-july-2012.jpg
Take a look at the report. Apple grew from 3.9% of all phones sold to 5.5% with sales growth from 17.2m to 22.6m. I'm having a tough time seeing why Apple fans should be worried.
OK. I'll stand corrected on that one.
Interoperability in protocol, data, schema and communication is the critical first step. The enabling principal is integration not duplication.
Possibly. Certainly there are examples of fairly complex data standards working on a variety of devices, like CDMA or GSM data on phones or cable data for televisions. On the other hand there are lots of examples where duplication became the means of standardization. Word and Excel became dominant, essentially a monopoly because:
a) document conversion even though it existed was too imperfect
b) non-duplication introduced substantial training costs
Again. The WordStar format was a standard that offered protocol, data, schema and communication. It lost first to WordPerfect and is now extinct. Microsoft built a huge part of their business historically on the fact that data conversion is complex and just having the data isn't enough.
I think a bigger issue today in terms of enhancing software interop are silos between vendors. There is not even a common language anymore: java,obj c,.net...
When was there a common language? I don't think it ever happened. Possibly C++ came close to becoming the GUI applications language but even at the height of C++, Visual Basic was easily in 1st place as an applications language and other languages like Delphi (Pascal) were hugely popular.
Things are moving backwards as each vendor does everything they can to enhance lockin. Apple does not allow apps which implement emulation or scripting languages.
Apple does allow apps that have scripting languages. For example Gambit Scheme, ND1, a huge number of Lua and Logo. What Apple does not do however is allow applications to share data between them except through very narrow protocols. And they are also restrictive and regulatory on usage.
It used to be the c compiler was available everywhere...
It was never true. Windows never had a system c compiler. On many Unixes getting GCC running was difficult and generally people used commercial C compilers that had vendor specific features. I'd say C being available with GCC is more true today than it ever was anytime in the past.
If you wanted to port you simply abstracted the environment specific interfaces and moved on to the next project. Before the i* meme we at least had an embedded java that worked more or less universally on most handsets...yes even the "dumb" ones.
Yes. Though it is interesting because now you aren't talking data portability but code portability.
You need metro for vector graphics? Really? Last I checked UI elements and fonts can be scaled from the windows control panel. They have been layed down and rendered in hardware as vectors for many many many years.
No they haven't. In theory Windows has supported a variety of DPIs, in practice you can't deviate much from 96. Try using Chrome on a Macbook retina with the higher DPI. The text looks terrible. All sorts of graphical elements make form factor assumptions in many applications and in the interface itself. Windows had to move from theoretically supporting UI elements to actually supporting them.
Its not even a particularly powerful laptop with a screen that folds backwards... There were "IBM" thinkpads with screens that twisted and then folded down over keyboard YEARS AGO and nobody cared.
Well first off somebody cared. The Fujis became the standard notebook for charting because of those features . I agree the standard x86, was low end cheap hardware without these elements. What's new to x86 is that the entire midrange has the features now. Going back to hardware being innovative is a huge change for the better.
Why do you have to choose between supporting existing systems and innovation? Why is it not possible to do both as MS has been doing all along for decades?
OK that gets to the core of the problem.
1) The accumulated computer culture that developed from the command line interf
What Android apps hold up well as 24" with a keyboard...?
How do you know what people will do regularly in the future? We know that some phone applications are crossing over, like Evernote. So clearly there is at least some desire. We know some desktop applications have phone versions that are successful: OmniFocus, Pages, Keynote. Google docs which you mentioned doesn't work well on phones and tablets but we know Google has been hit with repeated requests. Other things like calendaring and email not having the same applications is forcing custom synchronization.
I think the evidence is pretty clear people want to use not just the same data but the same applications taking advantage of the new form factors. The question is on average how close will they be.
There is a legitimate question as to whether Keynote and Evernote are exceptions or the rule going forward. But the point that:
a) This already exists
b) No one wants it
I don't think is supported.
Once a month when everyone else releases patches immediately?
Yeah. Microsoft has to balance patch sets being overwhelming for systems that need to test. Creating a schedule is useful for their customers to actually effectively keep up to date. An off schedule patch then automatically carries with it high priority.
Android doesn't support that. One can easily see Android applications that fall apart completely when you move from 3.5" phone to 7" tablet. Much less if you used them on a 23" touch desktop. I agree that Android is further along than Microsoft but that's something Microsoft wants to achieve.
As for the browser analogy. Browser code is data. Everyone supports moving data. It is moving applications that is the issue.
All of these "devices" are just the same guts/computers in different form factors.
Which is a critical first step.
The concept of "ubiquitous computing" is using intelligence to integrate and assist with aspects of the users *physical* environment.
Agreed. But that can't happen when software is tied to a particular small list of form factors.
By your measure Java is "ubiquitous computing".
Yeah that's fair. Java was a huge step forward in ubiquitous computing. I think the range of Java devices from the JavaVM phones, to Android smartphones to server, to Java applets running in browsers, to embedded systems running without interface is proof of that.
I would love to hear why metro is required for "Ubiquitous computing".
I said it in the very response. GDI has bitmaps and has GUI standards designed around bitmaps. One of the many things that needs to change is everything needs to be self adjusting vector graphics.
What hardware and why is it a huge step forward?
Take for example the Lenovo yoga with full ultrabook functionality and a snap hinge for tablet functionality. The HP envy all-in-one touch which work as all in ones or as large display touch systems, and at under $1000k! There was nothing like that 6 months ago.
Windows strength and brand loyalty stems from backwards compatibility and massive investment in existing infustructure and skills. Pissing it all away seems counterproductive and unlikely.
I think they are going to be able to migrate those skills and infrastructure. Very much the way Microsoft did with DOS. If not, if the only thing people like about Microsoft is legacy support, they've already lost. There is nothing to piss away, they are permanently a legacy vendor damned to falling marketshare and less and less relevance.
That's not true. Apple releases the video drivers. Microsoft has coauthored drivers. And the Linux community has written its own drivers.
You are kinda addressing restrictions in different areas. GP was talking about software installation. Apple doesn't support freedom of hardware, they are in the hardware business. Moreover, things have gotten worse since the video subsystem in OSX has been diverging more and more from how it is organized in windows for laptops.
In terms of changing system functionality like cut-and-paste. Apple is terrible, Android is far better.
I'm not sure how Windows RT's lack of software is correlated with the restrictiveness or distribution.
No I have. Tilling is still rather primitive in Metro. You have advanced functionality like grouping and tilling but you don't have free flowing window management. I'm going to assume that once Microsoft gets application designers used to standard tilings they are going to offer more complex tiling commands to end users. Look at any of the tiling window managers for LInux like XMonad and you can see that tilling is not the problem.
So yes I agree this is a problem but it is one that can be solved quickly and I think will be. For now Microsoft wants to make the situation less complex for application designers by only forcing them to deal with 3 shapes. After that I suspect you'll be able to do a bunch of windows as stripes the size of the right stripe.
I agree and also used desqview. I think though this is a situation where age works to our advantage. Windows 95 type interface is not the entirety of our computer experience. We remember what came before and usually did other interfaces after. The win 95 interface was just one interface we used.
In this particular case there was almost a ten year difference in when it was used. Today where you would see the difference is much more on the server side of things. In an enterprise setup you have complex layers of software with custom written interactions between them. That is for enterprise there exists staff whose full time job is to support a single piece of software. In a small business environment while they might have an IT guy whose scope is broad, everything would fall under it. The interactions between the users are mostly peer to peer and there won't be a complex server setup.
The desktops though aren't much different. And that's what Microsoft is trying to maintain.
Who ships a fully functioning version of that today? Apple doesn't have that. Android doesn't have that. MVS certainly doesn't.
You've mentioned a few technologies but not a complete solution that is for sale. Microsoft is doing what they typically do, take technologies that exist in isolation and packaging them together in q usable by the mainstream.
But as you can see phone apps have onscreen keyboard input. Apps like Evernote that evolved on phones use dozens if not hundreds of tags and the interfaces and a 3 dimensional filing system: folders x 2^(# of tags) x sequenced by time (labeled individually). So it isn't the case that all phone apps are simple. And obviously there are desktop apps that don't do very much and are simple. Certainly on average desktop apps want more density and more complexity and phone apps want less of both with tablets about 80% in the direction of phones.
The problem on my GPS is not that I have troubling hitting the buttons. The problem is that I have a non-intuitive interface using philosophy of design I have no experience with. That's the core issue, when confronted with a new interface familiarity would increase. And that is where Microsoft heading. Can you create interfaces which move seamless from less to more complex devices.
I'm going to link to this video again. Look at the interfaces on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0
Take graphical scalability. Win32 apps have all sorts of bitmapped drawing capabilities. And to support those font handling and shaping needs to assume properties like a definite point size. To move to a scalability you need vector formats and bitmaps to become the default. Which means you need to rethink all sorts of menu structures and layouts. If you are going to do that, every application is going to need to rethink its GUI.
I understand the point you are making. And I agree the internals are different. But at the same time NT 4 filled the niche of Windows for Workgroups. NTVDM allowed NT 3.51/4 to replace Win 3.11 (WfW). They were functionally contiguous even if underneath the covers quite different.
OS/2 was 2.0 on up (a better windows than windows) would have been contiguous in the same way that NT was.
There's no ubiquitous interface in the real (physical) world, why should there one be for software interfaces to different types of physical devices?
Because the number of devices we need to handle is increasing. Using your example of planes, it is reasonable to assume a pilot will study an individual plane. You can't make the same assumption about a car. So car interfaces need to be more uniform than plane interfaces. Conversely helicopters go in the opposite direction since those are more specialized.
Well that suggests that they were poor interfaces, not that a GPS shouldn't have a simple interface.
I agree but one way to fix the "poor interface" problem is for me to have more experience and built in troubleshooting skills. Familiarity is how you achieve that.
I think Microsoft is probably going to have to yield the bottom 1/3rd of the market to do what they need to do. For price reasons as well. Far too many people like $500 PCs and you can't make a $500 PC with a touch screen, an expensive hinge, thin components, low weight, good battery life, expensive video hardware oh and a year or two from now double density pixels with real time adjustments (what Apple calls "retina).
Well that's not what I meant. By IBM I mean mainframe and mini.
In terms of the IBM PC the IBM PC was IBM's small business solution. People who owned small business bought them and used them for home functionality as well. Overtime IBM distinguished itself from other personal computers like the Commodores, Atari... with a business focus. IBM PCs were dominant in consumer and small business space years before they started playing a meaningful role in enterprise.
Well this is mainly sarcastic ranting. Ubiquitous computing is the idea of being able to run applications on a variety of devices. The same application on smartphone, tablet, laptop. And yes Metro was needed for that, GDI didn't have fully scalable graphics.
The demand of users quite obviously for years has been more touch and less complexity. The sales volume on phones and tablets proves what users want. The x86 platform has become a dead zone as upgrade times have gone from 3 to 5 to 7 to now 10 years. Sure those users who want to spend as little as possible while getting the moon are upset, who cares?
And yes I'm serious about the 2012Q4 hardware it is a huge step forward.
Make metro optional and allow RT apps to run within desktop windows and magically people look forward to upgrading.
Make metro optional and Metro just becomes a new style of GUI which is unsupported rather than the direction Microsoft is going. Like Silverlight and 800 other projects it fails. Balmer needs to establish the kind of credibility that Jobs did, he needs to make the message clear: Metro is the new Windows GUI and anyone who wants to have a windows application that can sell in 2015 is going to have a fully Metro version.