I understand that may you think things have changed at Apple, but your previous post used older examples as supporting evidence, which I posited were unrelated or irrelevant.
So, in spite of that you still feel that Apple is out to squash competition out of sheer caprice; I don't. I think Steve Jobs has matured not only in his personal behaviour (to some degree), but on his business senses as well, and is doing everything in his power to avoid or prevent the same issues he encountered during his first tenure at Apple, due in part to his naivety and hubris at the time: mainly that the market will choose his products by mere virtue of them being better than the competition, and that there's nothing any competitor can do to touch them, because they are that good.
As far as I can tell, Apple still focuses heavily on the user experience. I would imagine that the popularity of some of its products would be evidence of this. Then you have the added dimension of Jobs trying to keep Apple's control over its properties. I don't see any anti-competitive behaviour: The market is full of portable music players and smart-phones, and many online stores and attractions have come and gone in the past. Even Google has their own phone and store now; I don't see Apple trying to close those down.
Do you forget that mere two years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, Apple was laughed at by the rest of the industry because they were going to attempt to enter the smart-phone market, which was wholly owned by the Big Players? And now these same critics claim Apple is a bully attempting to squash everybody else... interesting.
The strange thing is that the summary seems to imply that both articles are related, which they are most definitely not. The first one seems to be written by a naive noob, who just discovered a nifty trick in gcc. The second one is written by a real Wizard, who shows you how to conjure up some arcane magic to make ELF your bitch.
I have a suggestion: If you write your JVM in Visual Basic instead of C#, it'll be portable, since most old microcomputers included BASIC in ROM. And, of course,.NET already brings Visual Basic.NET!
You may be right, but your examples are disjointed.
The Lisa and the Mac limited expansion, not as an attempt to control the marketplace or the consumer, but to limit the options of infinite expansion, which to Jobs' views affected the experience of the consumer. Also due to his personal aesthetic sensibilities, as you pointed out.
Jobs killed the Newton for no other reason than because it was Sculley's and Jean Louis Gasset's baby project (the fact that it had already burned through over a billion dollars in R&D and marketing did not help the product either). It was a personal vendetta against the project's leaders since they were instrumental in Steve Jobs' dismissal from Apple, a pain that apparently still burned in his soul.
Yes, all this points to a tyrannical control over the products by a single maniacal person, but hardly a conspiracy against the consumer or to exploit him.
It all seems to stem from the apparent lessons that Steve Jobs learned during his years in so many failed technology companies, including the original Apple Computers, Inc. There was a time when a very naive (and just as forceful) Jobs thought that the Macintosh, and Apple in general, would trample over the competition by its own merits. The technology on its products, he was heard saying, was so good and so much above anything else in the industry, that nobody could touch them; people would just rush to genuflect at his feet and throw all sorts of money at him for the mere chance of owning one of his shiny products.
Windows? what Windows? Who's going to pay $200.00 for that piece of junk which runs on a stupidly broken, half-ass disk operating system installed on almost every plebeian machine; when they can pay $4,000.00 for a shiny new Macintosh? Applications you ask? It comes with MacPaint and MacWrite--show us the money!
Then, as history showed, that was not the case. People were perfectly happy with inferior products that just barely solved their problems, just because they were cheaper and affordable. Not many people or businesses could justify the price of a Lisa or a Macintosh, when an IBM PC ran a version of VisiCalc and WordStar, which were perfectly usable--and CHEAP! Heck, even the Apple II, which was more of a toy, kept overselling the Macintosh for years, and basically maintained Apple solvent for at least half a decade.
You could argue that the same happened with NextSTEP: all sorts of good and innovative technology, at a very high premium, one which most of the industry thought was unreasonable. They couldn't give those things away, and yet most of the technology in them was ahead of its time.
I guess Steve Jobs is determined not to let that happen again. He seems to understand that the iPod or the iPhone are not going to sell themselves just because they are a better product, that you have to fight your way through the market and make it recognize how much better they are.
So the new Apple, Inc. is now more aggressive than ever. Still, I would argue that they make the better products, at least some of them. Their tactics all revolve around making their products look better than the competition, by pushing for better integration and more intuitive user interfaces, and actively shoving this in everyone's face. You can't fault them for that.
Compare this, >> It wasn't OK for Microsoft, because their implementations sucked. People are willing to forgive Apple because it works well for them.
with this, >> The root hatred of Microsoft is that they kicked everyone's ass with arguably inferior products like DOS/Windows3, VisualBasic, MS-Access and so on.
>> There was one app that really did remove the DRM from iTunes Store purchased music, but Apple broke it in the next release of iTunes and it was never heard from again.
DVD-Jon's Requiem is still maintained, and removes DRM from even the latest version of iTunes' files. DRM on iTunes files, you say? Why, yes. Only mainstream music files are now DRM-free. Audiobooks, Podcasts, and other media still contain a FairPlay wrapper.
Really? Steve Jobs controls which apps are allowed on the iPhone, yet you are free to connect to the Net with any other device. More to the point, the apps we are talking about hardly define the Net; some of the most useful are not even aware of this Net. And besides, when you say the Net, you really mean this Web Two-point-Oh thingy, right? Because there is no way that the iPhone is even aware of much of the rest of the underlying Net (you know, the Network), much less controls it.
Well, I think his point implied that there is a huge gap between unattainable perfection and let's do as little as possible to get it out the door quickly, and that the latter seems to be the norm.
You mean, accurate as compared to the anecdotal article, based on an interview with the one guy who has a personal stake at having Windows 1.0 remembered fondly as a significant contribution?
Which NT was that? The slow and bloated 3.5? or the half-baked previous version? (I'm assuming that you are referring to NT 4 as the one with a compromised ring 0.)
>> However, by the time of my discussion with Steve, Windows still had not shipped within the promised timeframe and was starting to earn the reputation of being "vaporware."
It was being perceived by the industry as vaporware precisely because there was strong doubt that it was ever going to be released. Microsoft had to go on a media tour apologizing for the delays and convince everyone that they were serious, which implies such doubt.
More proof that if the prediction is vague enough, it can be associated with any reality.
>> But you know what? He has a good point that a great deal of the internet ended up using lifestreams anyway - blogs are all organized inherently along a timeline.
That's not entirely accurate. Oh yes, blogs and other online contents are organized chronologically, but not much more than, say, newspaper stories, and classic movies: they are still classified by the inherent taxonomy of their class, e.g. by title or topic, or headline, or genre.
The same with blogs. An individual blog is "organized inherently along a timeline," as you say; but all blogs at once are not. Likewise with Twitter: you do not read the entirety of the Twitter content (from all feeds or whatever they are called) as a single chronological stream. (Well, perhaps you do, I don't know; I don't touch the stuff.)
This David Gelernter guy reminds me of that Greek man in the Muppets Take Manhattan. He was always spewing pseudo-philosophical babble, that was just words with absolutely no meaning attached to them. Something like:
Peoples is peoples. No is buildings, is tomatoes, huh? Is peoples! is dancing! is music! Is potatoes.
>> What he is referring to, IMHO, is the Fucking Google Effect.
I believe that this is precisely the problem: that his "predictions" are so vaguely described that they can mean anything to anybody, and thus can never actually be falsified. Kind of like a garden-variety translation of Nostradamus' quatrains: somewhere, someone will twist their interpretation until it fits into some sort of reality.
And that's not "predicting the future". To paraphrase Toy Story character Woody, that's just "guessing with style."
Slashdot Mirror
>> Do we really need a million plastic "movie tie-in" figurines to be given away with Happy Meals, or blankets with arms in them?
Hey! Do not knock the Snuggie!
-dZ.
Damn!
> /me folds.
-dz.
I do think we disagree.
I understand that may you think things have changed at Apple, but your previous post used older examples as supporting evidence, which I posited were unrelated or irrelevant.
So, in spite of that you still feel that Apple is out to squash competition out of sheer caprice; I don't. I think Steve Jobs has matured not only in his personal behaviour (to some degree), but on his business senses as well, and is doing everything in his power to avoid or prevent the same issues he encountered during his first tenure at Apple, due in part to his naivety and hubris at the time: mainly that the market will choose his products by mere virtue of them being better than the competition, and that there's nothing any competitor can do to touch them, because they are that good.
As far as I can tell, Apple still focuses heavily on the user experience. I would imagine that the popularity of some of its products would be evidence of this. Then you have the added dimension of Jobs trying to keep Apple's control over its properties. I don't see any anti-competitive behaviour: The market is full of portable music players and smart-phones, and many online stores and attractions have come and gone in the past. Even Google has their own phone and store now; I don't see Apple trying to close those down.
Do you forget that mere two years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, Apple was laughed at by the rest of the industry because they were going to attempt to enter the smart-phone market, which was wholly owned by the Big Players? And now these same critics claim Apple is a bully attempting to squash everybody else... interesting.
-dZ.
After reading the linked article, I thought underwhelmed. Then I read the second article referenced in the summary:
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html
Now, that was interesting!
The strange thing is that the summary seems to imply that both articles are related, which they are most definitely not. The first one seems to be written by a naive noob, who just discovered a nifty trick in gcc. The second one is written by a real Wizard, who shows you how to conjure up some arcane magic to make ELF your bitch.
-dZ.
I have a suggestion: If you write your JVM in Visual Basic instead of C#, it'll be portable, since most old microcomputers included BASIC in ROM. And, of course, .NET already brings Visual Basic.NET!
-dZ.
I see your Amiga 1000 and raise you an Intellivision ECS.
Oh gawd... what have I done!
-dZ.
You may be right, but your examples are disjointed.
The Lisa and the Mac limited expansion, not as an attempt to control the marketplace or the consumer, but to limit the options of infinite expansion, which to Jobs' views affected the experience of the consumer. Also due to his personal aesthetic sensibilities, as you pointed out.
Jobs killed the Newton for no other reason than because it was Sculley's and Jean Louis Gasset's baby project (the fact that it had already burned through over a billion dollars in R&D and marketing did not help the product either). It was a personal vendetta against the project's leaders since they were instrumental in Steve Jobs' dismissal from Apple, a pain that apparently still burned in his soul.
Yes, all this points to a tyrannical control over the products by a single maniacal person, but hardly a conspiracy against the consumer or to exploit him.
-dZ.
>> Er, if it were his *first* smartphone, how could it *not* be the best he'd ever owned?
If it were a Windows mobile phone. Those things suck even when you don't know any better.
-dZ.
It all seems to stem from the apparent lessons that Steve Jobs learned during his years in so many failed technology companies, including the original Apple Computers, Inc. There was a time when a very naive (and just as forceful) Jobs thought that the Macintosh, and Apple in general, would trample over the competition by its own merits. The technology on its products, he was heard saying, was so good and so much above anything else in the industry, that nobody could touch them; people would just rush to genuflect at his feet and throw all sorts of money at him for the mere chance of owning one of his shiny products.
Windows? what Windows? Who's going to pay $200.00 for that piece of junk which runs on a stupidly broken, half-ass disk operating system installed on almost every plebeian machine; when they can pay $4,000.00 for a shiny new Macintosh? Applications you ask? It comes with MacPaint and MacWrite--show us the money!
Then, as history showed, that was not the case. People were perfectly happy with inferior products that just barely solved their problems, just because they were cheaper and affordable. Not many people or businesses could justify the price of a Lisa or a Macintosh, when an IBM PC ran a version of VisiCalc and WordStar, which were perfectly usable--and CHEAP! Heck, even the Apple II, which was more of a toy, kept overselling the Macintosh for years, and basically maintained Apple solvent for at least half a decade.
You could argue that the same happened with NextSTEP: all sorts of good and innovative technology, at a very high premium, one which most of the industry thought was unreasonable. They couldn't give those things away, and yet most of the technology in them was ahead of its time.
I guess Steve Jobs is determined not to let that happen again. He seems to understand that the iPod or the iPhone are not going to sell themselves just because they are a better product, that you have to fight your way through the market and make it recognize how much better they are.
So the new Apple, Inc. is now more aggressive than ever. Still, I would argue that they make the better products, at least some of them. Their tactics all revolve around making their products look better than the competition, by pushing for better integration and more intuitive user interfaces, and actively shoving this in everyone's face. You can't fault them for that.
-dZ.
Dude, that was his point!
Compare this,
>> It wasn't OK for Microsoft, because their implementations sucked. People are willing to forgive Apple because it works well for them.
with this,
>> The root hatred of Microsoft is that they kicked everyone's ass with arguably inferior products like DOS/Windows3, VisualBasic, MS-Access and so on.
-dZ.
>> Please explain how easy it is to remove "fairplay", if i remember correctly the instructions from Apple require you to BURN A CD OF THEM FIRST!!!!
Yes, and that was very easy indeed.
-dZ.
>> There was one app that really did remove the DRM from iTunes Store purchased music, but Apple broke it in the next release of iTunes and it was never heard from again.
DVD-Jon's Requiem is still maintained, and removes DRM from even the latest version of iTunes' files. DRM on iTunes files, you say? Why, yes. Only mainstream music files are now DRM-free. Audiobooks, Podcasts, and other media still contain a FairPlay wrapper.
-dZ.
I see your Atari 400, and raise you a Commodore 64.
-dZ.
Wow, get some perspective, man.
>> Now people like Steve Jobs control the Net.
Really? Steve Jobs controls which apps are allowed on the iPhone, yet you are free to connect to the Net with any other device. More to the point, the apps we are talking about hardly define the Net; some of the most useful are not even aware of this Net. And besides, when you say the Net, you really mean this Web Two-point-Oh thingy, right? Because there is no way that the iPhone is even aware of much of the rest of the underlying Net (you know, the Network), much less controls it.
-dZ.
To be fair, the ice cream man is indeed an expert on cellphone platforms. He told me himself.
-dZ.
So XML is a "technique" now? I guess it is something different to everyone.
I'd say a more apt analogy would be comparing a grammar text-book with a tape recorder.
-dZ.
Well, I think his point implied that there is a huge gap between unattainable perfection and let's do as little as possible to get it out the door quickly, and that the latter seems to be the norm.
Surely you can concede that.
-dZ.
>> That's not how things actually work for the rest of us.
Obviously, and so, as they say, here we are. Somehow this proves his point.
-dZ.
You mean, accurate as compared to the anecdotal article, based on an interview with the one guy who has a personal stake at having Windows 1.0 remembered fondly as a significant contribution?
-dZ.
Which NT was that? The slow and bloated 3.5? or the half-baked previous version? (I'm assuming that you are referring to NT 4 as the one with a compromised ring 0.)
-dZ.
I see your Amiga 1000 and raise you my Commodore 64 and an Intellivision with an Intellivoice adapter.
-dZ.
Did you read the article?
>> However, by the time of my discussion with Steve, Windows still had not shipped within the promised timeframe and was starting to earn the reputation of being "vaporware."
It was being perceived by the industry as vaporware precisely because there was strong doubt that it was ever going to be released. Microsoft had to go on a media tour apologizing for the delays and convince everyone that they were serious, which implies such doubt.
-dZ.
Repeat after me: The iPhone is not a general computing device.
There, you see now? If someone puts a microprocessor on a toaster, would you automatically expect it to do everything your laptop does?
-dZ.
More proof that if the prediction is vague enough, it can be associated with any reality.
>> But you know what? He has a good point that a great deal of the internet ended up using lifestreams anyway - blogs are all organized inherently along a timeline.
That's not entirely accurate. Oh yes, blogs and other online contents are organized chronologically, but not much more than, say, newspaper stories, and classic movies: they are still classified by the inherent taxonomy of their class, e.g. by title or topic, or headline, or genre.
The same with blogs. An individual blog is "organized inherently along a timeline," as you say; but all blogs at once are not. Likewise with Twitter: you do not read the entirety of the Twitter content (from all feeds or whatever they are called) as a single chronological stream. (Well, perhaps you do, I don't know; I don't touch the stuff.)
This David Gelernter guy reminds me of that Greek man in the Muppets Take Manhattan. He was always spewing pseudo-philosophical babble, that was just words with absolutely no meaning attached to them. Something like:
-dZ.
>> What he is referring to, IMHO, is the Fucking Google Effect .
I believe that this is precisely the problem: that his "predictions" are so vaguely described that they can mean anything to anybody, and thus can never actually be falsified. Kind of like a garden-variety translation of Nostradamus' quatrains: somewhere, someone will twist their interpretation until it fits into some sort of reality.
And that's not "predicting the future". To paraphrase Toy Story character Woody, that's just "guessing with style."
-dZ.