I can think of features I'd like to see too, and can imagineeer video conferencing and free VoIP over WiFi. And what about voice recognition and voice synthesis and voice mail trees and an iTunes store client... The thing is that many of these things are either engineering problems or have to wait because Apple has finite resources.
I'd rather get an iPhone now and watch it improve as Apple releases software updates for it that wait for it to be released until it could serve any need anyone could imagine. A general purpose computer would quickly turn into the Newton, which was ~$900. It lacked a clear obvious use, and only offered the potential to do a lot of things that its relatively small user base could not actually support.
The iPhone is already so much better than my Treo or the WM phones I've looked at, even the high end Nokia phones -- for what I want to do with a mobile. If it gets a market base similar to the iPod's, it will result in a vibrant platform that will have to deliver demanded features. It will create a vacuum for development. That won't detract from people who want something else. There will always be a market for N95s or WinCE phones tied into Microsoft's server and VB environment, and Treos... well not Treos, I think this will kill Palm.
That's what I see: no reason for threat. The only thing Apple can do to rivals is raise the bar, forcing them to compete and push the envelope themselves. That's why I don't understand all the hate and try to deflate it with some reality.
It's a lot like the Mac: the only thing Apple has done to the PC is to help push standards like USB, push tight integration, and push innovative features. PC users benefit from Apple being around, even if they never choose to buy anything from it. I think choice is good, and that innovation needs to be welcomed, not scorned. The mobile business is tragically boring, and the iPhone will help shake things up. I think the engineering decisions Apple is making are all pretty smart, and I like to describe why. If that makes me a "fanboy," well then yipee, I don't mind. As you've probably noticed, I have my own detractors, and I've learned to deal with it. I just like to write.
Re:Biased, iPhone not ready for enterprise use
on
The Perfect Phone Storm?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I assure you that the author of the article does indeed have a positive outlook on the iPhone. That is obvious from the context, so the bias can be evaluated by anyone reading it. The article does not pretend to be a blandly objective Wikipedia article, or a "should I buy one" review. Instead, it is quite obviously providing an opinion on the market and how the iPhone works within Apple's strategies, and how so much of the negative information about it is based on people grasping for straws or otherwise providing biased information, except that they are not clearly presenting it as delivered with a bias.
Bias is not a problem if you recognize it. You can learn about the viewpoints of even unreasonable extremists by reading what they write, and knowing that they are extreme in their opinions, you can evaluate how much of what they say you can agree with. Bias is only a problem with unreasonable people present biased information as if it is neutral and conveying no hidden agenda. Such as when CNN says the war in Iraq is going well. They should be providing an unbiased report of the facts, not presenting PR as news. When you watch a show that presents a clear and obvious political agenda, you are hearing opinions, not news. One can not have an unbiased opinion. Bias is expressing an opinion.
Still, nowhere does the article insist that people should buy an iPhone, although it certainly does provide reasons why IT users should question what you refer to as "analysts wishes." Really, it asks, why do these analysts wish this stuff? Why are they expressing their wishes that the iPhone be banned? Is there bias involved?
I should also assure you that the author of the article has experience in administrating Exchange 2003 and in using it with Windows Mobile phones, and that the comments made were made in relation to actual support issues.
The points you outline as important to IT are certainly worth mentioning. Some of them Apple addresses, and some of them are outside of the currently demonstrated feature set. For example, it appears that the iPhone won't edit Excel docs, although it can view them. Will Google Sheets serve this need? How many people will this really affect? Is this something that will expand in the future?
Certainly, the iPhone isn't going to satisfy 100% of the market. Apple generally targets 80% of the needs of the market. The iPod has no built in radio for example. If you really want a radio, you can buy an add on. If you really want a music player with a built in radio, you have to buy one from somebody else. That has not resulted in too many lost sales.
The iPhone will also not work for everyone. I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where phones brought on site can't have cameras. They also can't emit radio in the form of bluetooth, WiFi or even cellular. Obviously, Apple would be stymied to develop a version of the iPhone that would work there, because it would be impossible. So LLL falls outside of places where Apple can sell iPhones. That's a pretty small portion of the market however.
I know so much about the article and its author because I wrote it.
You are right that POP and IMAP are designed for email, not calendaring. However, Microsoft implemented calendaring features over IMAP by treating appointments and invitations as special emails that the Outlook or Entourage client then displays as a calendar. Apple's iCal client has some support for communicating with Microsoft's calendar-emails, but it is working to deliver its own calendar server, which is not based upon proprietary extensions to email.
Apple's new iCal Server is an open source calendaring server project that communicates with its clients using the emerging CalDAV standard. CalDAV is based on WebDAV, which is based on HTTP. That makes iCal basically a specialized, two way web server that handles calendaring.
Apple not only built the new server on open CalDAV standards, but has also released it under the FOSS Apache 2.0 license so anyone can use their code to build interoperable Calendar servers on any platform. It is working with OSF and a variety of other groups to create a calendar server that works a lot like Apache does for the web in general. Linux is lacking a strong calendar server needed to compete against Exchange; many of the current options attempt to clone an Exchange work-alike. It seems like it would be better to design an open calendar server from the ground up, and Apple is helping lead that.
If the project takes off, it will benefit both Linux in servers as well as making calendaring clients more open and interchangeable. It will also weaken the need for small and medium sized businesses to build a vast Exchange infrastructure, and end up as Windows only server shops. That will be good for open source, and will be good for Apple in trying to sell Xserve hardware.
"As comparison below shows, while Dell servers are comparably priced with Apple's, the expense of Windows Server and Exchange licensing, along with CALs for 100 users, makes a basic Microsoft email server over three times as much as an Xserve, which includes unlimited use of Mac OS X Server: $17,200 vs $5500!"
Exchange Server implements its Outlook Web (the web client) via a fairly standard Ajax website, but does provide greatly improved features for IE clients. FF and Safari work, but are not as fancy.
Exchange Server also provides standard POP/IMAP service for non-Outlook clients. Outlook uses a proprietary protocol often referred to as "MAPI," but in reality its just a lot of messy RPC talk that goes on between Outlook and Exchange. Microsoft supports its own Entourage (the Mac email client in Mac Office) using IMAP.
That means any organization that supports Entourage or any email clients outside of Outlook has POP or IMAP running, because that is Microsoft's own supported mechanism for email outside of Outlook.
Any mobile devices, including Windows Mobile pocket Outlook devices and the Palm OS Treo with Exchange Server support, get their mail through the same Outlook Web server as web clients. That means they act as specialized web clients, not as MAPI or IMAP clients.
The iPhone should have no problem with either IMAP or web support, in part because Apple already ships Mac OS X applications with support for Exchange via IMAP or the Outlook Web connector. The only reason why the iPhone would be "incompatible" with Exchange is if users want to have access to features that Microsoft only provides through its proprietary protocols, making the issue a problem for Microsoft, not Apple.
Is there any reason to believe that the iPhone could not maintain local web pages? Even the iPod can sync and display hyperlinked "Notes," which provide a subset of HTML to create navigable pages of information that can hyperlink to songs stored on the device. Why wouldn't the iPhone be able to copy local web pages that perform with all the functionality of a Dashboard Widget, along with the ability to dial, reference songs and other media, display linked graphics, execute JavaScript, etc.
Why would you assume it would not? If the iPhone artificially does not allow local web pages, that would be both odd and stupid of Apple, and would rightfully generate complaint. Since there has been no reason to assume such a bone-head move, maybe we should wait to see if Apple makes the mistake before complaining.
After all, the postulated complaints that its battery would be too short, its screen would scratch too easy, it couldn't use the iPhone name, it wouldn't be able to open any Word or Excel docs, and that IT shops would have no way to design custom apps for it all turned out to be non-problems.
Not only did Reuters just publish an article, but there have been a flurry of websites all providing information on how to survive the sidewalk in various cities.
Konquerer uses KHTML, and Safari's WebKit was built from that as a starting point, but is really a fork. Apple worked on it for a year before notifying KHTML, and there were troubles in merging the changes Apple submitted.
There has been some effort to get KDE to adopt WebKit.
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Cuckoo for Cocoa: Is Safari on Windows the next iTunes? Will Apple be able to achieve the same level of success with Safari as it has with iTunes, or are the circumstances completely different? Apple is betting on a handful of reasons why Windows users who already have a favorite web browser might want to use Safari. Here's a look at those reasons, what Safari shares in common with Apple's existing offerings--and in particular iTunes--and how it all relates to interesting possibilities in Apple's future strategies.
The Future of the Web: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer Imagine jumping back in time to 1993 and rescuing the world from fifteen years of enslavement to proprietary technologies that held up innovation and put development decisions in the hands of a few salesmen.
Look at Wikipedia's reports of various market share stats for that period. There is no controversy that Netscape's market share plunged in 1997. Now look up the browser MS shipped in 1997. It was not a superior product competing in the market place, because nobody chose IE; they got it by default.
Sure, after MS set up a barrier to Netscape's business plan, it could then invest more into browser development. After 1997, Netscape could do very little, while MS rapidly released three major new versions in 97, 99, and 2001.
What needs to be noted is what happened after AOL/Netscape/Mozilla stopped delivering anything as a competitor. Microsoft, without any further need to take the browser market, froze development of the browser for half a decade. Another version of IE wasn't delivered until 2006, and only because Firefox was starting to compete again.
You can say all you want about what "Steve Jobs" wants or knows, but since you can't understand why anticompetitive behavior and monopoly maintenance are bad for markets, I also have to assume you know nothing about what was going on inside Apple.
We also know, because Jobs announced it, that Jobs did try to sign fair contracts with cloners, and we also know (those of us that do) that Jobs entertained the idea of broadly licensing Rhapsody and YellowBox for Windows. That was NeXT's business model, and Apple tried to maintain it under the name Apple Enterprise.
The problem was that OEMs like HP and Dell would have nothing to do with Apple because Microsoft threatened to raise their Windows OEM prices dramatically if they did. Dell even scrambled to move its web store from NeXT's WebObjects to Microsoft's ASP after Apple bought NeXT.
Linux faces the same barriers to competition, but largely lacks the marketing muscle of Apple, making it even more difficult to line up and offerings of Linux on name brand hardware. Dell's placeholder Linux offerings are quite obviously bullshit, and as was recently reported, it will not sell them to businesses at all. Why not?
You have sassy comebacks for all sorts of things, but they are all based on fact free assertions. You also seem happiest when building strawmen and asserting your victory in ripping them apart. I did not admit any problems in a "primary argument" I never made. Instead, I linked to the article I wrote where one of the main points was that Netscape failed due to its own problems, both in strategy and in development.
Microsoft used Netscape's weakness in order to dominate the market, tying the web platform to its monopoly on the desktop and injecting proprietary extensions in order to make web apps require IE on Windows. That prevented any opportunity for competition, and ended any vehicle for Sun's Java. MS pretended to support Java on its own browser, but only with the intent of leading Sun down a dark hallway and shooting it when out of sight. That helped prevent any sort of meaningful cross platform way to deliver applications.
If you can't fathom a link between "no competition" and "no innovation," and want me to list innovations that are being prevented by anti-competitive behavior, I'll have to leave it at that, because there's no point in arguing with someone who willfully chooses to be obtuse. You may as well demand proof for the roundness of the Earth, evidence of man-made climate change, or a complete study on why dumping more war into Iraq won't solve the problems.
You make a couple comments that are technically true, but gloss over details to an absurd degree.
"IE4 surpassed Navigator in marketshare some time in 1999." Who cares? The real fact to consider is that IE resulted in an immediate plunge in Netscape's market share, from over 80% in 1996 to being a minority a year later. That's leverage. Part of that leverage in 1997 was MS using threats of delaying Office for Mac to get Apple to sign an exclusive deal to only put IE on the Mac desktop.
"In July of 1997, the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Microsoft appeared to vanish with the announcement a new cooperative partnership. Why did Microsoft invest millions in a partnership with its most obvious remaining competitor in the desktop operating system market? " --
MS didn't have to "surpass" anyone in market share immediately, it only had to suffocate Netscape and destroy its cross-platform strategy so there were no choices left. After there is no choice, MS is your choice.
I agree that Netscape screwed up its own game. However, MS not only put a bullet into Netscape's head, but further monopolized the browser market, to the point where the only competitors since have been a free project and a few niche micro-minorities: Opera on mobiles, and Safari on the Mac. That is not an open market.
Your comments about there being no market for Linux or Mac OS X on PCs fallacious; if you don't know how OEM contracts work, go look it up. There is no open market for PC OS and hasn't been since the early 90s. Apple could not find licensees the same way Linux can't get OEMs to offer it outside of a token hobbyist offering. Those contracts were all tied up by MS.
Nothing is free. If you want the browser to be free, and MS to provide it, you are inviting MS to run your desktop. Good for you, I don't care. The problem is that the market should not be dominated by any player with the ability to set prices and prevent innovation, particularly not the tech market.
You can also support mob protection for your block because they do such a good job, but that doesn't mean the world shouldn't enforce racketeering laws. Most of us don't want to live in a shitty world run by thugs.
You provide a good example of someone with an argument but without much grasp of what has happened, is happening, or will happen if the status quo is maintained. That makes your arguments, which are easy to pull apart, simply not worth very much.
One could also say having a browser is a "demanded feature" of an OS. What was wrong about MS tying IE with Windows?
In addition to leveraging its monopoly position on 98% of the world's PCs to instantly create overwhelming market share for IE almost instantly in 1997, MS also added proprietary extensions to IE to distort the market of the web itself. That allowed MS to kill Netscape's revenue from servers. IE didn't compete with Netscape as a product until Netscape itself began to fail with the fiasco of Communicator 4. IE 1-3 were junk. IE 4-6 were better than what Netscape offered only because the company had been vanquished and was no longer offering anything.
Google faces the same impossible leverage. While MS can "compete" against Google desktop or browser tools, it can't compete in web search and marketing. So it is using its monopoly desktop position to roll out integrated search that can't be disabled or replaced by third party vendors. Once MS establishes market share on the basis of disposable PCs being replaced, and not consumer choice, it can then start directing all web search to its own servers exclusively.
Google currently has to fund Mozilla's Firefox to the tune of about $50 million a year to maintain an alternative browser. That reminds one of the fact that the only competition to Windows on the desktop PC is Linux, which is free. Microsoft has still managed to prevent OEMS from bundling it.
So anyone who thinks that MS' monopoly isn't in place or is no longer being abused is delusional:
- There is no free market in PC desktop OSs (Apple could not sign up OEMs, and even the free Linux struggles to gain adoption) - There is no free market in desktop application suites (Office is rivaled mainly by free OpenOffice) - There is hardly a free market in web browsers (the only option is the free, DIY Firefox)
Do we want to further restrict the market in online web search and offer Microsoft additional exclusive power over a market where there is now choice?
What's next, will we make all peripherals only something one can buy from Microsoft? How about games? What other markets would people prefer to hand over to Microsoft?
The problem is, when markets are handed to MS, they become entangled in proprietary tetherings to Windows and innovation rapidly stops. Once MS marginalized Netscape, it quit its own development of IE, and another major version wasn't shipped until *five years* later, and only then because Firefox had begun eating back some market share.
The problem with Windows enthusiasts is they they do not understand what is going on, they don't grasp what has happened, they fail to consider the consequences of further abuse. They are very much the same as the ~25% of Americans who support a rudderless war with a blank check, a president who had installed the beginnings of a fascist, terrorizing police state, and the beginnings of a pseudo-christian theocracy ruled by a clergy of corporate board members.
So far, so good! Let's see more of the same cause it's working so well. Don't consider the alternatives! Stay the course.
These people make my head explode.
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Safari on Windows? Apple and the Origins of the Web One of the surprises unveiled in the WWDC keynote was the beta release of Safari 3.0 for both Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP and Vista. While it was known that a new version of Safari would appear in Mac OS X Leopard in October, getting a beta now for today's Tiger was news. The release of Safari for Windows PCs went even further, raising the question of why Apple would port its browser to a platform that perhaps has too many already.
You may be right that Apple has contractual obligations that prevent it from offering competing VoIP services on the iPhone. You may also be wrong. Imagining an accusation does not incur guilt.
I think there are significant, valid reasons for Apple to not allow full access to its brand new device, and the iPhone won't be the first phone lacking full access. Motorola's Linux phones don't allow full access, with the company saying J2ME is the full extent of its open platform capacity, similarly citing security threats. Symbian also introduced a signed software program that limited access to those who sign up, submit their products for signing, and pay fees.
I don't think its unreasonable for Apple to offer an 80% solution from day one (18 days before day one). After selling 10 million phones, no doubt the situation may change.
In any event, Skype is a proprietary VoIP service with unknown security, as nobody outside knows how it really works. I'd rather see an open standards solution to VoIP, one that uses the Jabber/SIP being implemented by both Apple and Google. We don't need more Windows-style proprietary technologies for VoIP in the style of AIM/Yahoo/MSN incompatible IM systems, we need standards based VoIP that works like IMAP/SMTP email.
That's likely going to come to the iPhone from Apple sooner than Skype.
I wholeheartedly agree that mobile providers are all pretty much a mix of greedy, visionless, and incompetent.
Compared to Apple's completely zipped lip on iPod games development, the company has kicked the door wide open (by Apple standards) in talking up web apps as a strategy for third party development. It also backed up its plans by releasing Safari/webkit on Windows.
Apple didn't say it would never open things up, but if you thought Apple would announce that "web 2.0 apps" were just a flaccid disguise the company was floating until say, August of 2008, when it planned to really roll out full access, what impact do you suppose that would have?
Do you also expect Apple to announce the next major revision to the iPhone?
The Treo had fans until Palm sat on it for years without delivering any innovation.
The iPaq was built upon a shoddy copycat platform, offered little hardware innovation, and a was a generally poor product. The thousands of people who bought one were probably fans momentarily, until they found they'd need to buy the next one, and the next one, and so on, before it would ever become a practical device. No doubt with some searching, one could turn up an iPaq fan.
Calling the iPhone "overpriced" in relation to either the iPaq or the Palm Treo is, however, truly and outrageously funny.
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian currently power the world's smartphones. How does each stack up against Apple's OS X in the iPhone? Here's an overview looking at the merits of each, starting with Microsoft.
The Egregious Incompetence of Palm Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian currently power the world's smartphones. How does each stack up against Apple's OS X in the iPhone? This article presents an overview of Palm. Palm's early products actually followed a trajectory strikingly similar to Apple's original Macintosh. Differences in the choices made at Palm provide an interesting glimpse into "what if" scenarios of a parallel universe.
Third party development offers not just great rewards and also risk. On desktop platforms, the risk pales in comparison. On mobiles, reward>risk isn't as obvious. Existing phones offer very little potential despite offering "open" platforms. I calculated $449 of Windows Mobile software that is either wholly unnecessary or included on the iPhone. That software is all in the top popularity listings on Windows Mobile sites.
Gizmodo complains that Apple isn't offering the rest of the world free reign to build Cocoa apps for the iPhone. That would be great, but would also crack open serious security gremlins. If Apple can't deliver Safari on Windows without heaps of contempt that its beta browser can be DoS'ed or crashed remotely, it is hard to understand that more serious risks might relate to the iPhone?
What could Apple have done to impress people? Shortly before the event, I suggested the only thing that would blow me away would be Cocoa for Windows, or perhaps just Safari for Windows.
Paired with what I already stated would be the only reasonable 3rd party platform announcement for "the 'Phone that isn't yet here," that means Apple is embarking on a strategy of promoting standards compliant, AJAX web 2.0 style development in its first assault on the hegemony of Windows in the cross-platform space.
I find it entertaining that FOSS developers--who love dropping the "web 2.0" buzzword and chastising everything proprietary--are booing Apple for pushing standards compliant web-centric development and for not delivering yet another proprietary mobile development framework to compete against.Net.
That quite clearly shows that nothing Apple could do would go uncriticized.
It simply makes the most sense for Apple to continue to partner with Google and Yahoo, and build strong support for the kind of development people already know how to build and are interested in building, rather than trying to immediately deploy something that--like QuickDraw GX--is very appealing in theory, but worthless if nobody pokes at it.
Mobile Disruption: Apple's iPhone and Third Party Software I previously wrote about Apple's comments to deliver the iPhone as a closed platform, explaining why this makes sense for Apple, but also presenting why I though that the panic feared by some was overstated. Since I don't make decisions at Apple, and really do not wield any influence at all over those making the decisions, it seemed to make more sense to logically explore the subject rather than quickly pass judgment.
iPhone Gremlins: Crashing, Security, and Network Collapse! In addition to showing off the iPhone's pretty interface as part of its first impression--including the Google Maps client Steve Jobs used to locate a Starbucks in order to place a crank call for a thousand coffees at Macworld--he also described the rationale behind the closed platform iPhone as a security and stability issue.
An iPhone SDK? Predictions for WWDC 2007! The fate of third party application development for the iPhone is one of a few objects of speculation for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference next week. What is likely in view of Apple's existing stance on the iPhone's platform? Here's a look, leading into some other predictions for WWDC 2007.
More Predictions for WWDC 2007: Solaris, Google, Surround Yesterday's article presented the likelihood of any new iPhone news at WWDC, but it appears that this years' event will be almost exclusively about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. What's in store for developers? Here's my list of inevitable new releases, good possibilities, a
The problem with making broad and sweeping generalizations that play upon the contrived stereotypes invented by the media is that such ideas rarely convey an accurate portrayal of what is really happening.
If Jobs' arrogance was the only factor involved in Apple's decisions, the company would not have surpassed Dell and the $100 billion market cap, sold 100 million iPods, etc. Bluster can make things appear to happen for a limited period of time, but you can't fool the market for seven years--not the stock market, and not the consumer market--without a huge amount of privilege or leverage, neither of which Jobs possessed ten years ago.
Apple quite obviously does make mistakes and errors, but every company that works to innovate will. What is interesting is not whether a company has ever failed, but how often its risks have been made in the right direction, and how many of its failures it has offset with huge successes at the same time.
The four factors of the iPhone you mention are indeed related to Apple's success with Cocoa and OS X, and some of them are tied to and dependant upon them. I've previously written about the differences in the iPhone and in competing environments, from the generic J2ME to the weak Flash Lite to Windows Mobile and the Palm OS. Clearly, Cocoa provides the iPhone with clear advantages.
And quite obviously, this allows Apple to deliver the kind of apps that other developers will want to create themselves. There is no question that native Cocoa development offers the tantalizing potential to deliver a major jump over the "web 2.0" apps Apple described as its 3rd party dev platform for the iPhone.
There is also no question that Apple does have limited resources. Should it hold up both the iPhone and Leopard to deliver "Leopard on the iPhone," even before the platform is delivered and before any market exists?
It's easy to make demands. But how much value will be immediately delivered by the release of mobile-Cocoa on the iPhone? How much risk? If your position is that it would be all win and no lose, then please explain why delivering Safari on Windows was immediately met by scorn and criticism. Safari is a web browser, not a mobile platform!
Certainly you can imagine that the Apple Trolls and Black Hat hackers--who already have a bone to pick with Apple over being exposed as frauds--would pounce upon even minor security issues on the iPhone exposed by a wide open, full access API, just as they do so over the ability to crash the new beta Safari 3.0 browser.
People can "walk and chew gum," but its a bit outside the world of simple cliches to expect a company like Apple, competing in a fully monopolized market (the desktop PC/IT platform is dominated by Windows, if you have been in a cave for 20 years) to launch a full assault on every Microsoft product all at once. Quite obviously, Apple does have to pick its targets wisely. I believe the company is doing well at the targets it is picking.
While I'd be happy to hear alternative viewpoints based on reason and logic, I'm a bit tired of hearing a nothing but a mixture of tired stereotype and cliche to explain why Jobs and Apple are persecuting the innocent just because Jobs is a maniac and Apple is a monstrous entity threatening the freedom of people who are happy to be monopolized.
iPhone Gremlins: Crashing, Security, and Network Collapse! In addition to showing off the iPhone's pretty interface as part of its first impression--including the Google Maps client Steve Jobs used to locate a Starbucks in order to place a crank call for a thousand coffees at Macworld--he also described the rationale behind the closed platform iPhone as a security and stability issue.
There is such a thing as competing intelligently. Apple could rush to market a full range of me-too products that match the all of the things Microsoft sells, but focusing on Safari first, and delivering WebKit cross platform (Mac/Windows/iPhone, plus as a FOSS project others--from Nokia to individuals--can port anywhere) competes most effectively against the hegemony of the IE-tied-to-Windows monopoly, with the least risk, while delivering the most benefit to consumers and developers compared to the risk and effort Apple has to expend.
The reason children fail to learn things is often because they are so busy demanding things that they often forget to think about why things are the way they are. By reflecting on why things are the way they are, one can learn a lot. That's all I'm trying to do. I'm not withholding your mobile Cocoa, Im just explaining why the expectation that it would appear was irrational and foolish.
Had Apple released a proprietary "mobile-Cocoa," would you be happier as a FOSS developer? Would your iPhone apps run at something closer to "full speed"? Would you even write apps for a proprietary mobile platform if you called yourself a FOSS developer?
Your sniveling about the sucking and blowing of FOSS in and out of commercial developers fails to account for the fact that without Apple, nobody would be using KHTML. Apple adapted it, made very significant updates, and then contributed innovation back, not just in the form of the open source WebKit, but also in the form of contributing the very useful canvas tags adopted by other browsers, as well as the future HTML 5 contributions Apple is making in web multimedia.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about as you spew false information. I encourage you to stop before you end up old and cranky with nothing left for yourself other than a podcast and a few speaking engagements or quotation gigs, like Enderle or Dvorak. It's an ugly path to the ignominy of trolldom.
It's not like nobody predicted Web 2.0 being the extent of third party software development for the iPhone, and its not like the world needs another mobile.Net rival anyway.
>>The last thing that enjoyed this much hype was Snakes on A Plane. Remember how good that was when it actually came out? I predict iPhone will share the same fate, and shares of Apple will plummet!
I already used that joke on about the Zune!
In both cases = lots of fake astroturfed excitement, no real excitement from users. The media celebrated the Zune until it was obvious that it had bombed.
With the iPhone, there is real excitement from users, but lots of criticism from the media, particularly trolls hoping to FUD it out of existence.
If you haven't noticed, the market does not agree with you.
It's funny how the meme that Motorola's crappy ROKR was somehow Apple's design keeps getting replayed. Apple quite obviously floated Motorola's phone while also cutting off its legs with the Nano at the same event. Nobody mentions the iTunes client on the SLVR, which actually didn't suck (the phone, not the limited client).
It's like he can't resist tying an albatross around Apple's neck to desperately make the company seem less magical or something. Is it wrong to give the company some credit for blowing out amazing crap over the recent years? If so, I don't want to be right.
"In addition to showing off the iPhone's pretty interface as part of its first impression--including the Google Maps client Steve Jobs used to locate a Starbucks in order to place a crank call for a thousand coffees at Macworld--he also described the rationale behind the closed platform iPhone as a security and stability issue. Was he kidding?"
Remember that Apple's Macs are EFI Intel PCs now. You don't need LILO and GRUB to start up an operating system, as EFI provides a minimal but sophisticated environment for handling multiple boot devices and system launching. It's like the Sun/Apple OpenFirmware that Macs have always had.
You'd only need those things to get Mac OS X running on a DOS PC, or when using ZFS with Linux, right?
--- Microsoft Surface: the Fine Clothes of a Naked Empire What happens when the core values of an empire are exposed as a fraud? Does it prompt it change? More likely, it results in the generation of more false information to cover up the embarrassing failings.
It actually displays whatever buttons would make sense in the given context.
How many tiny physical buttons do you think it needs? I've used everything from a Treo to a BBerry, and can't say physical buttons push my buttons. Dialing numbers or mixed number/text is annoying with a full mini keyboard, and is painful with T9. I for one welcome our new touch screen overlords.
Recall seeing any keyboards on Star Trek? We have to make the move at some point in order to get into the future, and its not like Microsoft is going to usher in something new.
Another point of interest is that nobody is crying about the LG Prada phone, which uses a similar arrangement of a touch screen, albeit using the horrific Flash Lite.
The OP is right that Apple has sold 100 million iPods over the last ~6 years (since 2001), but what is interesting is that the company has sold about 70 million of those IN THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF. That's why the installed base graph looks like a population explosion curve (just like Apple's stock price).
By (fiscal) year, Apple sold this many iPods: 2002 381,000 2003 939,000 2004 4,416,000 2005 22,497,000 2006 39,409,000 2007 31,615,000 (the two fiscal quarters ending in March 07)
So Microsoft's sales of 1,000,000 would be impressive if it had actually sold that many to consumers. The fact is however, that Microsoft reports sales by counting how many units it has pushed off on retailers. Microsoft reported sales of 10 million Xbox 360s last fall, after only selling 6 million to users. It continues to push retailers to take deliveries of units to create the appearance that the 360 has not reached saturation, despite little new growth. Given that it could dump 4 million 360's on retailers last fall, it's actually a pretty dismal failure that Microsoft can't manage to similarly fake sales of 4 million Zunes, even without ever selling one. If it can only mange to announce meeting its stated goal for June, it doesn't even care anymore. This is a very dead product.
Re:They're catching up, then...
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A Million Zunes Sold
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The Zune isn't a bad product "just because it's from Microsoft." It's a bad product because it's from Microsoft.
A subtle difference. Don't confuse causation with simple correlation.
Microsoft isn't working to make the Zune a good product, it's working to sell a bad product through FUD and intimidation, but in the consumer electronics world, MS isn't doing well at all, having lost many billions every year since 2001. If Microsoft spun its Apple-like hardware/consumer products off into its own company, it would be many times more beleagured than Apple ever was in the mid 80s.
What's really going to be fun to watch is not how the Zune shrivels up next to the iPod, but how Windows Mobile is going to implode as soon as business customers realize that mobile phones don't have to spontaneously crash, spend 2 minutes rebooting, and offer arcane and bizarre interfaces and a generally crappy software experience. That is set to happen as soon as the iPhone hits. Not even AT&T can screw that up. That may make IT people question why they're continuing to use Windows products rather than an open operating systems based on Unix.
This is simply Bill Gates' second pie in the face.
The iPhone stacks up pretty well against other smartphones in the Phone Wars, particularly with regard to its OS X in comparison to the rival Palm OS, WinCE, Symbian, and the state of mobile platforms using Linux--many of which, like Motorola's Linux phones, are really as closed as Apple's.
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Hi and thanks and yes I am Dan.
I can think of features I'd like to see too, and can imagineeer video conferencing and free VoIP over WiFi. And what about voice recognition and voice synthesis and voice mail trees and an iTunes store client... The thing is that many of these things are either engineering problems or have to wait because Apple has finite resources.
I'd rather get an iPhone now and watch it improve as Apple releases software updates for it that wait for it to be released until it could serve any need anyone could imagine. A general purpose computer would quickly turn into the Newton, which was ~$900. It lacked a clear obvious use, and only offered the potential to do a lot of things that its relatively small user base could not actually support.
The iPhone is already so much better than my Treo or the WM phones I've looked at, even the high end Nokia phones -- for what I want to do with a mobile. If it gets a market base similar to the iPod's, it will result in a vibrant platform that will have to deliver demanded features. It will create a vacuum for development. That won't detract from people who want something else. There will always be a market for N95s or WinCE phones tied into Microsoft's server and VB environment, and Treos... well not Treos, I think this will kill Palm.
That's what I see: no reason for threat. The only thing Apple can do to rivals is raise the bar, forcing them to compete and push the envelope themselves. That's why I don't understand all the hate and try to deflate it with some reality.
It's a lot like the Mac: the only thing Apple has done to the PC is to help push standards like USB, push tight integration, and push innovative features. PC users benefit from Apple being around, even if they never choose to buy anything from it. I think choice is good, and that innovation needs to be welcomed, not scorned. The mobile business is tragically boring, and the iPhone will help shake things up. I think the engineering decisions Apple is making are all pretty smart, and I like to describe why. If that makes me a "fanboy," well then yipee, I don't mind. As you've probably noticed, I have my own detractors, and I've learned to deal with it. I just like to write.
I assure you that the author of the article does indeed have a positive outlook on the iPhone. That is obvious from the context, so the bias can be evaluated by anyone reading it. The article does not pretend to be a blandly objective Wikipedia article, or a "should I buy one" review. Instead, it is quite obviously providing an opinion on the market and how the iPhone works within Apple's strategies, and how so much of the negative information about it is based on people grasping for straws or otherwise providing biased information, except that they are not clearly presenting it as delivered with a bias.
Bias is not a problem if you recognize it. You can learn about the viewpoints of even unreasonable extremists by reading what they write, and knowing that they are extreme in their opinions, you can evaluate how much of what they say you can agree with. Bias is only a problem with unreasonable people present biased information as if it is neutral and conveying no hidden agenda. Such as when CNN says the war in Iraq is going well. They should be providing an unbiased report of the facts, not presenting PR as news. When you watch a show that presents a clear and obvious political agenda, you are hearing opinions, not news. One can not have an unbiased opinion. Bias is expressing an opinion.
Still, nowhere does the article insist that people should buy an iPhone, although it certainly does provide reasons why IT users should question what you refer to as "analysts wishes." Really, it asks, why do these analysts wish this stuff? Why are they expressing their wishes that the iPhone be banned? Is there bias involved?
I should also assure you that the author of the article has experience in administrating Exchange 2003 and in using it with Windows Mobile phones, and that the comments made were made in relation to actual support issues.
The points you outline as important to IT are certainly worth mentioning. Some of them Apple addresses, and some of them are outside of the currently demonstrated feature set. For example, it appears that the iPhone won't edit Excel docs, although it can view them. Will Google Sheets serve this need? How many people will this really affect? Is this something that will expand in the future?
Certainly, the iPhone isn't going to satisfy 100% of the market. Apple generally targets 80% of the needs of the market. The iPod has no built in radio for example. If you really want a radio, you can buy an add on. If you really want a music player with a built in radio, you have to buy one from somebody else. That has not resulted in too many lost sales.
The iPhone will also not work for everyone. I was speaking at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where phones brought on site can't have cameras. They also can't emit radio in the form of bluetooth, WiFi or even cellular. Obviously, Apple would be stymied to develop a version of the iPhone that would work there, because it would be impossible. So LLL falls outside of places where Apple can sell iPhones. That's a pretty small portion of the market however.
I know so much about the article and its author because I wrote it.
You are right that POP and IMAP are designed for email, not calendaring. However, Microsoft implemented calendaring features over IMAP by treating appointments and invitations as special emails that the Outlook or Entourage client then displays as a calendar. Apple's iCal client has some support for communicating with Microsoft's calendar-emails, but it is working to deliver its own calendar server, which is not based upon proprietary extensions to email.
Apple's new iCal Server is an open source calendaring server project that communicates with its clients using the emerging CalDAV standard. CalDAV is based on WebDAV, which is based on HTTP. That makes iCal basically a specialized, two way web server that handles calendaring.
Apple not only built the new server on open CalDAV standards, but has also released it under the FOSS Apache 2.0 license so anyone can use their code to build interoperable Calendar servers on any platform. It is working with OSF and a variety of other groups to create a calendar server that works a lot like Apache does for the web in general. Linux is lacking a strong calendar server needed to compete against Exchange; many of the current options attempt to clone an Exchange work-alike. It seems like it would be better to design an open calendar server from the ground up, and Apple is helping lead that.
If the project takes off, it will benefit both Linux in servers as well as making calendaring clients more open and interchangeable. It will also weaken the need for small and medium sized businesses to build a vast Exchange infrastructure, and end up as Windows only server shops. That will be good for open source, and will be good for Apple in trying to sell Xserve hardware.
"As comparison below shows, while Dell servers are comparably priced with Apple's, the expense of Windows Server and Exchange licensing, along with CALs for 100 users, makes a basic Microsoft email server over three times as much as an Xserve, which includes unlimited use of Mac OS X Server: $17,200 vs $5500!"
Apple Takes On Exchange Server
Apple's Open Calendar Server vs Microsoft Exchange
Exchange Server implements its Outlook Web (the web client) via a fairly standard Ajax website, but does provide greatly improved features for IE clients. FF and Safari work, but are not as fancy.
Exchange Server also provides standard POP/IMAP service for non-Outlook clients. Outlook uses a proprietary protocol often referred to as "MAPI," but in reality its just a lot of messy RPC talk that goes on between Outlook and Exchange. Microsoft supports its own Entourage (the Mac email client in Mac Office) using IMAP.
That means any organization that supports Entourage or any email clients outside of Outlook has POP or IMAP running, because that is Microsoft's own supported mechanism for email outside of Outlook.
Any mobile devices, including Windows Mobile pocket Outlook devices and the Palm OS Treo with Exchange Server support, get their mail through the same Outlook Web server as web clients. That means they act as specialized web clients, not as MAPI or IMAP clients.
The iPhone should have no problem with either IMAP or web support, in part because Apple already ships Mac OS X applications with support for Exchange via IMAP or the Outlook Web connector. The only reason why the iPhone would be "incompatible" with Exchange is if users want to have access to features that Microsoft only provides through its proprietary protocols, making the issue a problem for Microsoft, not Apple.
Is there any reason to believe that the iPhone could not maintain local web pages? Even the iPod can sync and display hyperlinked "Notes," which provide a subset of HTML to create navigable pages of information that can hyperlink to songs stored on the device. Why wouldn't the iPhone be able to copy local web pages that perform with all the functionality of a Dashboard Widget, along with the ability to dial, reference songs and other media, display linked graphics, execute JavaScript, etc.
Why would you assume it would not? If the iPhone artificially does not allow local web pages, that would be both odd and stupid of Apple, and would rightfully generate complaint. Since there has been no reason to assume such a bone-head move, maybe we should wait to see if Apple makes the mistake before complaining.
After all, the postulated complaints that its battery would be too short, its screen would scratch too easy, it couldn't use the iPhone name, it wouldn't be able to open any Word or Excel docs, and that IT shops would have no way to design custom apps for it all turned out to be non-problems.
Why you should read newspapers.
Not only did Reuters just publish an article, but there have been a flurry of websites all providing information on how to survive the sidewalk in various cities.
Reuters article on iPhone campers.
Konquerer uses KHTML, and Safari's WebKit was built from that as a starting point, but is really a fork. Apple worked on it for a year before notifying KHTML, and there were troubles in merging the changes Apple submitted.
There has been some effort to get KDE to adopt WebKit.
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Cuckoo for Cocoa: Is Safari on Windows the next iTunes?
Will Apple be able to achieve the same level of success with Safari as it has with iTunes, or are the circumstances completely different? Apple is betting on a handful of reasons why Windows users who already have a favorite web browser might want to use Safari. Here's a look at those reasons, what Safari shares in common with Apple's existing offerings--and in particular iTunes--and how it all relates to interesting possibilities in Apple's future strategies.
The Future of the Web: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer
Imagine jumping back in time to 1993 and rescuing the world from fifteen years of enslavement to proprietary technologies that held up innovation and put development decisions in the hands of a few salesmen.
How about some facts?
Look at Wikipedia's reports of various market share stats for that period. There is no controversy that Netscape's market share plunged in 1997. Now look up the browser MS shipped in 1997. It was not a superior product competing in the market place, because nobody chose IE; they got it by default.
Sure, after MS set up a barrier to Netscape's business plan, it could then invest more into browser development. After 1997, Netscape could do very little, while MS rapidly released three major new versions in 97, 99, and 2001.
What needs to be noted is what happened after AOL/Netscape/Mozilla stopped delivering anything as a competitor. Microsoft, without any further need to take the browser market, froze development of the browser for half a decade. Another version of IE wasn't delivered until 2006, and only because Firefox was starting to compete again.
You can say all you want about what "Steve Jobs" wants or knows, but since you can't understand why anticompetitive behavior and monopoly maintenance are bad for markets, I also have to assume you know nothing about what was going on inside Apple.
We also know, because Jobs announced it, that Jobs did try to sign fair contracts with cloners, and we also know (those of us that do) that Jobs entertained the idea of broadly licensing Rhapsody and YellowBox for Windows. That was NeXT's business model, and Apple tried to maintain it under the name Apple Enterprise.
The problem was that OEMs like HP and Dell would have nothing to do with Apple because Microsoft threatened to raise their Windows OEM prices dramatically if they did. Dell even scrambled to move its web store from NeXT's WebObjects to Microsoft's ASP after Apple bought NeXT.
Linux faces the same barriers to competition, but largely lacks the marketing muscle of Apple, making it even more difficult to line up and offerings of Linux on name brand hardware. Dell's placeholder Linux offerings are quite obviously bullshit, and as was recently reported, it will not sell them to businesses at all. Why not?
You have sassy comebacks for all sorts of things, but they are all based on fact free assertions. You also seem happiest when building strawmen and asserting your victory in ripping them apart. I did not admit any problems in a "primary argument" I never made. Instead, I linked to the article I wrote where one of the main points was that Netscape failed due to its own problems, both in strategy and in development.
Microsoft used Netscape's weakness in order to dominate the market, tying the web platform to its monopoly on the desktop and injecting proprietary extensions in order to make web apps require IE on Windows. That prevented any opportunity for competition, and ended any vehicle for Sun's Java. MS pretended to support Java on its own browser, but only with the intent of leading Sun down a dark hallway and shooting it when out of sight. That helped prevent any sort of meaningful cross platform way to deliver applications.
If you can't fathom a link between "no competition" and "no innovation," and want me to list innovations that are being prevented by anti-competitive behavior, I'll have to leave it at that, because there's no point in arguing with someone who willfully chooses to be obtuse. You may as well demand proof for the roundness of the Earth, evidence of man-made climate change, or a complete study on why dumping more war into Iraq won't solve the problems.
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Web Browser Wars: Netscape vs Internet Explorer
You make a couple comments that are technically true, but gloss over details to an absurd degree.
"IE4 surpassed Navigator in marketshare some time in 1999." Who cares? The real fact to consider is that IE resulted in an immediate plunge in Netscape's market share, from over 80% in 1996 to being a minority a year later. That's leverage. Part of that leverage in 1997 was MS using threats of delaying Office for Mac to get Apple to sign an exclusive deal to only put IE on the Mac desktop.
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Mac Office, $150 Million, and the Story Nobody Covered
"In July of 1997, the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Microsoft appeared to vanish with the announcement a new cooperative partnership. Why did Microsoft invest millions in a partnership with its most obvious remaining competitor in the desktop operating system market? "
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MS didn't have to "surpass" anyone in market share immediately, it only had to suffocate Netscape and destroy its cross-platform strategy so there were no choices left. After there is no choice, MS is your choice.
I agree that Netscape screwed up its own game. However, MS not only put a bullet into Netscape's head, but further monopolized the browser market, to the point where the only competitors since have been a free project and a few niche micro-minorities: Opera on mobiles, and Safari on the Mac. That is not an open market.
Your comments about there being no market for Linux or Mac OS X on PCs fallacious; if you don't know how OEM contracts work, go look it up. There is no open market for PC OS and hasn't been since the early 90s. Apple could not find licensees the same way Linux can't get OEMs to offer it outside of a token hobbyist offering. Those contracts were all tied up by MS.
Nothing is free. If you want the browser to be free, and MS to provide it, you are inviting MS to run your desktop. Good for you, I don't care. The problem is that the market should not be dominated by any player with the ability to set prices and prevent innovation, particularly not the tech market.
You can also support mob protection for your block because they do such a good job, but that doesn't mean the world shouldn't enforce racketeering laws. Most of us don't want to live in a shitty world run by thugs.
You provide a good example of someone with an argument but without much grasp of what has happened, is happening, or will happen if the status quo is maintained. That makes your arguments, which are easy to pull apart, simply not worth very much.
One could also say having a browser is a "demanded feature" of an OS. What was wrong about MS tying IE with Windows?
In addition to leveraging its monopoly position on 98% of the world's PCs to instantly create overwhelming market share for IE almost instantly in 1997, MS also added proprietary extensions to IE to distort the market of the web itself. That allowed MS to kill Netscape's revenue from servers. IE didn't compete with Netscape as a product until Netscape itself began to fail with the fiasco of Communicator 4. IE 1-3 were junk. IE 4-6 were better than what Netscape offered only because the company had been vanquished and was no longer offering anything.
Google faces the same impossible leverage. While MS can "compete" against Google desktop or browser tools, it can't compete in web search and marketing. So it is using its monopoly desktop position to roll out integrated search that can't be disabled or replaced by third party vendors. Once MS establishes market share on the basis of disposable PCs being replaced, and not consumer choice, it can then start directing all web search to its own servers exclusively.
Google currently has to fund Mozilla's Firefox to the tune of about $50 million a year to maintain an alternative browser. That reminds one of the fact that the only competition to Windows on the desktop PC is Linux, which is free. Microsoft has still managed to prevent OEMS from bundling it.
So anyone who thinks that MS' monopoly isn't in place or is no longer being abused is delusional:
- There is no free market in PC desktop OSs (Apple could not sign up OEMs, and even the free Linux struggles to gain adoption)
- There is no free market in desktop application suites (Office is rivaled mainly by free OpenOffice)
- There is hardly a free market in web browsers (the only option is the free, DIY Firefox)
Do we want to further restrict the market in online web search and offer Microsoft additional exclusive power over a market where there is now choice?
What's next, will we make all peripherals only something one can buy from Microsoft? How about games? What other markets would people prefer to hand over to Microsoft?
The problem is, when markets are handed to MS, they become entangled in proprietary tetherings to Windows and innovation rapidly stops. Once MS marginalized Netscape, it quit its own development of IE, and another major version wasn't shipped until *five years* later, and only then because Firefox had begun eating back some market share.
The problem with Windows enthusiasts is they they do not understand what is going on, they don't grasp what has happened, they fail to consider the consequences of further abuse. They are very much the same as the ~25% of Americans who support a rudderless war with a blank check, a president who had installed the beginnings of a fascist, terrorizing police state, and the beginnings of a pseudo-christian theocracy ruled by a clergy of corporate board members.
So far, so good! Let's see more of the same cause it's working so well. Don't consider the alternatives! Stay the course.
These people make my head explode.
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Safari on Windows? Apple and the Origins of the Web
One of the surprises unveiled in the WWDC keynote was the beta release of Safari 3.0 for both Mac OS X Tiger and Windows XP and Vista. While it was known that a new version of Safari would appear in Mac OS X Leopard in October, getting a beta now for today's Tiger was news. The release of Safari for Windows PCs went even further, raising the question of why Apple would port its browser to a platform that perhaps has too many already.
Apple in the Web Browser Wars: Netscape vs Internet Explorer
Apple's surprise delivery of the Safari web browser for Windows at WWDC was described by seve
You may be right that Apple has contractual obligations that prevent it from offering competing VoIP services on the iPhone. You may also be wrong. Imagining an accusation does not incur guilt.
I think there are significant, valid reasons for Apple to not allow full access to its brand new device, and the iPhone won't be the first phone lacking full access. Motorola's Linux phones don't allow full access, with the company saying J2ME is the full extent of its open platform capacity, similarly citing security threats. Symbian also introduced a signed software program that limited access to those who sign up, submit their products for signing, and pay fees.
I don't think its unreasonable for Apple to offer an 80% solution from day one (18 days before day one). After selling 10 million phones, no doubt the situation may change.
In any event, Skype is a proprietary VoIP service with unknown security, as nobody outside knows how it really works. I'd rather see an open standards solution to VoIP, one that uses the Jabber/SIP being implemented by both Apple and Google. We don't need more Windows-style proprietary technologies for VoIP in the style of AIM/Yahoo/MSN incompatible IM systems, we need standards based VoIP that works like IMAP/SMTP email.
That's likely going to come to the iPhone from Apple sooner than Skype.
I wholeheartedly agree that mobile providers are all pretty much a mix of greedy, visionless, and incompetent.
Compared to Apple's completely zipped lip on iPod games development, the company has kicked the door wide open (by Apple standards) in talking up web apps as a strategy for third party development. It also backed up its plans by releasing Safari/webkit on Windows.
Apple didn't say it would never open things up, but if you thought Apple would announce that "web 2.0 apps" were just a flaccid disguise the company was floating until say, August of 2008, when it planned to really roll out full access, what impact do you suppose that would have?
Do you also expect Apple to announce the next major revision to the iPhone?
The Treo had fans until Palm sat on it for years without delivering any innovation.
The iPaq was built upon a shoddy copycat platform, offered little hardware innovation, and a was a generally poor product. The thousands of people who bought one were probably fans momentarily, until they found they'd need to buy the next one, and the next one, and so on, before it would ever become a practical device. No doubt with some searching, one could turn up an iPaq fan.
Calling the iPhone "overpriced" in relation to either the iPaq or the Palm Treo is, however, truly and outrageously funny.
The Spectacular Failure of WinCE and Windows Mobile
Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian currently power the world's smartphones. How does each stack up against Apple's OS X in the iPhone? Here's an overview looking at the merits of each, starting with Microsoft.
The Egregious Incompetence of Palm
Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Linux, and Symbian currently power the world's smartphones. How does each stack up against Apple's OS X in the iPhone? This article presents an overview of Palm. Palm's early products actually followed a trajectory strikingly similar to Apple's original Macintosh. Differences in the choices made at Palm provide an interesting glimpse into "what if" scenarios of a parallel universe.
Third party development offers not just great rewards and also risk. On desktop platforms, the risk pales in comparison. On mobiles, reward>risk isn't as obvious. Existing phones offer very little potential despite offering "open" platforms. I calculated $449 of Windows Mobile software that is either wholly unnecessary or included on the iPhone. That software is all in the top popularity listings on Windows Mobile sites.
.Net.
Gizmodo complains that Apple isn't offering the rest of the world free reign to build Cocoa apps for the iPhone. That would be great, but would also crack open serious security gremlins. If Apple can't deliver Safari on Windows without heaps of contempt that its beta browser can be DoS'ed or crashed remotely, it is hard to understand that more serious risks might relate to the iPhone?
What could Apple have done to impress people? Shortly before the event, I suggested the only thing that would blow me away would be Cocoa for Windows, or perhaps just Safari for Windows.
Paired with what I already stated would be the only reasonable 3rd party platform announcement for "the 'Phone that isn't yet here," that means Apple is embarking on a strategy of promoting standards compliant, AJAX web 2.0 style development in its first assault on the hegemony of Windows in the cross-platform space.
I find it entertaining that FOSS developers--who love dropping the "web 2.0" buzzword and chastising everything proprietary--are booing Apple for pushing standards compliant web-centric development and for not delivering yet another proprietary mobile development framework to compete against
That quite clearly shows that nothing Apple could do would go uncriticized.
It simply makes the most sense for Apple to continue to partner with Google and Yahoo, and build strong support for the kind of development people already know how to build and are interested in building, rather than trying to immediately deploy something that--like QuickDraw GX--is very appealing in theory, but worthless if nobody pokes at it.
Mobile Disruption: Apple's iPhone and Third Party Software
I previously wrote about Apple's comments to deliver the iPhone as a closed platform, explaining why this makes sense for Apple, but also presenting why I though that the panic feared by some was overstated. Since I don't make decisions at Apple, and really do not wield any influence at all over those making the decisions, it seemed to make more sense to logically explore the subject rather than quickly pass judgment.
iPhone Gremlins: Crashing, Security, and Network Collapse!
In addition to showing off the iPhone's pretty interface as part of its first impression--including the Google Maps client Steve Jobs used to locate a Starbucks in order to place a crank call for a thousand coffees at Macworld--he also described the rationale behind the closed platform iPhone as a security and stability issue.
An iPhone SDK? Predictions for WWDC 2007!
The fate of third party application development for the iPhone is one of a few objects of speculation for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference next week. What is likely in view of Apple's existing stance on the iPhone's platform? Here's a look, leading into some other predictions for WWDC 2007.
More Predictions for WWDC 2007: Solaris, Google, Surround
Yesterday's article presented the likelihood of any new iPhone news at WWDC, but it appears that this years' event will be almost exclusively about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. What's in store for developers? Here's my list of inevitable new releases, good possibilities, a
The problem with making broad and sweeping generalizations that play upon the contrived stereotypes invented by the media is that such ideas rarely convey an accurate portrayal of what is really happening.
If Jobs' arrogance was the only factor involved in Apple's decisions, the company would not have surpassed Dell and the $100 billion market cap, sold 100 million iPods, etc. Bluster can make things appear to happen for a limited period of time, but you can't fool the market for seven years--not the stock market, and not the consumer market--without a huge amount of privilege or leverage, neither of which Jobs possessed ten years ago.
Apple quite obviously does make mistakes and errors, but every company that works to innovate will. What is interesting is not whether a company has ever failed, but how often its risks have been made in the right direction, and how many of its failures it has offset with huge successes at the same time.
The four factors of the iPhone you mention are indeed related to Apple's success with Cocoa and OS X, and some of them are tied to and dependant upon them. I've previously written about the differences in the iPhone and in competing environments, from the generic J2ME to the weak Flash Lite to Windows Mobile and the Palm OS. Clearly, Cocoa provides the iPhone with clear advantages.
And quite obviously, this allows Apple to deliver the kind of apps that other developers will want to create themselves. There is no question that native Cocoa development offers the tantalizing potential to deliver a major jump over the "web 2.0" apps Apple described as its 3rd party dev platform for the iPhone.
There is also no question that Apple does have limited resources. Should it hold up both the iPhone and Leopard to deliver "Leopard on the iPhone," even before the platform is delivered and before any market exists?
It's easy to make demands. But how much value will be immediately delivered by the release of mobile-Cocoa on the iPhone? How much risk? If your position is that it would be all win and no lose, then please explain why delivering Safari on Windows was immediately met by scorn and criticism. Safari is a web browser, not a mobile platform!
Certainly you can imagine that the Apple Trolls and Black Hat hackers--who already have a bone to pick with Apple over being exposed as frauds--would pounce upon even minor security issues on the iPhone exposed by a wide open, full access API, just as they do so over the ability to crash the new beta Safari 3.0 browser.
People can "walk and chew gum," but its a bit outside the world of simple cliches to expect a company like Apple, competing in a fully monopolized market (the desktop PC/IT platform is dominated by Windows, if you have been in a cave for 20 years) to launch a full assault on every Microsoft product all at once. Quite obviously, Apple does have to pick its targets wisely. I believe the company is doing well at the targets it is picking.
While I'd be happy to hear alternative viewpoints based on reason and logic, I'm a bit tired of hearing a nothing but a mixture of tired stereotype and cliche to explain why Jobs and Apple are persecuting the innocent just because Jobs is a maniac and Apple is a monstrous entity threatening the freedom of people who are happy to be monopolized.
iPhone Gremlins: Crashing, Security, and Network Collapse!
In addition to showing off the iPhone's pretty interface as part of its first impression--including the Google Maps client Steve Jobs used to locate a Starbucks in order to place a crank call for a thousand coffees at Macworld--he also described the rationale behind the closed platform iPhone as a security and stability issue.
An iPhone SDK? Predictions for WWDC 2007!
The fate of third party application development for the iPh
There is such a thing as competing intelligently. Apple could rush to market a full range of me-too products that match the all of the things Microsoft sells, but focusing on Safari first, and delivering WebKit cross platform (Mac/Windows/iPhone, plus as a FOSS project others--from Nokia to individuals--can port anywhere) competes most effectively against the hegemony of the IE-tied-to-Windows monopoly, with the least risk, while delivering the most benefit to consumers and developers compared to the risk and effort Apple has to expend.
The reason children fail to learn things is often because they are so busy demanding things that they often forget to think about why things are the way they are. By reflecting on why things are the way they are, one can learn a lot. That's all I'm trying to do. I'm not withholding your mobile Cocoa, Im just explaining why the expectation that it would appear was irrational and foolish.
Had Apple released a proprietary "mobile-Cocoa," would you be happier as a FOSS developer? Would your iPhone apps run at something closer to "full speed"? Would you even write apps for a proprietary mobile platform if you called yourself a FOSS developer?
.Net rival anyway.
Your sniveling about the sucking and blowing of FOSS in and out of commercial developers fails to account for the fact that without Apple, nobody would be using KHTML. Apple adapted it, made very significant updates, and then contributed innovation back, not just in the form of the open source WebKit, but also in the form of contributing the very useful canvas tags adopted by other browsers, as well as the future HTML 5 contributions Apple is making in web multimedia.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about as you spew false information. I encourage you to stop before you end up old and cranky with nothing left for yourself other than a podcast and a few speaking engagements or quotation gigs, like Enderle or Dvorak. It's an ugly path to the ignominy of trolldom.
It's not like nobody predicted Web 2.0 being the extent of third party software development for the iPhone, and its not like the world needs another mobile
An iPhone SDK? Predictions for WWDC 2007!
>>The last thing that enjoyed this much hype was Snakes on A Plane. Remember how good that was when it actually came out? I predict iPhone will share the same fate, and shares of Apple will plummet!
I already used that joke on about the Zune!
In both cases = lots of fake astroturfed excitement, no real excitement from users. The media celebrated the Zune until it was obvious that it had bombed.
With the iPhone, there is real excitement from users, but lots of criticism from the media, particularly trolls hoping to FUD it out of existence.
If you haven't noticed, the market does not agree with you.
iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media Coverage
It's funny how the meme that Motorola's crappy ROKR was somehow Apple's design keeps getting replayed. Apple quite obviously floated Motorola's phone while also cutting off its legs with the Nano at the same event. Nobody mentions the iTunes client on the SLVR, which actually didn't suck (the phone, not the limited client).
It's like he can't resist tying an albatross around Apple's neck to desperately make the company seem less magical or something. Is it wrong to give the company some credit for blowing out amazing crap over the recent years? If so, I don't want to be right.
- iPhone Gremlins: Crashing, Security, and Network Collapse!
"In addition to showing off the iPhone's pretty interface as part of its first impression--including the Google Maps client Steve Jobs used to locate a Starbucks in order to place a crank call for a thousand coffees at Macworld--he also described the rationale behind the closed platform iPhone as a security and stability issue. Was he kidding?"
Remember that Apple's Macs are EFI Intel PCs now. You don't need LILO and GRUB to start up an operating system, as EFI provides a minimal but sophisticated environment for handling multiple boot devices and system launching. It's like the Sun/Apple OpenFirmware that Macs have always had.
You'd only need those things to get Mac OS X running on a DOS PC, or when using ZFS with Linux, right?
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Microsoft Surface: the Fine Clothes of a Naked Empire
What happens when the core values of an empire are exposed as a fraud? Does it prompt it change? More likely, it results in the generation of more false information to cover up the embarrassing failings.
Hi Mike,
It was a joke. I'll point them out next time so you don't get sad.
Dan
It actually displays whatever buttons would make sense in the given context.
How many tiny physical buttons do you think it needs? I've used everything from a Treo to a BBerry, and can't say physical buttons push my buttons. Dialing numbers or mixed number/text is annoying with a full mini keyboard, and is painful with T9. I for one welcome our new touch screen overlords.
Recall seeing any keyboards on Star Trek? We have to make the move at some point in order to get into the future, and its not like Microsoft is going to usher in something new.
Another point of interest is that nobody is crying about the LG Prada phone, which uses a similar arrangement of a touch screen, albeit using the horrific Flash Lite.
Origins: Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn't Symbian
Apple iPhone vs LG Prada KE850
The OP is right that Apple has sold 100 million iPods over the last ~6 years (since 2001), but what is interesting is that the company has sold about 70 million of those IN THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF. That's why the installed base graph looks like a population explosion curve (just like Apple's stock price).
By (fiscal) year, Apple sold this many iPods:
2002 381,000
2003 939,000
2004 4,416,000
2005 22,497,000
2006 39,409,000
2007 31,615,000 (the two fiscal quarters ending in March 07)
So Microsoft's sales of 1,000,000 would be impressive if it had actually sold that many to consumers. The fact is however, that Microsoft reports sales by counting how many units it has pushed off on retailers. Microsoft reported sales of 10 million Xbox 360s last fall, after only selling 6 million to users. It continues to push retailers to take deliveries of units to create the appearance that the 360 has not reached saturation, despite little new growth. Given that it could dump 4 million 360's on retailers last fall, it's actually a pretty dismal failure that Microsoft can't manage to similarly fake sales of 4 million Zunes, even without ever selling one. If it can only mange to announce meeting its stated goal for June, it doesn't even care anymore. This is a very dead product.
Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media Coverage
iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
Next Gen Sales - Q1 2007 - Zune, Xbox, PS3, Wii, Apple TV
The Zune isn't a bad product "just because it's from Microsoft." It's a bad product because it's from Microsoft.
A subtle difference. Don't confuse causation with simple correlation.
Microsoft isn't working to make the Zune a good product, it's working to sell a bad product through FUD and intimidation, but in the consumer electronics world, MS isn't doing well at all, having lost many billions every year since 2001. If Microsoft spun its Apple-like hardware/consumer products off into its own company, it would be many times more beleagured than Apple ever was in the mid 80s.
What's really going to be fun to watch is not how the Zune shrivels up next to the iPod, but how Windows Mobile is going to implode as soon as business customers realize that mobile phones don't have to spontaneously crash, spend 2 minutes rebooting, and offer arcane and bizarre interfaces and a generally crappy software experience. That is set to happen as soon as the iPhone hits. Not even AT&T can screw that up. That may make IT people question why they're continuing to use Windows products rather than an open operating systems based on Unix.
This is simply Bill Gates' second pie in the face.
Zune vs. iPhone: Five Phases of Media Coverage
iPod vs Zune: Microsoft's Slippery Astroturf
Next Gen Sales - Q1 2007 - Zune, Xbox, PS3, Wii, Apple TV
Sun's jPhone is in a bit of a pickle: Sun Tries to Jump on iPhone Bandwagon with jPhone, Ballmer's adoring infactuation with the problematic Motorola Q is a bit over the top: Cingular Apple iPhone vs. Verizon Motorola Q, and LG's Prada Phone is an overpriced Flash in the pan Apple iPhone vs LG Prada KE850.
The iPhone stacks up pretty well against other smartphones in the Phone Wars, particularly with regard to its OS X in comparison to the rival Palm OS, WinCE, Symbian, and the state of mobile platforms using Linux--many of which, like Motorola's Linux phones, are really as closed as Apple's.
Of course, they say I'm biased, but so is everyone else.