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IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

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Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#101

Post by rimantas »

abstractbill wrote: post #34
houseabsolute wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's just tune in and watch the sales of the iPad starting next month We already watched the sales of the iPhone, and we saw how that went. Same type of device, same type of complaints by openness advocate, and what was the result? Are you guys going to just keep on saying this stuff until some closed Apple product fails, then say that's proof that people want openness, ignoring the litany of preceding closed devi…

Android gained 5.2% of the US smartphone market between December 2009 and February 2010, while the iPhone lost 0.1% ( http://www.mobileburn.com/news.jsp?Id=9184 ). Of course I'm not going to declare the iPhone a failure - it's clearly done very well. But I think it's still a little early to call it a winner.

Comparing Android to iPhone is like comparing copies of Windows 7 sold to the number of Macbook Pro 15".

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#102

Post by copenja »

houseabsolute wrote: post #91
copenja wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales don't prove sexiness or ease of use. Consider sales of the Droid. In it's first 74 days it sold more units than the original iPhone did in it's first 74 days. http://mashable.com/2010/03/16/nexus-one-sales-poor/ But I'm not going to say that proves that the Droid is sexier than the iPhone. Hell, there both great phones.

You should especially not say that since the comparison is not really fair, considering the iPhone OS was an unknown quantity, and iPhone lacked an app store, was on a smaller carrier, and was not launched during the holiday season. Sales are not complete proof of sexiness, but they are evidence. It strikes me that if the iPhone on a single carrier can win out against an entire ecosystem of phones on many carriers, i…

If sales were a sign of sexiness OS X would have outsold Windows.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#103

Post by copenja »

jsz0 wrote: post #56
david927 wrote: post #26

Woz has always about being open and modular and extensible. Jobs has always been about the opposite -- and for good reason; the early Macs were typically more stable and functioned better simply because of that lock-in. But history has played this over and over again, and Woz always wins. Vendors work out standards; the user experience consolidates. If you give people the freedom and trust them, they'll work it out.…

Keep in mind it's not 1976 or 1984. Things are different today. Technology is no longer reserved for the technical elite to enjoy or fetishize over exclusively. If you want to draw a line in the sand to figure out when things changed I'd say 2001 and the introduction of the iPod -- an incredibly closed but amazingly compelling and easy to use mainstream device that smashed its open competition with no mercy. This was…

Relax. Neither open or closed equals total domination.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#104

Post by eru »

jsz0 wrote: post #56
david927 wrote: post #26

Woz has always about being open and modular and extensible. Jobs has always been about the opposite -- and for good reason; the early Macs were typically more stable and functioned better simply because of that lock-in. But history has played this over and over again, and Woz always wins. Vendors work out standards; the user experience consolidates. If you give people the freedom and trust them, they'll work it out.…

Keep in mind it's not 1976 or 1984. Things are different today. Technology is no longer reserved for the technical elite to enjoy or fetishize over exclusively. If you want to draw a line in the sand to figure out when things changed I'd say 2001 and the introduction of the iPod -- an incredibly closed but amazingly compelling and easy to use mainstream device that smashed its open competition with no mercy. This was…

What about the original game boy? And numerous other devices.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#105

Post by david927 »

houseabsolute wrote: post #44
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone market share is respectable but hardly dominant: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/the_truth_about_apple...

Granted, but irrelevant to the claim I was making. Also I'd like to point out that that's one device on (normally) one carrier per country, being pushed by only one company. The others are all being pushed by consortiums or multiple phone companies and are available normally on all carriers yet they still lag behind.

Mobile phones and tablet computers are completely different markets.

The trajectory of the iPad will be quite different than that of the iPhone. Wait. You'll see.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#106

Post by jacquesm »

joezydeco wrote: post #81
samd wrote: post #14

I found this quote from Wozniak in Founders at Work to be ironic. "You'd go to the store and they'd just have all this stuff that you could buy to enhance the Apple II. So one of our big keys to success was that we were very open. There's a big world out there for other people to come and join us."

But all of those were things that were left out of the Apple ][ project for various reasons: either they didn't exist yet (Disk ][ being the prime example), or were too expensive to add to the motherboard. What exactly is lacking from modern hardware today? Not enough communications capability? Screen isn't large or hi-res enough? The expandability has moved to software. That's the App Store. People are customizing t…

Any restrictions on modern hardware are likely to be strategic. For instance, the reason you can't make voice calls with the ipad and that it doesn't have a camera is most likely because that would mean you no longer need an iphone.

The parts would have added another $5 to the total cost, if that. It also gives them a reason to sell you a new one a year or two down the line. Along with less anemic ram, needed for this amazing new feature called multi-tasking.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#107

Post by jacquesm »

There are multiple 'axis' to this victory business, and this one - the money angle - is only a single way of interpreting all this.

If I could choose between the two of them as human beings I'd pick Wozniak for sure, he's one of the nicest 'well to do' people that ever came out of silicon valley.

Jobs is simply still in a pissing match with Gates, and it looks like he will be able to prove some day that Apples view of the software market was even more closed than Microsofts, and potentially far more profitable.

I bought a Mac for my son a couple of years ago, I'm beginning to regret that decision. At the time it was to open his eyes to the fact that not every computer on the planet runs the same operating system and that diversity is good. Now I'm not so sure that an Apple was the right way to express that (he already had an older linux computer to play with blender on, but it was definitely past its prime).

Money is a very convenient yardstick to measure success by, but it collapses a lot of data in to a single number and it does not tell you the history of how it got there.

Clearly 'open' is never going to make as much money as 'closed', the RIAA and MPAA are all too aware of that, but longer term 'open' will always win because stuff that is special today is a commodity tomorrow.

Remember the times when each and every piece of electronics came with it's own weird set of proprietary protocols and connectors? Now it's all IP and we're better off because of that, except for the lawyers.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#108

Post by benwerd »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #94
pyre wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of carrier-branded phones have features like that disabled in favor of only allowing the user to purchase ringtones from the carrier's marketplace where you pay upwards of $3-$4 per ringtone (i.e. ringtones, at 30s or less, cost more than buying the entire song on iTunes). It is/was vendor lock-in at it's worst: create a captive audience, and then price gouge them because they don't know any better (i.e. "My ol…

A lot of carrier-branded phones have features like that disabled in favor of only allowing the user to purchase ringtones from the carrier's marketplace where you pay upwards of $3-$4 per ringtone (i.e. ringtones, at 30s or less, cost more than buying the entire song on iTunes). I would like to point out this is an American phenomenon. At least in India, the mobile market is completely open.

This. I think the iPhone was a complete boon to the US mobile market, which was suffering and locked down. In America, the iPhone is one of the most open handsets out there. However, everywhere else, where carriers have less of an ability to be quite as locked-down and evil, they're one of the least open.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#109

Post by rbanffy »

rjurney wrote: post #78
xiaoma wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone is really open and functional compared to the phones that preceded it. Just downloading a ringtone for most prior phones was more expensive than full-fledged games on the iPhone. The app store is far from perfect, but it's a very open market compared to anything I've seen out of Nokia or any of the Japanese handset makers.

Its funny how easily people forget this - Apple created the first MARKET for mobile apps. Thats openness. Before the iPhone the mobile game was one big scam, with someone reaching into your pocket at each and every step in a long chain.

> Apple created the first MARKET for mobile apps. Thats openness.

I distinctly remember being able to install software I downloaded (or made) on my Sony Ericsson P-800 a good couple years before the iPhone was announced. In fact, digging a little back, I am sure you could install PalmOS apps on your Treos since the first day they were launched.

And anyone could develop for both platforms (actually, there was Java ME too), anyone could host the file you would have to download to install and specify how, and if, you would pay for the download. In fact, many application stores appeared hosting zillions of smartphone apps you could download and install.

Apple's market is not open at all. Apple decides if you will be able to sell the fruits of your development work.

What Apple did is to corner both users and developers. And that's bad.

Re: IPad is Steve Jobs’ final victory over Steve Wozniak

#110

Post by rbanffy »

GeneralMaximus wrote: post #94
pyre wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of carrier-branded phones have features like that disabled in favor of only allowing the user to purchase ringtones from the carrier's marketplace where you pay upwards of $3-$4 per ringtone (i.e. ringtones, at 30s or less, cost more than buying the entire song on iTunes). It is/was vendor lock-in at it's worst: create a captive audience, and then price gouge them because they don't know any better (i.e. "My ol…

A lot of carrier-branded phones have features like that disabled in favor of only allowing the user to purchase ringtones from the carrier's marketplace where you pay upwards of $3-$4 per ringtone (i.e. ringtones, at 30s or less, cost more than buying the entire song on iTunes). I would like to point out this is an American phenomenon. At least in India, the mobile market is completely open.

> I would like to point out this is an American phenomenon

And this explains why the iPhone was somewhat underwhelming for the rest of the world. It's a great phone, sure, but no revolution.

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