61–70 of 80 posts
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When they fail, they fail with style. I'd love to have an A/UX box. Edit: didn't think of it this way when writing the above, but a unix kernel with an actual, Apple designed, Mac GUI on top was actually a failure... Go figure.
I've got an IIsi with A/UX on it. It's pretty neat, though a bit slow--9M of RAM isn't quite enough. I'd love to give you a hand setting up your own machine, let me know. :)
Ha, this made me search the web for things PG said recently. I didn't find anything that specific although I wonder what he thinks of Google/Facebook or Android/iPhone standoffs Come to think of it, I wonder what is going to happen to Microsoft? Something is obviously coming (they won't just fade into background), but what would it be? People say that oh, don't worry Microsoft will become just like IBM, but I don't b…
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It depends how specific the predictions are. Anyone can make some vague Nostradamus type prediction. Whereas I actually take pride in my spring '07 analysis of why cell phone software was broken: http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/05/cell_phone_... (Which isn't phrased as a prediction, but is basically equivalent in that it can only be proven or disproven by future events.) The funny thing is that the post…
A lot of your analysis applies with equal force today, and so has been falsified by intervening events. For example, you say: "Let's say that against all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible. Invisible software isn't viral." This is still true today (no one can tell what I'm doing while I fiddle with my p…
Those footnotes have a mix of prescience and just plain wrong. For instance, there's one about how a good open source browser can fundamentally change the industry; and Firefox has in that time gained much ground and helped spur innovation in IE and across the web (as have WebKit and Chrome). However, Firefox was already underway by the time he wrote this, so that prediction isn't necessarily so forward looking. His…
He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong
What's the original quote? I bet that in "client-side apps is a bad idea", he was talking about desktop apps as opposed to web apps. Client-side JS is very much a web app thing, so far from refuting the prediction, it confirms it. And indeed the prediction turned out correct, if not so prescient as to be newsworthy years later.
Assuming I'm guessing correctly, that brings us to 3 correct predictions vs. 1 incorrect one, quite a bit better a record than you're implying.
Edit: Also, since you allude to "some more that were wrong": care to say what they were?
Alan Kay was heard to have said something along the lines of "Give this a 9-inch screen and you'll take over the world" when he first saw an iPhone. My favorite one of these was from my favorite music band, The KLF, who after the success of "Doctor in the TARDIS" decided to write a book called The Manual, Or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way , which explains, as it says on the tin, how to go about producing a hit…
By two decades these guys anticipated mashups and the Rickroll. No. The people who bought the single in 1987 were responding to the song very differently from the people who turned it into an internet meme 20 years later. The passage you quote describes the former; it doesn't predict the latter.
Alan Kay was heard to have said something along the lines of "Give this a 9-inch screen and you'll take over the world" when he first saw an iPhone. My favorite one of these was from my favorite music band, The KLF, who after the success of "Doctor in the TARDIS" decided to write a book called The Manual, Or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way , which explains, as it says on the tin, how to go about producing a hit…
Even more ironically, Squeak is a derivative of Smalltalk-80, a Smalltalk implementation that a research group at Apple released.
Those footnotes have a mix of prescience and just plain wrong. For instance, there's one about how a good open source browser can fundamentally change the industry; and Firefox has in that time gained much ground and helped spur innovation in IE and across the web (as have WebKit and Chrome). However, Firefox was already underway by the time he wrote this, so that prediction isn't necessarily so forward looking. His…
Hold on a second. He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong What's the original quote? I bet that in "client-side apps is a bad idea", he was talking about desktop apps as opposed to web apps. Client-side JS is very much a web app thing, so far from refuting the prediction, it confirms it. And indeed the prediction turned out correct, if no…
p. 227, from scrolling around a bit from the Google Books links in the original post: http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&pg=PA228&#...
Also, pp. 228-229:
"I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn't. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn't necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they'll even support it."
Note that this is just from reading a few of the footnotes from that link; I haven't read the rest of the book, so I can't speak much on it. All I'm saying is that he got some things right, some wrong, and that other people were talking about an iPhone before he did.
And I should have said "a few prescient quotes, and a few that are wrong." The "one prescient quote" that I wrote was a mistake on my part, as I had just discussed two prescient quotes (iPhone and open-source browser innovation); not sure why I wrote "one."
Alan Kay was heard to have said something along the lines of "Give this a 9-inch screen and you'll take over the world" when he first saw an iPhone. My favorite one of these was from my favorite music band, The KLF, who after the success of "Doctor in the TARDIS" decided to write a book called The Manual, Or How to Have a Number One the Easy Way , which explains, as it says on the tin, how to go about producing a hit…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hold on a second. He says that writing client-side apps is a bad idea, but the popularity of client-side JavaScript is proving that wrong What's the original quote? I bet that in "client-side apps is a bad idea", he was talking about desktop apps as opposed to web apps. Client-side JS is very much a web app thing, so far from refuting the prediction, it confirms it. And indeed the prediction turned out correct, if no…
"In 1995, when we started Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be the technology everyone was going to use to develop server-base applications. Applets seemed to us an old-fashioned idea. Download programs to run on the client? Simpler just to go all the way and run the programs on the server. We wasted little time on applets, but countless other startups must have been lured into this tar pit. Few seem to have esca…
I read this as being advice for the then-present, not a prediction. "Javascript isn't necessary, doesn't work well, and it's not guaranteed that it will work in future."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of your analysis applies with equal force today, and so has been falsified by intervening events. For example, you say: "Let's say that against all odds you get a few early adopters. To everyone else it will look like they are just sending text messages. Unlike the iPod, your software is invisible. Invisible software isn't viral." This is still true today (no one can tell what I'm doing while I fiddle with my p…
The WiFi part I was clearly wrong about, it ended up being Apple and not a shift in communications standards that was the key disruptor for the industry. But I disagree on the other two points. If someone is playing a game on their iPhone today then it is pretty obvious, or at least much more obvious than the pre-iPhone days when cell phones had tiny black and white screes. And as for the thing about women, women use…
Uh.