11–20 of 49 posts
Great find... If you continue listening to Steve ramble on about the what we now call "the Cloud", you can hear him mention hardware-thin/software-thick clients, eg. the iPhone and the iPad. I wonder what held him back from achieving that vision is the first place. AFAICS, Apple is now playing catch-up to Google and Amazon in the cloud computing space.
Great find... If you continue listening to Steve ramble on about the what we now call "the Cloud", you can hear him mention hardware-thin/software-thick clients, eg. the iPhone and the iPad. I wonder what held him back from achieving that vision is the first place. AFAICS, Apple is now playing catch-up to Google and Amazon in the cloud computing space.
What held them back? Probably two things: 1. They only had the Mac platform (and non-connected iPods). Can you change the world with a 5% market share? 2. They wanted to charge for it. Now, they could have done this a couple of years ago after they conquered #1, but they were still hung up on point #2, and just tried to make a better pay service.
2. Who gives their service away for free? Apple still charges for it. It's included in the devices you buy, etc.
Great find... If you continue listening to Steve ramble on about the what we now call "the Cloud", you can hear him mention hardware-thin/software-thick clients, eg. the iPhone and the iPad. I wonder what held him back from achieving that vision is the first place. AFAICS, Apple is now playing catch-up to Google and Amazon in the cloud computing space.
1. Bandwidth started to become conveniently fast and widespread around year 2000, people are just starting to be familiar with that. He's talking about gigabit ethernet in the video, even today most people don't even have 1/1000 of that.
2. Computers in general have just started to become widespread among the general population until now.
3. Trust, 10 years ago privacy had a much higher price than now. Especially considering the people who used computers then were the tinfoil hacker kind as opposed to every random person today.
4. User interfaces was horrible 10 years ago. Just imagine setting up a network connection with settings like baudrate and hundreds of other funny things that nobody except the programmer of the application cares about.
5. Money and effort. Hard drives are cheap, big enough, and last long enough to not scare people away from them. People don't want to complicate things more than necessary.
And to be fair, most big companies has had the kind of thin-client setup he's talking about for quite long. You just need a VPN-tunnel and you can access it from everywhere in the world. (again, back to user friendlyness).
This was Sun Microsystems' vision of computing in 1982, 15 years earlier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What held them back? Probably two things: 1. They only had the Mac platform (and non-connected iPods). Can you change the world with a 5% market share? 2. They wanted to charge for it. Now, they could have done this a couple of years ago after they conquered #1, but they were still hung up on point #2, and just tried to make a better pay service.
1. In 1997, technology held him back, not market share. The iPhone changed the world with no market share. The iPad changed the world with no market share. Etc. 2. Who gives their service away for free? Apple still charges for it. It's included in the devices you buy, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing it themselves and doing it right is my guess. Just look at Sony for an example of rushing into doing something yourself (PSN.)
Exactly this, I think most would agree that Apple attempts to either do it right or not at all.
I don't know much about iCloud, but I really hope they had learned the lesson and made it more open by providing APIs, allowing data migration, and supporting tools for other platforms. However, this might be just my wishful thinking.
Spooky to hear Jobs speak so well of Rubenstein ("I trust him with my life"), knowing that Palm will hire him away for WebOS a decade later.
I guess this is because now, every word he says is analysed and reported by mainstream media. He has to communicate to the entire world because of Apple's popularity, and not just a room full of WWDC developers.