Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
www2.macleans.ca
Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
1–10 of 123 posts
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#2Article summary: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#3Article summary: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
This.
It seems the writer here is wearing blinders; it's fine if you're not a proponent of Apple Inc. that's 100% your prerogative, but if you're going to cherrypick which points stick and which don't so that the only thing that's left are the ones that directly support whatever point, well sorry.
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#4Article summary: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
You are giving the wrong summary. A better summary would be: Napster gave us wine, Apple created a nice looking bottle for it. But without bottle there would still be wine.
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#5Article summary: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
But all those innovations were inevitable! So, you know, the Romans surely don't deserve any credit.
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#6Article summary: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
I agree though that Google has more impact than Apple. Every student, every high schooler or college student, professor, scientist etc around the world use Google to get access to knowledge, learn and get their job done. I live in Peru where every student use google to get knowledge, I haven't seen anyone with an idevice anywhere here.
I think the service Google has done to humanity by making information accessible to all and that easily is hard to match by any company today on earth. Apple makes pretty devices, and accelerated the smartphone revolution (which was already en marche with blackberry as the article say), but on the whole, Google reached and helped (and keep doing so today) much more people than Apple ever has. Not to mention the billions of dollars Google give to publishers from India to Peru helping them make a living, not to mention Android, youtube, blogger etc.
So yes, Google has changed the world much more than Apple in my opinion and experience here and everywhere I've been.
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#7I really don't understand the need to denigrate Apple. It almost seems as this spawns from an instinctive respect for the significance that Apple, and Steve Jobs specifically, have actually had.
Apple invented the GUI (using some ideas they licensed from Xerox), as part of a project that Steve Jobs led. The NeXT cube inspired the web to some extent and made the first browser much easier to write. Apple invented the touch UI. Hell, just listing the significant inventions of Apple is almost embarrassing because any list is going to leave so many of them off.
I credit Google for inventing page rank and for nailing web advertising. I won't even debate whether that is more significant than what Apple has done in just the last decade because doing so implies that some sort of one-upmanship has any point at all.
But, what significant inventions can we credit to Microsoft? HP? Dell? Lenovo? Samsung? Sony? The cell networks?
Lets step out of the world of computers, where Apple is somehow a controversial figure, and look at the world of movies. Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas for $6M of his own money (got from selling Apple stock) in 1986. At the time Pixar was just an effects shop for Lucas, but Ed Catmull et. al. wanted to make a feature. Jobs nurtured that company, tried to get it to at least break even (so it wouldn't break him) doing cutting edge commercials in the 1990s, until they finally got a break and got a deal with Disney. Pixar changed movies forever.
And they were able to do it because Steve Jobs had a perspective that even George Lucas didn't have. Lucas knew Catmull et al wanted to do features, but he didn't think it was viable. Jobs did, and put up what, at the time, was a significant portion of his net worth. And he stuck thru it during a number of thin years. All credit to the people at Pixar who actually made the technology and the movies-- but also credit to Jobs for letting them do it, with minimal interference.
It's not that Apple changed everything, its that Steve Jobs did.
I think attempting to deny this man-- one of the few genuine capitalist heroes-- the credit he is due is doomed to failure. You can't deny it, and trying to only reflects on yourself.
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#8Article summary: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
The point is that none of what Apple brought about in the last decade was "significant" in the same way that sanitation, ..., public health are. They primarily brought combinations of things we were already doing in slick and usable packages. They produced a bunch of great products, no doubt, but I cringe whenever someone calls an iThing "revolutionary".
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#9Somewhat related: You know how we in the startup world are constantly chanting, "It's the execution that matters, not the idea?" Well, many of the discussions around Apple seem to boil down to one person saying that Apple copied/stole the idea, or the idea was inevitable, and the other person saying "Yeah, but Apple pulled off he execution."
To the extent that all of Apple's ideas in GUIs, mobile devices, music retailing, physical stores, and so on are all "obvious" or "inevitable," Apple's success has been in executing on those ideas with overwhelming competence.
It may sound banal to say that all Apple does is execute competently. But experience with startups shows that executing competently with new products and creating new markets is heinously difficult. And without that execution, progress happens glacially if at all.
Re: Apple changed everything? Yeah, right.
#10There is a good argument to be made that Google is a more influential company than Apple, but this article doesn't present it. Once you take away the unsubstantiated (at least in the article) fluff, such as "Google preaches openness because it benefits the company", here are Google's concrete accomplishments, according to the article:
1) Their core technology, Google search.
2) The fact that they bought YouTube.
This isn't a very compelling summary of Google's concrete accomplishments, and I'm sure a much better one could be made. Even Google Docs is a better example of Google changing the way people communicate than "they bought YouTube". (YouTube itself is, of course, amazing, but they were established and very popular before Google, a fact that doesn't really fit the narrative as presented.)
The worst part of this article, however, is that it presents Apple's accomplishments as inevitable and Google's as miraculous, when you could just as easily argue the reverse. "Someone would inevitably have bought YouTube -- surely the fact that anybody can now share videos on the Internet is inevitable?" And the answer is, yes, someone would have, but the point is that Google did. In the same way, everybody can see, in hindsight, that the iTunes music store was inevitable, but Apple was the company to make it happen. Being first is only easy in retrospect.