71–80 of 127 posts
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you can't call android a monopoly. thats like saying server is monopolized by GNU/linux.
You make it sound as if there's any doubt that Google will continue to control Android for the foreseeable future. There is none.
The relative ubiquity of the internet is an important consideration here. In previous swings of the pendulum, computing (and/or the internet) was concentrated among a much smaller base of users, many of whom had strongly vested interests in the side to which the pendulum was swinging. These days, the internet is certainly ubiquitous, and "smart" mobile devices are basically ubiquitous, if not yet entirely so. And the…
"To overcome this appeal, the next great disruption will need to equate openness with convenience. Open must = easy. More precisely, open must be more highly correlated with ease than walled gardens are correlated with ease." I agree with this, but I'm not sure how it'd happen. Open source has been really good for things that are infrastructure, or common building blocks. However, it's not been so good for things at…
Apple has done a phenomenal job creating a design-forward, UX-optimized, sparklingly walled garden. But I believe that a richness of content, easily accessed and easily used, can lure people outside.
Two things need to happen: 1) more entrepreneurs need to be convinced that the big rewards are outside the walls, and 2) the things they create will need to lure people out there. We may need a third factor, like the one Yahoo and eventually Google performed for the nascent WWW, which was to add the easy-access layer on top of it all.
Full disclosure: I used to work at Apple, I greatly admire them, and I bear no ill will toward them at all. But I am a big proponent of the open internet, and I believe that the arc of history will bend back toward it eventually.
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> I think the article misses one of the fundamental reasons that mobile is a closed environment: fear. It seems we treat things we can put in our pocket as more personal and much different than the twilight zone we expect out of computers. Mobile is closed because Apple is closed, were wildly successful when they entered the market, and everyone else followed suit. There success wasn't due to the closed nature, but a…
Mobile is closed because the network providers are terrified of letting devices that they cannot control on their network.
The most interesting thing about these recent trends is human nature. I remember back in year 2000/2001 how everybody was talking about freedom, open-source and the open nature of the Internet. I remember how the closed garden that Microsoft tried to create was frowned upon. Small companies that were picking the Internet as a delivery platform and using open-source/multi-platform technologies were on the forefront of…
I never understand this argument, will watching iTunes U and reading Instapaper make me dumber because it's "consumption"? Are today's iPhone users not "producing" when posting pictures to Facebook just like we were, uploading pictures to GeoCities a decade ago?
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I'm having similar concerns, and I think both your post and the parent post are indicative of a trend that, in hindsight, will have begun just around 2011/12. And as someone who remembers (and was part of) the first phase of migration to Apple/OS X, around 2001/02, it seems to me that it had less momentum and was harder to envision than the migration from Apple that may be in its infancy now. (Note: "migration from"…
> indicative of a trend that, in hindsight, will have begun just around 2011/12 I think the very beginnings of it were earlier. The moment Apple jumped the shark was when they banned apps not originally written in C/ObjC from the app store. In that moment they made it virtually impossible to be a geek with any credibility and not be at least a little embarrassed to be an Apple fan. They reversed their decision but it…
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Mobile is closed because the network providers are terrified of letting devices that they cannot control on their network.
There are more than one layer of closed, and you're right, that layer has always been closed, but from the software side it's a new phenomenon. Pocket PCs and Palms did not share the modern security model. Apple gave us that.
Apple didn't give up that. Apple followed the non-PDA path.
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There are more than one layer of closed, and you're right, that layer has always been closed, but from the software side it's a new phenomenon. Pocket PCs and Palms did not share the modern security model. Apple gave us that.
If the phone OS originated on a PDA, it wasn't locked on the phone version, but for all the other phones, it was a serious PITA to get software out there. Remember BREW and the costs to deploy / get approved (that was the easy one). Apple didn't give up that. Apple followed the non-PDA path.
Remember that there are two possible outcomes, one where the internet successfully manages to cause a swing to the edge of freedom, and another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on…
This is the most poignant insight in the article. For some decades now, it has been accepted--with minimal opposition--that we are beholden to some party (the state) for the right to travel. Then it is not far-fetched to imagine that in some decades, the right to communicate may be popularly regarded as a mere "privilege" which is granted by the generosity of the state. We accept random searches at airports, centralized driver licensing, red light cameras, etc. The legislature already flirts with the digital equivalents of those concepts.
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Android isn't really Linux Huh? It's Linux. It's just not GNU/Linux.
Yeah. I think that's what I meant to say. I'm still a bit hazy on all the components of the Android platform but AFAIK, the Linux kernel is only the most basic part of the whole thing with the VM and associated parts a larger percentage of the whole package.