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Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

zachholman.com

61–70 of 133 posts

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#61

' “Open” isn’t just a buzz word. People like the word “open”. Marketers love it. ' A very valid point, everyone these days in jumping on the open bandwagon. This problem isn't limited to just Apple unfortunately - several companies have been guilty of twisting open to suit their needs (HTC not releasing some modified Android code which was under GPL a while ago, and Google not releasing the Honeycomb source come to m…

It was an especially 'we are more open-ish' WWDC from a PR stand point. Former Apple evangelist Matt Drance wrote [1]:

The introduction of Bing as a search provider for Safari on iPhone had been rumored for some time. Naturally, everyone saw this development as an attack on Google. But the presentation itself sent just as much of a message. Jobs used the word “choice” six times in less than twenty seconds during the Bing announcement. While Apple’s addition of Bing was a shot at Google’s core business, the announcement was a shot at its melodramatic PR.

The announcement that FaceTime would be an open standard was another surprise. Would Apple have done this without the pressure Google and Adobe have been applying? Maybe. But we certainly wouldn’t have seen a slide with a giant “OPEN” on it.

[1] http://www.appleoutsider.com/2010/06/15/wwdc10/

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#62
post #28

I might care more if I'd ever actually observed someone using FaceTime. I have 3 MacBooks, an iPad, an iPhone 4, my coworkers and girlfriend and friends have FaceTime compatible devices too, but I've never seen anyone use it. Maybe they don't open it because it is a dead product.

My cell reception at home and work is flaky at best (thanks, AT&T!), so when I call my parents (both of whom also have iPhones), I'll usually do it over Facetime, which uses the much stabler WiFi.

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#63

I think Facetime is already open. You can use it on your Mac, on your iPhone, on your iPad. Looks like this is open to Steve Jobs, open to all your iOS devices. Why would you need to have another kind of device anyway?

Is this fucking Scientology, where we replace the meaning of words with their opposites?! The fact that Apple is the only provider of FaceTime software and it's only available on Mac and iOS means it's proprietary. Jobs said they're going make it an open standard. They didn't. There's no third party client, there's no FaceTime for Windows or Android.

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#64
post #38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of them inter-operate. So, when you have a friend on Tango, a friend on Qik, and a friend on Skype, you have to install Tango, Qik and Skype. We don't have a single protocol for everyone to standardize on, and we don't even have enough access to the various protocols to build a Trillian-like client that supports everything.

That makes sense, but opening up Facetime doesn't necessarily solve that problem. It has to be open and all these video chat vendors have to decide to embrace it, possibly abandoning years of investment in their own protocol. In general, I prefer open protocols and standards. I'm just not sure opening Facetime meets any pressing demands of consumers. I suspect this is a matter of not wanting to allocate resources to…

Obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#65
There are plenty of (insert absolutely any apple product here)-killers that are loudly touted by the manufacturer, and any apple-hater that we have never heard of since. Do we whinge that there hasn't been more proof that the iphone/etc are best? Silence isn't incriminating, it's silence.

How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream?

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#66
My understanding of the situation has been that most of the FaceTime technology is indeed in the open just because they mostly used already existing technology. What is not in the open is the cryptographic key that is used to sign all the FaceTime client keys. So technically you could create a FaceTime compatible client by following open specifications and filling the gaps by reverse engineering, but Apple devices wouldn't want to talk to it without Steve's cryptographic signature.

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#67
post #22

My wife: "Will you take the trash out?" Me: "Yeah, for sure. I'll take it out tonight." Tonight rolls by and the next day she tells me "You didn't take out the trash. You lied." Did I lie? Or did I have honest intentions of taking out the trash with circumstances getting in the way? Maybe I just forgot? I don't presume to know Jobs' intentions but without a history of lying during presentations I'm going to assume hi…

I view it more as a broken promise than a lie. I do, however, think that both are, morally speaking, on a similar level. Lying is worse but a broken promise isn’t all that much better.

Where does linkbaiting rate on this scale?

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#68

My wife: "Will you take the trash out?" Me: "Yeah, for sure. I'll take it out tonight." Tonight rolls by and the next day she tells me "You didn't take out the trash. You lied." Did I lie? Or did I have honest intentions of taking out the trash with circumstances getting in the way? Maybe I just forgot? I don't presume to know Jobs' intentions but without a history of lying during presentations I'm going to assume hi…

Yup, because if Steve Jobs wants something but the team pushes back, he'll abandon the idea.

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#69

My wife: "Will you take the trash out?" Me: "Yeah, for sure. I'll take it out tonight." Tonight rolls by and the next day she tells me "You didn't take out the trash. You lied." Did I lie? Or did I have honest intentions of taking out the trash with circumstances getting in the way? Maybe I just forgot? I don't presume to know Jobs' intentions but without a history of lying during presentations I'm going to assume hi…

I don't think the trash is a good analogy. I think the proper analogy is something like:

Me: I'm going to start working on my PhD tomorrow.

My wife, tomorrow: Did you finish your PhD yet?

Me: Lol wut?

Re: Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You

#70

Didn't Apple do something similar when they forked KHTML? I think it took them a few years to make it completely open source after they said they would.

They still take up to a year to release the changes they made to khtml for a given iOS release.
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