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The Pendulum Swings, Again

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#61

Post by nacker »

kris_lander wrote: post #32

Whilst the article mentions how countries like China restrict access to communication networks we should be under no illusions that nearly all major communication networks are ultimately still under the control of central government wherever you live. For the pendulum to permanently swing in favour of "freedom and democracy" we need a genuinely open network. Without an open network open devices, operating systems, so…

I agree 100%! This is the main point that the article misses.

Open hardware and open software are completely useless if the networks are not open. The open internet as we know it would never have happened unless it had been provided by thousands of tiny ISPs. The most worrying pendulum swing of all is the consolidation of all traffic into a few giants like Comcast per country.

Mesh networking is the next frontier for openness.

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#62

Post by rolux »

Nrsolis wrote: post #44
bad_user wrote: post #22

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…

Wow. This captures my feelings almost to a "T". I have an iPhone4 (replacing a 3GS), an iPad3 (replacing an original iPad), and a Macbook Air (replacing a MacBookPro15) and I'm starting to get very nervous about AAPL. I'm concerned that they are loving towards locking down OS X in a similar fashion to iOS. I wasn't particularly fond of the walled-garden but it was such an improvement that I put up with it. No other p…

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" doesn't imply losing market share, or even a lower growth rate. It rather means that a specific, tiny but crucial slice of mind share may have begun to erode.)

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#63

Post by rolux »

adestefan wrote: post #58
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In addition to that, mobile is closed because hardware manufacturers, software companies and network providers all seem to agree that the combination of mandated personalization and permanent tracking is a potential gold mine.

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#64

Post by protomyth »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #56
protomyth wrote: post #41

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. I am sure, at some point, a program uploaded the Outlook address book of some Fortune 500 sales manager to the internet without telling him/her. Any problem or security breach in the…

Then build a modern day Atari 800 / C64. Isn't that what Raspberry Pi is? A very simple, understandable, eminently hackable computer? That does make me wonder: if I could get 35-40 of them for my kids' high school, would they put them to use? Or would three be as valuable as 40, since only the kids who are like I was would care?

No, Raspberry Pi is a board. You don't hand people a motherboard and expect them to learn to program.

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#65

Post by Nrsolis »

rolux wrote: post #62
Nrsolis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. This captures my feelings almost to a "T". I have an iPhone4 (replacing a 3GS), an iPad3 (replacing an original iPad), and a Macbook Air (replacing a MacBookPro15) and I'm starting to get very nervous about AAPL. I'm concerned that they are loving towards locking down OS X in a similar fashion to iOS. I wasn't particularly fond of the walled-garden but it was such an improvement that I put up with it. No other p…

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"…

If someone out there made a decent laptop with upgradable components and a retina-quality display, I'd probably switch in a moment.

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#66

Post by iamwil »

jonnathanson wrote: post #40

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 the top of the stack, like applications. Design by committee is no design at all.

If Apple's done anything right, it's brought design to the forefront of a lot of people's thought as a driving force for innovation (and to a lesser extent, Ruby, with its focus on programmer happiness, which is language design)

But even then, most open source software focuses on getting it to work first, and figures that someone else will come along to help later. The most usable projects are the ones that decide from the beginning to focus on usability.

In addition, some people probably feel, "Hey, I'm giving this away for free already, and you're complaining about usability? You go fix it."

And are there open source designs? Twitter bootstrap is the only one I'm aware of. Dribbble is the closest, but there, they're not sharing design, in the sense of "hey you can use this too", but in the sense of "I'll show off to 'inspire' you"

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#67

Post by zmmmmm »

rolux wrote: post #62
Nrsolis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. This captures my feelings almost to a "T". I have an iPhone4 (replacing a 3GS), an iPad3 (replacing an original iPad), and a Macbook Air (replacing a MacBookPro15) and I'm starting to get very nervous about AAPL. I'm concerned that they are loving towards locking down OS X in a similar fashion to iOS. I wasn't particularly fond of the walled-garden but it was such an improvement that I put up with it. No other p…

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 was too late - geeks flooded into Android and the Android market increased its app count by about 400% in the ensuing months. Ever since then I've noticed that my geek friends who carry iPhones have been defensive about it - they say things to rationalize why they aren't carrying a real geek phone.

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#68

Post by drumdance »

bad_user wrote: post #22

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…

All good points. Another thing that amazes me is how Facebook has quietly reinvented the AOL keyword and Microsoft Passport. Many, many web sites essentially outsource their login and account creation to Facebook. And advertisers often mention their Facebook url instead of their web site.

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#69

Post by [deleted] »

protomyth wrote: post #41

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. I am sure, at some point, a program uploaded the Outlook address book of some Fortune 500 sales manager to the internet without telling him/her. Any problem or security breach in the…

[deleted]

Re: The Pendulum Swings, Again

#70

Post by jl6 »

protomyth wrote: post #41

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. I am sure, at some point, a program uploaded the Outlook address book of some Fortune 500 sales manager to the internet without telling him/her. Any problem or security breach in the…

Isn't the modern replacement the web browser? A browser these days can do anything a C64 could do, in a safe, easy to debug environment, that comes preinstalled on every PC.
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