James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he “couldn’t imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft’s, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple’s vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. “Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” says Toni Sacconaghi. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult."
According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. “But in the end, it didn’t create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.” Can Apple continue to live by Jobs’s disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. “The question investors have is, what’s the next iPhone? There’s no obvious answer. It’s almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing.”
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 30 2015, @05:15PM
You need to already have an iPhone to use your iWatch?
No fucking thanks. Suck it, Crapple.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday January 31 2015, @01:53AM
This comment is NOT off-topic. If this is actually true (not worth my time to look into that, frankly), then it's totally relevant in the context of Apple's success at "creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories".
On-topic this thread/off-topic this article -- Where are my recently promised mod points? I'd correct this if I could.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 3, Informative) by TheRaven on Saturday January 31 2015, @10:38AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:16PM
There are probably technical reasons for releasing the Mac-only version first. But I'm sure the company also takes into account the element of unattainability (where only a privileged minority can have something) that can heighten desire.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @02:16AM
I've got no problem with smartwatches requiring a smartphone to work, or even doing Dick Tracy style phonecalls. But iOS only is lame.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Kymation on Friday January 30 2015, @05:16PM
A computer on every desk was the first step. A computer in every pocket was the second. What's next? Figure that out, build it, and you can surpass both Microsoft and Apple.
There will always be a next step. My bet is that neither Microsoft nor Apple will be selling it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Friday January 30 2015, @05:17PM
A computer in every prefrontal cortex.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday January 30 2015, @06:03PM
I suspect "A computer on every face" may come first - if we can ever get augmented reality/wearable computer to the point where it isn't incredibly stupid looking or incredibly uncomfortable (or both). And the interface needs work; the thing where you have to touch Google Glass to send input to it is just not workable - it should have included an interface on a watch or a ring.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 30 2015, @06:15PM
That's called your brain....
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday January 30 2015, @07:47PM
Modifying its perception of the world is a really old and regulated business with lots of entrenched incumbents.
Modifying it in a seamless controlled manner, on the other hand, would make someone very very rich...
(Score: 3) by Immerman on Friday January 30 2015, @07:54PM
Nah, brains are squishy and imprecise, and won't run multiplayer GTA XXI in full sensory immersion mode.
Unless miniaturization and thermal envelopes improve dramatically though, I suspect that only the neural interface would actually be embedded in the brain, along with possibly a very minimal CPU to handle the interface and provide very basic functionality - *maybe* modern smartphone class. Anything more processing intensive would likely require a secondary computer that relegates the cranial implant to a glorified I/O device. Either external, or possibly embedded in the torso where spatial and thermal tolerances are much less constraining.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday January 31 2015, @07:06AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday January 31 2015, @07:08AM
I've heard of it, but I'm waiting to play until they implement cheat codes and quick-save functionality.
(Score: 3, Funny) by FatPhil on Saturday January 31 2015, @07:40AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Saturday January 31 2015, @05:11PM
Maybe, but it's getting really good press - just look at how the subscription numbers have been exploding over the last few centuries. In fact I've heard rumors that most of the early players are actually still playing, they've just had to start new characters because permadeath is enabled on all the servers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday February 01 2015, @11:08AM
[* And here I use the term in the unusual mathematical sense, which means "exponentially", rather than the derphead sense of "it's big, innit"]
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday February 01 2015, @06:43PM
Well, it was for a while there - seems to be starting to plateau now. Standard sigmoid curve behavior, extremely common in systems when some change temporarily destabilizes the equilibrium state.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday January 30 2015, @08:23PM
You're going to have BRAIN SURGERY to get on the internet? Seriously??
I can see implants to cure medical problems, but brain surgery for no pressing need is simply insane.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ikanreed on Friday January 30 2015, @09:37PM
Nah, as long as I'm bullshitting about future tech, the computer will be a self assembling set of nanomachines that are injected into the bloodstream and self-assemble around existing brain structure.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 31 2015, @06:20PM
Well, in the FAR future [mcgrewbooks.com] maybe. Everything will be made out of nobots.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday January 30 2015, @10:22PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday January 31 2015, @06:25PM
First, are you nearsighted and also have middle aged farsightedness and maybe astigmatism, too? If so, you can have better than 20/20 vision at all distances! The catch is, it costs $15,000 and they stick needles in your eyes (I have one of the implanted CrystaLenses in my left eye). Still want a brain implant? I don't.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @09:51PM
"Cyber" [wiktionary.org] has already been taken and used for a more general meme.
Has some entity trademarked "Steve Austin"? [wiktionary.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @05:24PM
Both Apple and Microsoft can and will have ebbs and flows in product development, profitability, market cap, etc. Apple being double the market cap of Microsoft today is due to both companies' actions. Apple became entrenched in the consumer electronics business long before Microsoft, and Microsoft's Vista & 8 releases set it back in both the enterprise space and the home markets. The current positions of each company in their respective markets are not permanent.
Android device manufacturers went right past Apple in the phone markets, though Apple's recent quarter brought them back into prominence. Another quarter or two and Apple may lose ground again. Microsoft needs to figure out where they plan to reestablish themselves in the markets that they are not dominant and try to move forward from there. It's not easy, but if we're looking back in another 20 years nothing will look as it does today.
(Score: 1) by TheRealMike on Friday January 30 2015, @06:52PM
Yep, I think we have a winner.
The iPhone did not do so well because Steve Jobs is some kind of unknowable divine presence, it did well because at the time Apple launched it their competition was virtually non-existent. Their competition was so non-existent, in fact, that Google had already got exasperated with the shitty state of the smartphone market and decided to literally give away the R&D needed to make it not suck. That's how terrible it was. The only devices you could credibly call smartphones were all running operating systems designed for a prior generation of hardware that was rapidly becoming obsolete, and were made by companies that were sitting on their asses doing nothing.
Apple had a fresh start and an unusual focus on animations, graphics and general UI polish over functionality. At the time the industry believed features sold phones and as they were expensive and thus bought mostly by business, that wasn't a totally untrue belief. The features vs UI bias of early Android vs iPhone models makes this clear.
But, Android caught up in the UI polish department faster than Apple caught up in the features department and the iPhone has been losing market share since, especially in more price sensitive markets.
To recreate the success of the iPhone, Apple would need to find a huge consumer electronics market where the competition is asleep at the wheel. It could have been watches. A few years ago I would have said smart TVs because they all seemed to suck, but Samsung and Android have started producing really slick units now that have completely eliminated any UI edge Apple might have had. Android Wear watches are likewise simple and slick. Without a competitive advantage in UI, Apple doesn't have much left to give. There's nothing else especially compelling about their kit.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @07:44PM
There's nothing else especially compelling about their kit
Which is why you are starting to see them to lock in vendors. Not so they can use the stuff the vendor makes but just so someone ELSE does not buy the item. Atari did the same thing in the mid 80s. They would tie up hundreds of chip companies making them all think they are going to get into the next atari unit and sell millions. When the reality was they were being used so that Atari could lock out competitors. MS used to play this same game but with software companies.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by quacking duck on Friday January 30 2015, @08:02PM
It should be noted that Apple has had 3 new runaway hits in the space of a decade, not just the iPhone. Apple clobbered the mp3 player market with the iPod, the smartphone with iPhone, and then the tablet market with the iPad. In each case there were many competitors before and after that were better, sometimes much better, on the spec sheet, but fell short on usability in critical consumer-centric areas. For example the so-called "first all-touchscreen phone" that beat the iPhone by 3-4 weeks in announcement and shipment by a few months, had a UI so bad (T9 keypad, scrollbars to move up/down a page, terrible browser) that it was outdated the minute the iPhone was announced.
If you make the mistake of looking at market share and *nothing* else then yeah, Apple is falling behind. Except that's totally expected, since they don't play in the low-margin space, and that's where the majority of Android market share comes from. Their total annual sales have increased each year since the iPhone was introduced, even if there's some levelling off the last 2 years when larger-screened Androids were more popular. And really that's all a company should care about, not the childish Wall Street fantasies where companies must magically sustain exponential growth or be destroyed.
I don't know that the Apple Watch or whatever else Apple introduces will be a runaway hit. But then I (and many Apple supporters in 2010, actually) didn't think the iPad would be that big a deal either.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Friday January 30 2015, @05:29PM
IBM had a nifty "Metacard" concept ages ago, where one carried around a small computer core and plugged it into various devices so as to make use of the persistent storage and apps in it.
The Oqo folks tried something similar.
While cloud computing ostensibly eliminates the need for this sort of thing, I'd still like to see:
- a laptop which would have a removable trackpad section which could be removed and replaced w/ an iPhone/iPod touch --- when on did this the screen on the small device could then be used as an adjunct to the main display --- similarly the device would be matched up w/ an account and would automatically back up the device to the laptop and the matching user's accounts onto the device
- a desktop keyboard/dock w/ similar functionality
They should be more concerned about their MacBook Air and iPad business --- it's tough not having a way to directly address a significant number of your competitors having a feature (active digitizer/stylus) which your machines don't have.
Still trying to justify buying a ModBook.
(Score: 2) by emg on Friday January 30 2015, @05:31PM
Bill Gates was pushing tablet PCs in 2001.
His problem was that he was convinced that people wanted to run XP on them, whereas Apple went out and built a new OS that was designed for a small touchscreen rather than a desktop with keyboard and mouse. Ballmer's problem was that he apparently decided that, since XP tablets didn't sell, that clearly meant he had to turn desktop Windows into a tablet interface.
The desperate desire to have the same OS running everywhere, even when it makes no sense at all, is what's screwed Microsoft since 2001. OK, maybe their early phone OS was more sensible, but I've never seen a Windows phone, so I can't be sure.
(Score: 2) by cmn32480 on Friday January 30 2015, @05:49PM
I have one of the 7 people who bought one working in my office. His chief complaint is that a lot of the apps he had on Android aren't available. I haven't had time to survey the remaining 6 people who bought a Windows phone world wide.
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @06:01PM
Bill Gates was pushing tablet PCs in 2001.
There were several problems with the early tablets that MS never fixed.
1) single touch screens. The many touch screens we have now are pretty fng cool. They had them then but they were wildly expensive. Think 2-3k for a 'huge' 8-9 inch screen.
2) input control was clunky because of one touch and needed a stylus to work properly
3) they were basically laptops. That cost a premium. The touch screen easily added 300-500 BOM. Never mind the middle man markup.
4) Laptops of the time were THICK and clunky. Think 3-4cm. SoC was just a dream at the time.
5) ARM was no where able to run a decent OS of the time. It was basically an embedded controller chip. That left x86 or powerpc. Those things roasted thru batteries. Adding thickness and weight.
So at the time in 2001 it was pure demo tech. A few people bought them but that was mostly for people to show off how cool they were.
Very spot on about Ballmer.
The desperate desire to have the same OS running everywhere
iOS is MacOSX with a different gui. WinCE never made sense it should have been NT with a different GUI...
The other problem that MS had was the carriers themselves. They wanted to charge 15-20 dollars per megabyte. It is why verizon did not get the apple phone first. AT&T who had the arguably worse network at the time was willing to make a deal with the devil to get that phone. They created 'unlimited data'. It took VZW another 3 years to even consider not charging 15-20 dollars per megabyte. The WinCE phones were decent enough. But cost was way out of wack with them. You could get one on contract for 300-400 dollars then get raped on data every month. That and they would randomly reset to default and activesync sucked hard.
(Score: 1) by WillAdams on Friday January 30 2015, @08:14PM
Apple didn't build a new OS, they bought NeXT and got NeXT/OPENstep.
The big realization which Apple had was that the technological support wasn't good enough for tablet computers for the general public to accept --- they looked around for a device which they could build and chose to do the iPhone (again, using OPENSTEP as the basis for the OS) --- then, once battery and other technologies were good enough, they made the iPad.
Microsoft's problem was a continuation of Go Corporation's --- they assumed that people would love the machines enough to put up w/ the limitations of battery life and would be willing to tether themselves at need to a wall outlet.
William
(who has finally replaced his Newton --- w/ an Asus Vivotab Note 8 running Windows 8.1)
(Score: 2) by emg on Friday January 30 2015, @09:15PM
And what does the iPad/iPhone interface have to do with NeXT?
Some of us have actually used both NeXT machines and iPads.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday January 30 2015, @10:16PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Friday January 30 2015, @10:27PM
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday January 31 2015, @04:13AM
I'm on a Win phone as I type, and it doesn't have those issues.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by khedoros on Monday February 02 2015, @11:13PM
The loose sim card seems to be a fairly common issue with the HTC Windows Phone 8x. The workaround that I used was suggested in a web forum full of people experiencing the same issue. While the basic issue of losing connection with the SIM card is a hardware-specific problem, Windows randomly rebooting due to it is a software issue.
Aside from that, lack of apps is a very YMMV situation. My Android devices tend to end up with around 100 apps installed because I treat them like pocket computers as much as I treat them as phones. Most of my software either doesn't exist in any form in WinPhone 8, or doesn't exist in a feature-equivalent form.
I'm glad that you aren't having issues, but what I've described is representative of the problems my wife has had, and they're all reasons that I'm not interested in considering the OS for any of my own devices (in particular, the lack of apps).
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday January 31 2015, @10:42AM
whereas Apple went out and built a new OS that was designed for a small touchscreen rather than a desktop
No they didn't. What they did was write a new UI library that was designed for these devices and not support the desktop one on the small devices. They also took the opportunity to throw away some legacy cruft from AppKit when designing UIKit (some design choices in AppKit only make sense on devices with 4-8MB of RAM and no GPU). You can share almost all of the code between an OS X and iOS app, you just have to redo the UI. And since you're forced to redo the UI, you end up creating something that works well on a touchscreen, rather than tweaking a desktop UI to mostly work.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 31 2015, @09:42PM
i'm typically a m$ basher, but when i heard (third-hand admittedly) about some of the features of windows 10 it sounded promising.
an operating system that can switch from being a tablet when its traveling and desktop mode when its got a screen and keyboard etc plugged in sounds pretty neat
dunno how it will affect the developers being strung along for the ride though. i think microsoft has kinda fucked up their relationship with a lot of devs when they tried to force metro down everyone's throats
debian++
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Friday January 30 2015, @05:35PM
The combination of a good product and loads of free advertising from the media who in general have been big Apple fans (writing, audio workstations, video editing).
(Score: 2, Troll) by quacking duck on Friday January 30 2015, @08:13PM
Emphasis on "good product" (overall).
Brand advertising is like a cold-call résumé, trying them in-store is the interview, buying from them is hiring them on a term contract.
You don't renew the contract if they stumble too much or aren't good enough at their job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @05:44PM
Jobs' closed system where you get a piece of all the pies is what 'won'.
Gates would have been strung up in the 2000's by the anti-trust squad if
he would have tried what Apple did. And now MSFT is scrambling to try to
get into that space.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Daiv on Friday January 30 2015, @09:47PM
One tried it from a position of absolute dominance. The other had people begging to allow them to use their walled garden. Perspective is subjective when you choose which variables to ignore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @06:55PM
Walter Isaacson
"in the end, it didn’t create products of ethereal beauty."
he's totally sucked into the maw of the Reality Distortion Field
At least SOMEONE has escaped
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew6fv9UUlQ8 [youtube.com]
The look of horror and disbelief from Conan is what I find disturbing
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Friday January 30 2015, @08:40PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @11:14PM
Microsoft up until recently didn't care about that demographic.