"Listen to so-and-so interview Steve Wozniak" is hardly what I'd call interesting reading, and I do not want to listen to a bunch of people say "Umm" for an hour and a half just to get five minutes worth of information. It's nothing to do with ADD even — it's just that I have only 16 waking hours in my day, and even fewer free, so that isn't a good use of them. Putting information in text format adds value.
That original post didn't really emphasize the interesting part, so I'd argue that the secondary blog posts that picked up this story are, in this case, actually more useful to the average reader. Still, it probably would've been better to link to WPCentral (http://www.wpcentral.com/co-founder-apple-steve-wozniak-choo...) which first found out about the interview and dug up the quotes.
I wouldn't say it's blogspam, but linking the original source is still preferred. (Although here it seems to have gone down!)
(Blogspam originally implied a blog post that copy-pastes the entire original article, possibly adding one or two sentences of "commentary". This article clearly has more meat than that -- it's at least a good faith effort to provide some context.)
In a world of short attention spans, I don't want to listen to a podcast, and I doubt the podcast would have skyrocketed up the HN page.
Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...
In a world of short attention spans I particularly want to listen to a podcast of the "Woz" because this is not the normal corporate gibberish that strongly contributed to the "short attention span".
The occasions they let the Woz out are rare enough.
Or as they say - listen and learn ;-)
(and thanks for all the links)
In a world of short attention spans, listening to Woz talk while I dick around on the Internet is actually pretty appealing to my ritalin-deprived self.
In a world of short attentions spans oh look an eagle!
This whole talk about low attention spans, is it backed by any real research? I'd have thought folks on Hacker News would have longer attention spans. After all, most are developers who need to get into the zone when coding, and often read copious amounts of documentation. This sort of thing requires concentration!
So what you're saying (as heard from someone looking to get into the software developer field sometime soon), is that as a developer you still do a lot of documentation reading and you dont just have it all stored upstairs?
Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source.
This may be a good lesson for writers to learn (imagine how a pageview-whore would summarize your article, then summarize it yourself), but in the meantime we shouldn't encourage it IMO.
Here's why Windows possibly has a shot at regaining a meaningful presence in the mobile space.
1) the untapped market potential is still huge (I myself don't own an Android or an iPhone - although I'll be buying an Android phone soon)
2) The customers gained by Android and iOS are not as loyal or as committed to each platform as the early adopters of the home PC were. When you bought your first PC, you usually spent a lot of money on it, invested in software...etc. By contrast, most smartphone buyers just need a phone with an internet connection, decent browser and a Facebook app. Other apps and games are just a short-term bonus that quickly become a bore. Also phones are cheap or free with a contract (in North America at least) so switching after your 2-3 year prison sentence with one of the carriers is not a huge leap of faith.
Having said all this I personally hope Apple and Microsoft lose badly and Android wins. Purely based on principle and to a lesser degree my own mild case of fanboyism.
Don't forget all the music and movies that you've payed for in one market or another that you might not be able to transfer easily to your new device. Building a complete consumption ecosystem was very smart of Apple and it's why Amazon has grabbed the lion's share of Android tablets with a pretty lackluster debut.
Yeah most music is DRM-free these days but as far as most users know, their iPhone knows how to talk to iTunes and their other phone doesn't, end of story.
>The customers gained by Android and iOS are not as loyal or as committed
I doubt Windows Phone users are any more loyal. I'm a current Windows user and I intend to go back to Android. The app market is weak and multi-tasking doesn't work particularly well. I do love the Zune software though.
I'm also a Windows Phone user and the Zune software on the phone is 2nd to none. However, I do not subscribe to Zune for the simple reason that my desktop of choice is Linux and OSX and Microsoft refuses to make a way for me to be able to listen to my music on those platforms (without running a virtual). How hard is it to allow me web access to their music collection!
What I hope is that another mobile OS eat Android on its left: even more open, even less linked to big corps. This OS would be to Android what Linux is to Unix.
The problem isn't really the OS. It would be hard to find something significantly more open than stock Android sans the Google integration. The problem is that the OEMs (largely at the behest of AT&T et al) sell most of the devices with locked bootloaders.
The tablet market has the potential to be the thin end of the wedge toward fixing that though. Suppose several of the existing PC makers like Dell get into the tablet market and start offering WiFi-only devices available with stock Android and unlocked boot loaders. I have to assume that those companies would be happy to see some real competition for Microsoft for once.
The trouble is going to be that Microsoft may be back to its old tricks with regard to not allowing PC OEMs to preinstall "Linux" on their hardware. We've already heard ruminations about Win8-on-ARM requiring a locked boot loader. It remains to be seen whether the PC makers will be willing to throw their users under the bus in order to appease Microsoft.
The open nature of Android, specifically being open source can be doubted at times. There is the whole incident with Honeycomb source code, and how it wasn't released until the Ice Cream Sandwich source code was released. Even worse is that this incident was in direct contradiction to comments from one of the android leads https://twitter.com/#!/Arubin/status/27808662429. I do have large respect for how open Android is though, and how the GPL on the Linux kernel really shows how useful it is.
In regard to secure boot and Windows 8, the restrictions are a part of the Windows 8 certification system. Personally I don't think many manufacturers will want to skip windows certification, even if they have to implement the restrictions. The more I think about it, the more I see this could bring up another anti-trust case. It would probably also bring the 'do you own your device' issue to the forefront.
3) WP8 and Windows 8 are converging into a single entity. Before long you'll be able to run a full desktop on your phone, all you need is a dock to connect it to a mouse/keyboard/monitor. This is a nice feature for a lot of people who just use their desktop PCs for typing out letters and browsing the internet.
If high-end smartphones are able to replace desktop PCs for light/casual users, Microsoft can take advantage of their desktop dominance. Apple of course could offer an OSX desktop, but Android would have to rely on gnome or kde, and although both of these are fine products, they haven't exactly proven themselves commercially.
Yes absolutely. Both Windows and OSX/iTunes have existing desktop/tv mediacenter lock-in they can take advantage of to secure (imprison) new customers. Android doesn't have such a firm grip on its users. The strongest lock-in Google has is their online services like Gmail, Docs etc and even there it's really easy to export everything and use it on a different platform (which ironically is why i am a Google fanboy). I don't know whether Chrome OS/GoogleTV will become a viable platform to allow Android users to easily extend their mobile computing onto the desktop and tv or maybe another Linux distro will steal that opportunity (I recently saw Canonical demontrate some pretty seamless transitioning between Android and Ubuntu). Both Microsoft and Apple are moving towards the cloud with many of their services so maybe that's where the war will be fought, but I don't know if I see the whole app ecosystems moving along with them.
On the other hand. Both of these points have been true for the past one year. It has been one whole year since WP launched. It's not like it's a brand new comer bringing something the market has never seen anymore.
And during this past year, both microsoft and nokia's market share actually decreased [1]. That's with both the points you mentioned, over one year.
Don't you agree that's enough empirical evidence that those 2 points, alone, are not enough?
I have played around a bit with a Lumia some weeks ago (it was available earlier in Europe), and I have to say I was quite disappointed. Microsoft waited too long with screen resolution upgrades, and its low resolution makes it feel like an Android from 2 years ago. That makes it hard to trump modern Androids like the Galaxy Nexus UI-beauty-wise.
The navigation paradigma Microsoft uses is not for me, I prefer Apple's more natural approach. Also, most apps in the store look the same (establishing context by design, anyone?) because there are only so many possibilities of laying out monochrome elements (mostly HUGE text) on a black or photo background. But I'm clearly not part of the intended audience, Woz demonstrates that there are people who like that.
The navigation paradigma Microsoft uses is not for me, I prefer Apple's more natural approach.
I'm fascinated to know what is "natural" about Apple's approach. I think it is "natural" because you are used to it. To me, it feels overly (/incredibly) app-centric. Both Android and Windows Phone (to differing degrees) feel far more task based: "You have a photo. What would you like to do with it?", as opposed to "You opened Instagram? I assume you want to do stuff with photos".
By example, when I look up a contact in my address book in Windows Phone, it allows me to look up my history with that person. Emails, texts, IMs, tweets, everything- all in one place, because who thinks "Dave tweeted that at me" over "Dave sent that to me"? By contrast, iOS keeps every interaction siloed in-app.
Apple's most "natural" interactions result in making the address book look like a leather bound book.
"By example, when I look up a contact in my address book in Windows Phone, it allows me to look up my history with that person. Emails, texts, IMs, tweets, everything- all in one place, because who thinks "Dave tweeted that at me" over "Dave sent that to me"? By contrast, iOS keeps every interaction siloed in-app."
that's a very good point. And that sounds like a FANTASTIC feature I'd love to have on my phone. your right, if the windows phone is more "people centric", as opposed to "app centric" And now that you mention it, I'd love to try out the windows phone, because it really sounds like they have it together. I think Android could go this way too, there's a lot they can do. But as fass as buggieness, and overall satisfaction, I've had a rather disappointing time with android (only smartphone I've owed.)
It isn't just limited to being 'people centric'. It's more content(? there may be a better word) centric. When you're looking at a photo, do you want to share it? go to one of your photo apps? adjust it? e-mail it to somebody?
I was really surprised when I got my iPad that I couldn't open a photo and just upload it to facebook or send it to somebody in an e-mail. I had to go find an app to do that.
And it's funny how BlackBerry has been doing this for several years now, but people seemed to have just glossed over it. RIM has had NUMEROUS missteps over the last few years, but they do have some good ideas in there. Let's hope they shine this week with BB10.
Oh, and let me get the obligatory, "BlackBerry? They still exist?" out of the way.
Hmm, you bring up some good points. Blackberries did have a lot of crazy good things about them. And I might even consider looking at a BB or WP for my next phone (just to be different, a bit of a hipster decision I suppose, but I'm disappointed with android, and I don't know if I want to support Apples frivolous patent trolling.)
iOS' UI tries to emulate things we already know (through metaphors & skeumorphism). What I meant by iOS being "more natural" is exactly this - while Apple emphasizes on reminding users of things they already know, Microsoft has chosen to kill many such analogies by purpose. The Zune/Phone 7 interface tries to get the max out of the fact that it's a digital environment, where you do not need beveled buttons or stitched leather ribbons. While I think I understand why MS is doing this - increased focus on presented data, less distractions for the eye, less energy usage on AMOLED displays - I don't think I particularly like its plainness, emotionally. And I believe that many people feel the same, mabye unconsciously.
The other thing is that, on iOS, there is a context (app) for everything, with a dedicated meaning to every screen. I agree that Microsoft's approach to navigation is not bad, and it surely fares better in some aspects. But dedicated context is often lost when apps act as a "hub". I think that this kind of information presentation leads to information overburden, the kind of which prevents people from opening an app more often than once a week.
A good majority of apps use a hierarchy of views, which is exceptionally natural since we see generations of things everywhere, including our own families. One view is parent to the next, and so on.
I want to say "Woz is the most handsome man in tech business." just to emphasize that beauty is subjective.
But I am curious, a lot of praise comes to windows mobile from iphone fans (I am not talking about Woz but many others). Would there be a lot of Apple fans really switching to Lumias or are they simply telling it just to criticize Android?
The latter, I suspect. In Apple-worshipping circles, they bought the "Android is a stolen product" bit hook, line and sinker, conveniently ignoring the fact that the iPhone's interface was just an iteration on everything else that had come before. They look at the Windows phones and say, "see? You didn't have to copy the iPhone!"
They would never use it, but it's necessary to praise it in order to validate their indignation that Android is more successful and widespread (which feeds into their sense of superiority as being among the select few who see the light).
I'm seriously not an Apple hater. I have a MBP and a 3gs. I'll probably get a 5 when it comes out. I love the industrial design of Apple's products. But a good half the people I know who use them have a near-religious attachment to them, and fully buy into the Jobsian reality distortion field. It's kind of like how, as a Canucks fan, I love my team but hate half the fans.
I think many iPhone fans see WP7 as an attempt to innovate, whereas Android seems more like an attempt to imitate (of course, Android has had many innovations as well).
Apple made the first usable and popular touchscreen smartphone, and Androids success is largely due to the fact that Google recognized this and quickly repositioned Android, and I think that's pretty evident by looking at the evolution of the Android OS. The original Android prototypes didn't look very innovative, they looked like imitations of Symbian or WM6.
The major innovation was the scrolling: none of the previous touchscreen phones had smooth, natural, physics-based scrolling on a capacitive (e.g. finger, not fingernail) touchscreen. The home screen is a prettier version of the Palm OS one, and much of the UI is similar, although it feels a lot more natural with animations and without a desktop-style menu bar.
Are better scrolling and natural animations really innovation? It's much more of a progression. Touchscreen is the same? I believe the quality of touchscreens weren't good enough before 1997.
Yes, they are. It's what changes the device from a standard computer (with an indirect interface) into direct manipulation of objects on a screen. With Palm OS-style scrollbars or desktop scroll wheels, you are manipulating an object that affects something else.
With iOS-style scrolling, there is nothing to learn. That's one of the biggest issues with Android (and, conversely, one of the advantages of Windows Phone and iOS): because Android has not been able to match the fluid scrolling and realistic physics, it breaks the illusion of physicality that the original iPhone managed to first create in 2007.
I think many iPhone fans see WP7 as an attempt to innovate, whereas Android seems more like an attempt to imitate (of course, Android has had many innovations as well).
So what? At the end of the day I care that my phone works well and in a way that makes sense to me. I don't care whether or not it's a "copy" of another user interface.
As an iPhone user, Android is "the same, but different". The Windows Phone sample I played with was actually different. Whether Android cloned iPhone or not, it feels like their design was, in many cases, "do what they do." With WP, it just seems more like they actually stepped back and asked, "What are we trying to do again?" Of course, all three end up being fairly similar, there's only so many solutions to the same problem.
IMHO, if you used Android phones 2 years ago (I have, they sucked), you'd be killing to have a Lumia. I find the overall experience stunning despite the relatively low resolution (which is still plenty usable); their attention to detail should have Apple quaking. ICS is just now catching up in terms of polish; and they still have ways to go. I'm using the Galaxy Nexus now, but I was impressed with the Lumia enough that I'm likely switching to WP full-time when Apollo phones hit
I'm also using a Galaxy Nexus beside some iOS devices, and I can't see what you are seeing - Windows Phone is plain anti-polish to me. Smooth animations, a good typeface, and exaggerated visual hierarchy are all there is to it. UI widgets developers can choose from are also very sparse - they are good for CRUD apps with low information density, but that's about it. I currently develop & design for iOS and Android, and I don't think I would want to do that for WP7. I hope WP8 has more polish, widgets-wise.
So are you impressed with the phone itself or the OS? I get the feeling that all this interest in WP7 started because people really like the phone. WP7.5 has been around for at least 6 months, and style wise its the same as it was late 2010. If Nokia didn't make a nicely designed phone, WP7 would still be as little talked about as it was before and with just as little interest. I agree with Joshua Topolsky that a lot more people would be interested in it if it had ICS on that phone.
I've developed apps for all 3 devices, and while I use the iPhone personally, I think WP7 is much better than android. Im talking about WP7 phones from a year ago too. Every time I use an android phone it is buggy and not at all responsive. When I click a button I don't like waiting for it to do something.
Windows Phone is a breath of fresh air, design wise. I'm not saying iPhone is ugly, but I've just used it for a few years so it no longer seems as shiny and nice. Windows Phone is fun to use and I really enjoy some aspects of it.
The Lumia is a good phone, but it's still not as good as my iPhone 4. The screen and camera are what really ruin it for me.
Software wise, I miss a lot of apps, and while some of the stuff windows does with merging contacts between twitter, Facebook, etc. is cool, it falls down when it isn't done perfectly (which is rare)
I will say using a Windows Phone is MUCH "nicer" than an Android phone, but it still has a ways to go feature wise.
Woz has also said in the past that he thought Android would won the mobile wars. As he's still technically an employee of Apple, I bet that their PR team really love him.
He does just seem to be a genuinely guileless person (in the original, positive sense of that word -- ie, completely honest and without trickery). I love that the guy just says what he thinks.
Indeed, he seems to love and appreciate good technology and design for what it is, and not through colored lens of being a fanboy or a hater of some company as too often is the case.
What's wrong with Nokia? As best I've been able to tell, they've always made some of the best hardware in the business (at least, in their higher end models. Not talking about the $20 specials)
Beauty is a personal preference and lots of people like it and I guess you do not. But I am not with you on the "harder to use/understand" part. It's extremely simple, intuitive and easy to pick up, I've seen non-techies pick the UI up very quickly.
maybe easy to dial and send messages, but when I try to power on the Lumia 800 the first time, when I try to charge the phone or connect it to computer, when I try to close the networks becuz my battery is low, when I try to pick up contacts, when I try to type using the default keyboard, when I see the scars on the screen...
Also they need good apps, apps in WP style. WP is good at showing infomations, but not good to me.
To be honest I've had every smartphone since the Treo 180 and the only one that actually doesn't make me want to gouge out my eyeballs due to endless problems is a Windows phone (Lumia 710).
It just works which is an utter shock these days.
(yes I've had a 4s and a number of HTCs)
It also cost literally bugger all - so much so I don't need insurance or a contract to cover the costs.
The irony of this is that, with Android 4.x and the Fragment APIs for scaling UI from tablets to handsets, Android is the only UI system that has sophisticated ways for apps to intelligently arrange their UI elements to fit all sizes of devices, and developers are, as yet, ignoring those APIs.
"Intelligently" yes, but not intuitively. There's a difference.
That being said all of Google's products cater to, and now operate consistently for, a certain mindset. Reluctantly I'll admit that it's possible for a platform to successfully operate using parameters other than intuition-based UX/UI. It just feeeels weird ;-)
Android Fragments really aren't useful when A) you can't use them yet because so many users are on older unsupported versions (insert generic "fragmentation" pun here) and B) you still can't smoothly scroll a ListView containing more than a dozen Views or a few text shadows.
The Android SDK includes a library called the Support Package (previously called the Android Compatibility Package). This library provides support for Fragment and related classes, and Loader and related classes back to Android 1.6.
Even if you are targeting API levels lower than in 3.x, using the Support Package is a substantial benefit in organizing your UI code and improved concurrency support.
As ever, you can set your minimum API level below the API level to which you build, and test for API availability at runtime, for any API in Android.
In C# I think MS has the nicest language of the three and I can't imagine Visual Studio is as bad as Xcode 4. I'm keeping a close eye on the WP market. If sales pick up at all I'm going to try my hand at a few apps. iOS is stagnating and the app market is absurdly oversaturated and Android is still the public access television of mobile.
I've used both visual studio (express) and Xcode 3. I much prefer visual studio.
Your point about C# vs. Objective-C is an important one that may have been glossed over somewhat. I can't bear Objective-C, I find it's syntax highly confusing and difficult to parse (my own subjective opinion). C# is much more pleasant. Microsoft could win over developers because of this if they are smart about it.
I don't personally mind Obj-C but there's really no reason to write most apps in a language with so much exposure to all the low-level nastiness of C.
You can currently write iOS apps in C# with Mono but my initial experiments in that direction suggested to me that it was too far out on the limb for comfort.
This doesn't surprise me too much. I just got a Nokia Lumia 900 (I'm using it right now in fact) and from a design and usability standpoint it really impresses me. Everything's so smooth and fluid, and the interface is so clean and consistent that it's just fun to use. It's so good that I could care less that the screen doesn't have some super high pixel density, that there's not that many good apps, or even that the camera performs poorly in low light situations.
I just got a Lumia 900 and I think it's the only phone that is competitive with the iPhone. It looks fantastic and it performs well. Seriously, there isn't a non-iPhone device out there that can compete with the design of the Lumia 900.
Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time dealing with the screen. Text looks like shit, and since most of what I do with my phone involves reading text, this is annoying. I hate that I have to zoom almost every email I get just to get something legible. (That could be more to do with all the wasted space in the email app though)
The camera is shit. It's ok in good lighting and completely worthless in low light. I loved that my iPhone camera was good enough that I could capture a moment wherever I was and it would look fine on a computer screen. That's really all I need from the camera. I can't do that with my Lumia because it just won't work in most situations.
This could be just my problem, but I don't like the big form factor. My thumb just can't reach the whole screen without uncomfortably stretching. Since Windows Phone navigation relies heavily on the back button, if I'm ever holding it with my right hand, I can barely use it. The big screen is great, but since Windows Phone uses empty space as such a big design element, it cuts down the usable space to be even less than what it was on my iPhone in lots of apps.
I really like the flow of most Windows Phone apps, but right now I haven't seen any developers do a good job of making their app stand out. Every app looks exactly the same, with different words in the lists. I don't know if it's just because the platform is still new, or if the APIs are too limiting.
But for 100 bucks on contract, it's a good phone, despite all my problems with it.
Android is a really low bar. I've used several smartphones and the Android ones are easily the worst. It really does feel cobbled together and unintuitive. I call it the platform that makes. Symbian look good. On the other hand it's what I use since Apple has been so hostile to me and friends, and webOS is clearly a dead-end.
Edit: Downvote? so android is a smartphone? The parent was complaining about different smartphones, not different OSes. I think thats a subtle difference.
Maybe. And I actually tend to agree that all Android smartphones share some of the characteristics that I don't like, but I still wouldn't put them all in one basket.
The anal-retentiveness required to honestly differentiate between navigating an iphone and an android is ridiculous. They both have grids of 4 icons wide. Android scrolls vertically, iphone scrolls horizontally. You touch the icon to launch app. The idea that there is room between android and iOS for a 2nd favorite mobile OS, based upon navigation of app screens is laughable. Either its better than both of them, or its worse than both of them.
There is a gigantic difference in how an Android and iPhone navigate. Develop the same app for both and you will see that clearly.
The big difference is Android uses a standard back button for all applications. This leads Android users to end up mashing a lot of buttons at random, to try and get what they want - it's actually quite a bad UI, and it was just translated from the web clumsily.
On iPhone, each app has its own navigation method, based on the requirements of the app. The main nav options for an iPhone app are:
* a navigation bar that stacks a series of views, with a back button.
* a tab bar which gives a 4-5 ever-present options on bottom
* a single view with buttons for menus
Even when you implement a nav bar for an app, which is similar to Android, it's much better, because the stack of views is deterministic. You can never tell what the Back button will do on an Android app.
The Reality Distortion Field is strong in this one. So if I understand what you're saying, android's back button causes users to randomly mash buttons in frothy fits of delirium, yet iOS's back button provides zen like enlightenment and happy endings.
Pushing the back button on an android phone, by default ALWAYS goes to the previous activity, or cancels context menus. Of course, it's possible to make the android back button do something else with the onPause method, just as it's possible to make that happen in the viewDidUnload method in iOS.
The dropbox and imdb android apps use tabs perfectly well.
> Pushing the back button on an android phone, by default ALWAYS goes to the previous activity.
Good if it is the only apps you are using. But what if you switch to use others app for a while and switch back to this app. Can you remember the activity stack as of all the apps good as the OS does? Can you predict where back button is going to take you after not using the phone for half an hours?
I think the updated design guide for ICS Android calls for the back button to ascend up the hierarchy of the app, rather than taking you to whatever screen you were last on. (So it is now supposed to be deterministic.) There are also better guidelines for how to provide in app navigation.
The big difference is Android uses a standard back button for all applications. This leads Android users to end up mashing a lot of buttons at random, to try and get what they want - it's actually quite a bad UI, and it was just translated from the web clumsily.
This is seriously one of the most W.T.F. comments I've ever read on HN. No exaggerating.
The Android back button is incredibly consistent, and the only people it causes in any confusion in are people too accustomed to the iPhone, mentally configured to always look to go to the top of the stack. There are a few apps that break the model, but by and large they work perfectly.
On iOS -- and yes, I use both daily with an iPad 3rd gen and an GS II running ICS -- it is essentially mystery meat in most apps. There is no universal model beyond some basic behaviors. As one aside, it is a PITA when you're lounging with the iPad and you have to go to the top to do every navigation.
There is no universe where the iOS model is better, but through completely acclimation.
I've found the back button on Android and Windows Phone to be inconsistent. Sometimes it will dump me back to the home screen when I expected it to take me to the last screen I was on in the app. It's not that terrible, but it happens more often than it should.
Favorably comparing Windows Phone to Android is kinda damning with faint praise, IMHO. I have an Android; once the initial joy of "YAY GPS AGAIN" and "YAY INTERNET EVERYWHERE" wore off it's really pretty awkward.
For years MS genes to arrive late and win worked: Windows after Apple, Word after Word-perfect, Excel after Lotus/Borland, networks after Novel, Xbox after Nintendo.
They didn't succeed to change this mode, although it doesn't work anymore (search, Zune, mobile).
Future is for leaders or way-fast movers.
Microsoft won for one simple reason -- the licensing deal for DOS. (Not that it wasn't smart and ruthless and good at executing.) IBM made DOS the dominant desktop OS, and the licensing deal allowed Microsoft to enable clone makers to displace IBM (without displacing DOS).
Microsoft's legendary persistence -- fast following rival products and iterating them until they didn't suck and eventually drove competitors out of business -- would have been fruitless without the dominant position IBM simply handed to Microsoft with the original DOS deal.
And none of this stuff has taken place since Bill Gates left. Microsoft's record for the last ten years has been of failed initiatives (Zune, WinCE) and barely-successful subsidized persistence (MSN, XBox).
There's one significant case where Microsoft managed to do well without directly benefiting from the original DOS deal and that's XBox. (This indirectly benefited from the DOS deal in that it leveraged Microsoft's dominance of gaming, and subsidized by profits from that dominance, but compared to everything else it qualifies as an independent success.) Of course, XBox has hardly made Microsoft any money.
I wouldn't call the Xbox barely-successful. I'd even say it fits in perfectly with your described model of following rival products and iterating. (Xbox -> Xbox360)
Microsoft's other successes netted it billions of dollars. XBox’s chief success from a business perspective seems to be defensive, as long as XBox maintains a significant market share, nobody will create a post-PC or post-TV world based on gaming consoles.
Of course, somebody seems to be creating a post-PC world based on phones and tablets, but that doesn’t negate the fact that this could have happened earlier if someone like SOny had sewn up 99% of the gaming console market and then integrated it with the web and content.
I agree with what you're saying, but since this is the Internet I'm going to nitpick one little tiny point.
Windows CE has done just fine. It's not as huge a profit maker as Office or Windows, but it's still used on millions of devices worldwide. It ships in millions of Ford cars, ATMs, billboards, etc.
>Microsoft won for one simple reason -- the licensing deal for DOS
I think bigger and gutsy move was licensing DOS/Windows to Compaq inspite of IBM not being happy with it. Microsoft could've had an Apple like vertical integration(and immense profits) by making hardware too, but never made PCs. Licensing to PC clones drove the prices of PCs down and made them affordable to a wide swath of the world and helping the Internet come about. If computers cost $3000 like back in the day, adoption would have been quite low.
>Microsoft's legendary persistence -- fast following rival products and iterating them until they didn't suck and eventually drove competitors out of business -- would have been fruitless without the dominant position IBM simply handed to Microsoft with the original DOS deal.
Sure, but lots of companies have a lot of money to throw around but the difference with Microsoft was they kept at it and waited for missteps from competition while continuously making improvements. Eg. Netscape with the big rewrite http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html or more recently, Sony with the PS3 security issues and Move.
Your conclusions are ridiculously wrong. Also you are cherry-picking results to fit them.
Microsoft's "arrive late" model didn't always work in the past (see: Money vs Quicken, et al) and while Microsoft has been struggling to reach traction with totally new (to them) products lately, there is no reason to believe this is due to any sort of sea change in the importance of being a first mover, because there are still plenty of cases in which the first mover is stomped by someone else these days, the someone else just generally isn't Microsoft.
Some of their wins were competitor missteps too. Wordperfect was late to the Windows party, so users who wanted to use a GUI went to Word. That misstep may have very well given MS it's opening.
The XBox did all right, but the 360 has done quite well. I loved my PS2, the XBox wasn't bad. But Sony released a year later and at an insane price point. Combined with the difficulty of developing for the cell relative (relative to 3 identical cores) and MS was able to gain a big chunk of the market.
Apple never made a big mistake with the iPod. Even the 2nd or 3rd gen (which the capacitive buttons) was still a nice player. The "fat" nano was still a nice player. One of the shuffles was a bit of a dud, but that was never a big chunk of their sales anyway. Any downsides were more than made up for by the availability of accessories and the iTunes Music Store.
With the iPhone, I don't think Apple has made any big mistakes either. Maybe the price on the original (which they fixed relatively quickly), and I know many people were unhappy with the AT&T choice, but it seems to have worked out fine. Apple was able to control the experience to keep it from being ruined by the carriers (mostly), and again the accessor market and the App Store have more than made up for that with most consumers. The two biggest complaints I've heard are lock-in/freedom (most people don't seem to care) and the lack of a physical keyboard (preference, and Apple clearly is willing to let keyboard enthusiasts go somewhere else).
I'd say there have been Android missteps. Some carriers ruin the phones, and the updates thing is a big negative in my mind. But Android phones cater to just about everyone (touch screen only or keyboard lover), and come in at all price points. It's clearly good enough for a great many people.
At this point, I don't think there is an opening in the smartphone market. If MS wants to succeed, they're going to have to make an opening... and they haven't done that yet. Combine that with the Window Phone's downsides (update questions, smaller app market due to small market share) and it's not an easy sell.
I'd like to see them succeed here, if only because I like that they're pushing a totally different UI and they provide additional pressure on Apple and Google to keep improving. But the iPhone came out five years ago. Two or three years ago I think they could have had a good chance against Android. They may have waited too long.
Clever, eh? You must be proud.
Still, there is a lesson: The entrenched leaders have harder time to catch-up if they miss , and it's not only MS. These are good news.
The future is not like the past because back then MS could easily lag and still take the market later. Now they can't.
I felt that webOS was immature. There was places that weren't smooth. Also, some of the web rendering was just messed up. I have seen characters broken in two.
Rendering glitch aside, it was the best designed OS for it's time. Interactive notifications, gestures, multitasking and app switching. all copied by ios and android after webos fell apart.
Besides that - why would you actually rotate between a lot of devices? Is anyone here doing something similar? I get that it's nice to have a work phone and a private phone, but why would you rotate them?
I can understand that someone wants to try something new, but in the end, I would stick to my favourite - not going back to an old one I didn't like.
I kind of do. I have an iPhone for personal use so I choose to have an Android phone for work. Not because I particularly like Android but simply because I'd like to have one to play around with. I'll probably swap it out with a WP7 device sometime this year. I can't really justify carrying around 3 (or more) phones though. 2 is enough.
Yeah, WP7's interface and apps look great, they just need better marketing and more hardware - the selection is just pathetic. Also, there are plenty of apps for iOS and Android that don't run on WP7...
I keep hearing the "lack of 3rd party apps" and I have to wonder, are people really using that many applications? I was on iOS for a long time and am now using WP7 and I guess I just don't understand what apps people are looking for??
What I find lacking, coming from the Apple world, is the severe lack of accessories for my phone. Finding even a simple dock or a decent case is a pain.
I personally think that this may be interesting, but it really shouldn't effect your own personal opinion on smartphones. It is really sad to see people completely change of mind based off of someone else's personal opinion on smartphones.
its unfortunate hes comaparing all companies flagship phones but when it comes to Android , he's using the Droid RAZR. I would like to see his impressions with the Galaxy Nexus or even the Samsung galaxy s2
I just got a Galaxy Nexus a couple days ago, and my first thought after turning it on was that I wasn't sure where I could touch to do things. They try to be so slick with the UI that it's hard to see the boundaries between UI elements some times, especially with editable text fields, which are just a bottom border---the background color isn't different and there are no other borders. Another example is going back in applications. There's the back button, which takes you to where you previously were, but then there's another button that seems to take you to the parent menu (at least in the Play store, not sure if it's true in all apps). The latter is easy to miss. I didn't notice it the first few times I opened the Play store, because the back button is the application icon. All they do is add a tiny grey arrow next to the application icon when you can use it to go to the parent screen.
I'm used to it now, but it can probably be improved by installing an aftermarket firmware like CyanogenMod. I haven't looked into it.
The Metro UI is really good, but it's too little, too late, or at least that's what sales numbers are showing: WP7 can't make a dent in the market, which BTW Android is zerg-rushing.
Original story here, from the ones that actually interviewed Wozniak: http://anewdomain.net/2012/04/26/apple-founder-inventor-stev...