Sort of but not really -- the entire article is in relation to the Apple vs Adobe debate. But it's about what's driving the conflict rather than the particulars of the current imbroglio. His analysis is pretty dead on.
The headline does feel a bit baiting, but if it suckered me, it was worth it. This is a very interesting article about the next five years in computing.
What I'd disagree with is the idea that Apple is trying to transition into a cloud provider with a merely incidental hardware business. I think that's a misunderstanding of Apple's priorities as well as an overestimation of Apple's tendencies to follow fashion.
Apple will stay a hardware company. They will go cloud, but here's the thing: Apple's cloud will be federated. Five years from now you'll buy an iPad and instead of a Mac, its home will be a port-less little monolith of aluminum and rubber that functions as your own little slice of cloud. Even as LTE picks up, a local server will always be ahead with the latest wi-fi revision and no network congestion, and no shared processor load, and this will be Apple's selling point for why their model is better for media use. And, most importantly for Apple's survival, why they can sell you a new one in two years' time.
Not a purely hardware company: Apple is already calling itself "Mobile Device Company". They already work hard to start making devices that fit best to the described future of computing.
A friend's Macbook Air SSD died. We plugged her Time Machine to a Mac Mini, restored into a new account, and she had "her" computer. Had been a day or two since her last backup, but MobileMe brought her latest appointments, contacts, and bookmarks back down from the ".Mac" cloud.
She missed having the portable Air, so walked into a BestBuy, got an iPad, logged into MobileMe, and was immediately checking her half dozen email accounts along with, again, all her bookmarks, appointments, and contacts, because those settings were stored in the cloud. Plugged it to the account on the Mac Mini, and now had her 5GB of photos and 20GB of music.
Three weeks later, Apple gave her a fixed Macbook Air. At boot it asked if she owned another Mac, and she plugged in her Time Machine drive. Slightly less than 9 minutes later, a reboot, and "her" Mac was back, again with every app and tweak. MobileMe sync ran, and by the time she opened her iCal, it was up to date.
The hardware essentially didn't matter. "Her" settings, "her" data, were accessible to her across phone, tablet, other person's computer, and a replacement for her own computer, all with zero I.T. effort.
Best part -- she didn't even notice this was remarkable. She just logged into the Macbook Air and started doing email, right at home, without a second thought.
As for that little monolith? Maybe it's already here -- Time Capsule is an Airport Extreme with built in dual channel 802.11a/b/g/n and another guest WiFi DMZ, includes TimeMachine wireless backup, offers a USB printer hub, and gives remote access that also syncs to MobileMe (which stores documents and personalization in the cloud).
I am expecting, sooner rather than later, that Time Capsule will acquire the ability to do OTA backup of iPad/iPhone. Either that, or that there'll be a second-generation Apple TV that is basically a combined Apple TV and Time Capsule -- streaming media to all your iDevices, feeding video out directly to your TV, and acting as a backup hub and wireless router. The "home hub" with cloud backup is clearly not that far off Apple's current road map ...
This is a really verbose post, but he does get around to alluding to a very good point: if iStuff supported Flash, you could develop in Flash and bypass the App Store.
If you have an iPad, check out http://touch.sproutcore.com/ and http://touch.sproutcore.com/hedwig/
The HTML5/JavaScript layer is already working very well, and Apple is investing time and effort to making it better. (Learned about those demo apps at the most recent JSConf in D.C.)
you could develop in Flash and bypass the App Store.
Well, if Apple were making a bulk of money from App Store this point would hold. But Apple does not: they are making money on hardware. Anything that helps to sell hardware is good. Flash would make iP* seem unreliable and battery hungry—bad. Hence, no Flash.
If Apple can entice us all into their walled garden, they'll own our entire experience - not just our desktops or data centers. It'll be AOL, pre-Internet, except it'll be way, way nicer - nice enough that most of us will not complain.
> if Apple can entice us all into their walled garden,
That's a pretty big if. I don't think more than 20% of all computer activities can be exercised in that 'walled garden', that's consumers only, and mostly media consumption at that.
Indeed. Computers didn't become popular because Joe Sixpack wanted to watch porn and update Facebook. They became popular because Joe Sixpackatwork could click shit in Outlook and Excel.
(And 8-core desktop-class machines with 64-bit address spaces were obviously popularized by the need to run Eclipse, but I digress...)
Agreed, but this is kind of an "80-20 rule" thing. 80% of the time is spent on those 20% of activities, and 80% of people are basically just doing email, browsing, Twitter/Facebook, and media/entertainment. Even people who do more complex things with computers spend part of the day just doing those things as well, which is why there is an opportunity for a dedicated product focused on these 20% activities (and why Apple and others think the potential market for iPad-like devices is so enormous, despite the product type being extremely limited by design).
Also, even Apple does not think everything falls into their 'walled garden', so they'll continue to develop and sell normal computers for the other 80% of activities. But these new kinds of products reflect the shift in the set of activities that dominate modern computer use. The shift allows them to create a viable product that mostly ignores 80% of computer activities, and moreover, by omitting those other things, different design decisions can be made (e.g. walled garden app store) to make it much easier for them to meet the new set of requirements demanded by these media consumption type activities (e.g. battery life, appliance-level reliability). Those design decisions don't work with normal computers, as the requirements are different (e.g. completely general purpose use very important, battery life less important or unimportant [desktops]). So I think it is a mistake to think that even everything from Apple will be walled.
- similar to the 80's: In the beginning of the 80's we had a large number of computer types (IBM PC, Apple II, Commodore, Acorn, Sinclair, BBC Micro, CP/M, etc). In the end of the 80's, only the IBM PC (and Mac) were left standing.
Today we have a large number of mobile companies. In 10 years time only Apple and Android will remain.
(Android is like IBM PC compatibles today: several companies, but they don't control anything as they have to follow MS rules, and they can easily be replaced with another company: see history of Dell).
It's always just been "own the platform". "The experience" is just short for "the experience of using my new platform".
The platform of the day chases technology somewhat, but it's mostly a business-driven cycle:
The entrenched winners on the current platform have little incentive to move boldly forward into a new domain where they have little advantage and little to gain by rushing forward.
Competitors face an uphill battle on the current platform, but much greater opportunity by rushing into these new domains and pitching them as an alternative or unambiguous step forward. (When nothing of the sort has ever actually been true.)
So now we roll on to a fight over the mobile platform. The simple analysis would be to assume that one company will again dominate and squeeze the platform. But if we look more closely at the battle over the internet, we see the very interesting fact that no-one won.
When we look to why, it's almost entirely due to the emergence of Open Source as a serious competitor. It became the vehicle whereby underdog competitors and jaded customers could gang up against the favorite to prevent any one company from truly controlling a platform.
That's why Google took the Open-Source route with Android. Not because it's necessary, but because they saw the iPhone coming and they knew that with an Open approach, everyone would help them fight Apple or any other would-be dominant.
(As in other areas, Google's underlying strategy is: we'll do fine as long as we can compete and don't get marginalized by someone else controlling the platform and writing us out.)
So my guess is that no-one will "own" mobile either. There will be some large-ish companies that together dominate much of the space, but it will be more like the MS/Google/Facebook share-split on the net than the MS/Apple split on the desktop. Also, as with the internet, the roster of the major players will be far more fluid.
(I don't buy "the cloud" or "services" as a distinct platform unto themselves. They're just the continued maturation of the last platform, the same way the desktop continued to get better even after the fight over the network was well under-way. They're being pitched as a companion feature in the mobile fight the same as integration to particular desktop software was pitched as a companion feature in the network fight.)
As for the 'next' platform, that tends to be something laying in plain sight while the current cycle thunders on. Something promising but clumsy. Exposed as necessary, but still nascent.
My guess? Personal area networks; specifically to effect less-awkward Augmented Reality and end the proliferation of redundant sensors.
Anyone with a powerful laptop, smartphone and/or tablet has wanted a way to sync session, state or data streams between these devices without waiting on a slower, spotty intermediary. Does each and every device I own need its own (mostly lame) camera? How about one camera on my necklace/ear/glasses and a data stream? How about my phone's GPS stream and net connection gets naturally shared to my tablet?
The clumsy stabs at this so far will pale to the ultimate platform the same way the first forms of the internet pale to the web today.
And the refinement of it, after the PAN fight settles down and everyone starts to look at the next big thing, promises to be truly the stuff of science-fiction.
I think you can roll those all into a single 'own the dominant delivery form of the era'.
Of course everybody is shifting, IT is a moving target and that will not stop for a long long time. The really interesting question is what it all converges to in the long run, and if that can be 'owned' at all.
Yes, the PC era is coming to a close, and every company involved is panicking, EXCEPT for Apple, because they're clearly out in front with their iPhone/iPad OS ecosystem.
Also, Apple makes relatively little money from the App Store; they still make most of their money from hardware, even if its increasingly mobile hardware.
The real people they're trying to please are users. They only court developers to the extent that enough apps are generated that it enhances the experience for users. And as both a developer and a user, even though it pisses me off a little bit, objectively, I think that's a good business decision. A locked down App Store, while shitty for developers, does probably create a better user experience and sells more hardware...
Yes, it's all about hardware and that's not going to change, despite the author's arguments otherwise.
PCs aren't going anywhere either. Offices will continue to use PCs even if the consumer market switches to mobile phone/tablet devices.
And Apple isn't going to kill its line of computers with the iPad as they have a very clear and healthy market there. iPads intentionally can't function without a PC/Mac running iTunes. And while every other PC maker has slashed prices and seen downturns, Apple's been growing for a decade. They know what they're doing with their Mac market.
Meta-comment: I don't agree with everything in this post, but it made me think. It's a refreshing change from the echo-chamber posts that simply parrot whatever was last posted and either agree in breathless terms or disagree vociferously.
Suggestion to bloggers: When you read something that makes you excited or angry, resist the impulse to respond on the same terms. Ask yourself what important factor is being ignored in the current debate.
As background: Charles Stross is a prolific science-fiction author. He's a smart guy with a lot of interesting things to say about the future of technology.
This would have to be the first time I've read a novel that includes communication with the dead and demons summoned via pentagram as a "documentary on industry best practices."
I thought such events only happened at Apple, and chiefly around leakers.
I know what you're trying to say, but if we are talking about software development, I have very little evidence that "communication with the dead and demons summoned via pentagram" are practices that are any less effective than techniques in widespread use such as attempting to specify the entire program in advance of development, attempting to remove defects during a "bug fix" phase at the end, or attempting to make up for schedule slips with forced overtime and canceling holidays.
You've obviously never been in the room when someone wants to "call in the consultants to wave a dead chicken over the database" on a floundering ERP project.
He's a pithy writer, and he's probably right about Jobs' intentions. I do wish he'd drop that annoying British habit of referring to a company in the plural ("HP are ..."). It's distracting and flat-out bad grammar.
Relax. It's just a difference between British and American English. As for it being "distracting", it's not distracting if you're British. (And I expect it's no more distracting than certain features of American English are for British readers.)
I agree with a lot of this, but one point seems to contradict facts:
Even if he's reduced to giving the machines away, as long as he can charge rent for access to data (or apps) he's got a business model.
Hasn't Apple repeatedly stated the case that the App Store runs at break even? The whole idea is to drive sales of machines. Now if it is for some cloud based services in the future that might work - still an iPhone unsubsidized is ~$600 so that is a good deal of cloud service revs that need to make up for that.
They've said repeatedly that the iTunes music store runs at break even, with basically all their profit going to the record labels. I haven't heard anything about the app store, but I'd be very surprised if at least 27 of the 30 cents they take on each dollar isn't pure profit.
Sorry, but physics is against you. There isn't enough wireless bandwidth to do what you suggest. It doesn't exist, we're pretty much saturated as it is.
The only hope is micro cells, tons and tons of them, each with high bandwidth, and low range. Or very directional devices (but that's not practical).
But micro cells with the high bandwidth you hope for don't exist now, and probably won't any time soon.
And if such high bandwidth did exist, I really hope the future of computing is not iPhone type devices.
My Clearwire (Clear, Sprint 4G, Comcast 4G) stock is down 50% from when I bought it. There's a Clear store in the city here (Philadelphia is 100% covered by 4G) and in the malls in the area. I've never seen a customer walk inside any of them. They set up tables to demo Clear 4G on netbooks outside, and nobody ever walks up to it. I am not confident WiMax is going to catch on any time soon, unfortunately.
4G is in the very, very early stages, like mobile phones when they were huge suitcase-size devices.
With that in mind, Clear's options are simply not very compelling. They charge a lot of money for a very tiny coverage area. Clear charges more depending on whether you buy a "home" plan or "mobile" plan. The "mobile" plan is significantly more expensive. But the "home" plan is not guaranteed to work indoors, even though they give you equipment that requires AC power. What a scam.
Sprint's plan is better; their 3G network is everywhere and is included with the 4G plans. (Or rather, 4G is a no-cost add-on for their 3G plans.) This is more compelling because Sprint 3G is everywhere, and their network is pretty solid. I get much faster speeds on Sprint's 3G network compared to what I got on T-Mobile or AT&T. (And like I said, when I do get a good 4G signal, it beats my 6M/768k DSL. In fact, with a bad signal, I usually get something like 1.5M/1.5M, which still beats my DSL in one direction.)
As the wireless carriers move from 3G to 4G to take load off the 3G network, I think 4G will become as popular as 3G. But relying on early-adopters paying $40 for worthless coverage is not a great business model. And relying on people to use wireless broadband when the fine print advises, "not guaranteed to work inside buildings" is also stupid. Why pay more money for a slower connection that's not guaranteed to work like copper?
That's why nobody is in the Clear store. Anyone with $60 month to spend on wireless broadband just uses Sprint, and everyone else just tethers their phone because they only use wireless broadband once a year.
I've had Clear for a few years at my office. Its gotten a bit faster recently, but the latency is still terrible. It will also arbitrarily cut out for a few hours with no explanation.
Unfortunately, there are no better deals for business internet around here, unless you're willing to pay $400/month to TWC. But if you have any option, do not sign-up for Clear.
WiMax can not possibly provide 100Mbps to many people. It can't even do it to a small number.
There is a reason it's expensive: they can not provide service to large number of people at once, instead they aim for high speed to a small number, and you pay for it.
Additionally the farther you are from the base station, the slower the speeds. To provide even decent speeds to lots of people you need many many base stations.
Do you have any sources for this? I'd be very curious to read at a basic level some of the physics involved and the theoretical limits. I'm amazed, as is, at what cell phones can do.
PCs are not "becoming commodity items". PCs have been commodity items for over 20 years. The difference now is that improvements in speed and capacity are no longer compelling reasons for mainstream users to upgrade every couple of years.
This is The Innovator's Dilemma, of mainframes to minis to workstations to PCs... when a small portable device is "fast enough", its other benefits enable it to beat a desktop (even though a desktop remains more powerful - just as a mainframe does). And there's a changing of the guard.
I have my doubts about multi-touch; but always-connected-portable-devices is definitely the future IMHO.
I think Steve loves the idea of pioneering and owning the new computing UI (multi-touch). Maybe he sees this as an end-game, as he has a family, gets older and has had health scares... but insofar as we're reading minds, I don't think he really cares about owning it in the long-term. He'll go off to develop the next new technology, because that's where he enjoys making money. If the iPad isn't a huge hit (or if it is), I bet there are a bunch of other projects in the wings... for the future.
Though the title says 'The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash', he talks more about overall industry dynamics than Flash. And he is definitely right about one thing: the PC industry needs to re-invent itself or it will die. I have been using Windows XP as my work laptop for all my career and I still don't know if MS has any good replacement.
This article highlights my problem with Apple. They really suck at cloud services. Google on the other hand is the leader and runs amazing cloud services. The reason my next device will be an Android, is because Apple has decided to block Google's excellent cloud services(gVoice). I think Google has the edge in the future described in the article, not Apple. I think it is going to be easier for Google to make a better device, than for Apple to start running the kinds of datacenters that Google does.
The reason I settled on Gmail and Google Calendar is because it was the only option for consistent access to my data across my MacBook Pro, iPod Touch, and Vista desktop at work.
If you're going to be offering cloud services to developers they'll have to do a lot better than they're doing right now in their marketplace.
Restrictions simply won't cut it in that market, and it needs to be seen if something like what Apple is doing will survive without those restrictions.
Apple doesn't 'depend on AT&T'. They're not locked in beyond a short-term contract. They're using AT&T because it makes financial sense - they have a sweetheart deal in the US. Worldwide, they use a whole bunch of providers.
When they decide that sticking to AT&T isn't in their best interest, they will switch to a different provider.
Google saw it, Android phones and Chrome OS netbooks are targeted into this space. Difference from Apple: Google thinks it can deliver both hardware and software at knock down prices or free, without needing to curate an in-house ecosystem, and profit by monetizing what the devices provide access to - the whole internet.
Apple has 40 billion plus in cash. If you listen to the calls, they say they're going to use it for something big. It's done in a very understated way. My belief? They're hoarding it to roll out essentially a wireless high speed network as described in this post. That's why you hoard what will eventually be 50+ billion dollars in cold hard cash. Just my theory though.
he knows what he is talking about. the only problem -> there is no longterm future for splinternetssss http://tinyurl.com/yeg6bbg the model apple follows? change -> make money -> change again -> make money -> ... problem? as change accelerates it becomes nearly impossible to hold on as a company. the real model apple follows? selling rotten apples from an ever growing tree of disruptive technology.
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