4 ms·

This is capitalism at its finest. Everyone just redoes the same things, occasionally with a slight spin on it followed by heavy marketing. Noone cares about in

by barnacs 10y ago

This is capitalism at its finest. Everyone just redoes the same things, occasionally with a slight spin on it followed by heavy marketing. Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. Standards bodies are being taken over by company interests and we're still piling stuff on top of a technology stack designed with a ~50 year old technology landscape in mind. Noone wants to think further than next quarter's profits. Our industry has gone to shit.

dozzie 10y ago
> This is capitalism at its finest. [...] > Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. It's not a consequence of capitalism alone. Capitalism wouldn't result in that if its actors were rewarded for interoperability and future-proof access to data. Sadly, customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability), so almost no company makes any effort to provide them. > Our industry has gone to shit. It's hardly specific to IT/consumer electronics. You have the same with cars, tools, clothing, everything really.
- pjc50 10y ago
  > "customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability)" Customers have no realistic way of assessing those things, especially in a market where all the products are obsoleted every year or so. It's Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" all over again.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    A vast amount of the consumers in this case are still woefully ignorant of technology at all, but that is changing, the younger customers are more demanding of tech companies and have d loyalty than any group before, meaning these companies will have to start changing or be replaced by ones using more open frameworks.
    - pjc50 10y ago
      It's not that kind of ignorance, it's that you literally can't assess the quality of a product before buying it and testing it. That information is not available. As others have pointed out, UL and CE impose certain categories of pre-sales testing to guarantee certain safety properties. But there's no guarantee that the product will actually work in particular ways and continue to do so. You can't expect that everyone should, before buying a product, perform their own accelerated-life testing and code security audit. (I think we've yet to have the statutory rights lawsuits where people's IoT devices stop working after a couple of years and they claim this is a "manufacturing defect", which under UK law must be warrantied for six years.)
      - FussyZeus 10y ago
        I'm not even talking security, that's a whole other dog and pony show and you're right about that, the fact that there's no kind of oversight in that is insane. We make sure car manufacturers install air bags, and identity theft thanks to the garbage mechanisms in place to handle it is almost certainly as damaging if not moreso to you than having to go through a windshield, especially when you consider that the IoT startups can give away your life savings and then just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when you ask for their help. But I agree, there is woefully little information even about what I was talking about which was interoperability, or even just functionality. Pretty much your only recourse is to look into reviews of existing products from a given manufacturer and hope that said review wasn't bought and paid for.
    - dahauns 10y ago
      While I'd love this development to be true, in my experience it's the opposite: Younger customers are at least as ignorant as the older generation, if not worse. And long term loyalty is even less a concern: It's all about the new gadget/social platform/etc. of the day.
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  You hit the nail on its head. It's our job as consumers to care about SD cards smartphones, replaceable batteries etc. if we really want these.
mseebach 10y ago
You all are not seeing the forest for the trees. Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. (This is in response to the general angst over interoperability, not the IOT space, which I agree is underwhelming at the moment. However, in what I assume to be opposition to most people in this thread, I am hugely optimistic (if not yet invested).) Sure, every once in a while something that would appear to be easy turns out not to be, and that's really annoying. But most things works well most of the time. Transferring state between devices? That's the cloud. My email is in sync 100% of the time between 4-5 different computers and devices of different brands and OSs. Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Not too long ago, transferring files between Mac and Windows was hard (I think macs had a proprietary compression program that wasn't available on windows?) - luckily that's entirely in the past. USB is ubiquitous, FireWire, PS/2, ADB, serial, all gone. A Mac keyboard works on a Windows box, and vice-versa. Bluetooth definitely has kinks, but it also has a lot of "just works" along very long stretches. With a few annoying exceptions, people using Linux, Macs and Windows can work together seamlessly. Websites (with a few annoying exceptions) generally works well in all major browsers on all major platforms, on desktop, tablets or mobile (both IOS, Android and Microsoft). I got a new wifi-printer a few days ago - after joining to the network, it was automatically available on our computers. Took maybe five minutes, no messing about with IP addresses and drivers. I can cast to a ChromeCast on my TV from my Mac, my Android and random guests iPhones (I can also "cast" Youtube directly to the TVs Youtube app, but it's pretty flaky -- and this is some fancy standard, as opposed to the ChromeCast, it's just that Sony is shit at implementing the standard). I can play music from Spotify from my laptop or smartphone on a Denon speaker in the kitchen, a "GramoFon" wifi-sound-device attached to my "dumb" stereo and my dad's "smart" Marantz stereo. Interoperability is doing fine, but yes, it's messier than it might have been if some magic omniscient body had come up with clean standards for all this. That doesn't mean that it's not there.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  A few counterpoints: > Transferring state between devices? That's my butt. No, it isn't. It is for transferring state between instances of the same application (or group of application by the same vendor) between devices. > Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Did you try to make them work together? Oh, you can't really, because Google Docs decided to be cloud-first and you don't have files with actual data on your hard drive anymore. You can't open them in a third-party application anymore. Here's the thing - seamless operation is getting worse than it was few years ago. A lot of that came from the push to cloud and mobile - even with propertiary formats on the desktop you could work with the files using third-party apps, because the data was actually on your hard drive. Now the cloud services locked your data in, and they're giving you access only through a way of their choosing (which is usually a lowest-common-denominator webapp). What we see now is a lot of companies trying to commoditize each other. Third-party software developers try to commoditize the platform makers by routing the data through the Internet. So sure, Spotify works and syncs up nicely between your iPhone, Android tablet, Macbook and Windows PC. But why on Earth do I have to use the Spotify app to listen to music, instead of - I don't know - Foobar2000? That's right - because files are not there. > Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. Actually, I think it's very good and sane. It's a perfect yardstick - because we get to ignore all the market forces and imagine how things could work if they were designed to be actually useful. And then we can ask ourselves, why things are not like this, and how to make them more like this.

by barnacs 10y ago

dozzie 10y ago

> This is capitalism at its finest. [...] > Noone cares about interoperability, noone cares whether all the data and content we're generating today will be accessible in a few decades or centuries. It's not a consequence of capitalism alone. Capitalism wouldn't result in that if its actors were rewarded for interoperability and future-proof access to data. Sadly, customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability), so almost no company makes any effort to provide them. > Our industry has gone to shit. It's hardly specific to IT/consumer electronics. You have the same with cars, tools, clothing, everything really.

pjc50 10y ago
> "customers don't care about these two aspects (or long-term durability of a product, or servicability)" Customers have no realistic way of assessing those things, especially in a market where all the products are obsoleted every year or so. It's Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" all over again.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  A vast amount of the consumers in this case are still woefully ignorant of technology at all, but that is changing, the younger customers are more demanding of tech companies and have d loyalty than any group before, meaning these companies will have to start changing or be replaced by ones using more open frameworks.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    It's not that kind of ignorance, it's that you literally can't assess the quality of a product before buying it and testing it. That information is not available. As others have pointed out, UL and CE impose certain categories of pre-sales testing to guarantee certain safety properties. But there's no guarantee that the product will actually work in particular ways and continue to do so. You can't expect that everyone should, before buying a product, perform their own accelerated-life testing and code security audit. (I think we've yet to have the statutory rights lawsuits where people's IoT devices stop working after a couple of years and they claim this is a "manufacturing defect", which under UK law must be warrantied for six years.)
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      I'm not even talking security, that's a whole other dog and pony show and you're right about that, the fact that there's no kind of oversight in that is insane. We make sure car manufacturers install air bags, and identity theft thanks to the garbage mechanisms in place to handle it is almost certainly as damaging if not moreso to you than having to go through a windshield, especially when you consider that the IoT startups can give away your life savings and then just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ when you ask for their help. But I agree, there is woefully little information even about what I was talking about which was interoperability, or even just functionality. Pretty much your only recourse is to look into reviews of existing products from a given manufacturer and hope that said review wasn't bought and paid for.
  - dahauns 10y ago
    While I'd love this development to be true, in my experience it's the opposite: Younger customers are at least as ignorant as the older generation, if not worse. And long term loyalty is even less a concern: It's all about the new gadget/social platform/etc. of the day.
nileshtrivedi 10y ago
You hit the nail on its head. It's our job as consumers to care about SD cards smartphones, replaceable batteries etc. if we really want these.

mseebach 10y ago

You all are not seeing the forest for the trees. Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. (This is in response to the general angst over interoperability, not the IOT space, which I agree is underwhelming at the moment. However, in what I assume to be opposition to most people in this thread, I am hugely optimistic (if not yet invested).) Sure, every once in a while something that would appear to be easy turns out not to be, and that's really annoying. But most things works well most of the time. Transferring state between devices? That's the cloud. My email is in sync 100% of the time between 4-5 different computers and devices of different brands and OSs. Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Not too long ago, transferring files between Mac and Windows was hard (I think macs had a proprietary compression program that wasn't available on windows?) - luckily that's entirely in the past. USB is ubiquitous, FireWire, PS/2, ADB, serial, all gone. A Mac keyboard works on a Windows box, and vice-versa. Bluetooth definitely has kinks, but it also has a lot of "just works" along very long stretches. With a few annoying exceptions, people using Linux, Macs and Windows can work together seamlessly. Websites (with a few annoying exceptions) generally works well in all major browsers on all major platforms, on desktop, tablets or mobile (both IOS, Android and Microsoft). I got a new wifi-printer a few days ago - after joining to the network, it was automatically available on our computers. Took maybe five minutes, no messing about with IP addresses and drivers. I can cast to a ChromeCast on my TV from my Mac, my Android and random guests iPhones (I can also "cast" Youtube directly to the TVs Youtube app, but it's pretty flaky -- and this is some fancy standard, as opposed to the ChromeCast, it's just that Sony is shit at implementing the standard). I can play music from Spotify from my laptop or smartphone on a Denon speaker in the kitchen, a "GramoFon" wifi-sound-device attached to my "dumb" stereo and my dad's "smart" Marantz stereo. Interoperability is doing fine, but yes, it's messier than it might have been if some magic omniscient body had come up with clean standards for all this. That doesn't mean that it's not there.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
A few counterpoints: > Transferring state between devices? That's my butt. No, it isn't. It is for transferring state between instances of the same application (or group of application by the same vendor) between devices. > Dropbox takes care of my personal files, box.com of those for work. I frequently collaborate on documents in both Google Docs and Quip. Did you try to make them work together? Oh, you can't really, because Google Docs decided to be cloud-first and you don't have files with actual data on your hard drive anymore. You can't open them in a third-party application anymore. Here's the thing - seamless operation is getting worse than it was few years ago. A lot of that came from the push to cloud and mobile - even with propertiary formats on the desktop you could work with the files using third-party apps, because the data was actually on your hard drive. Now the cloud services locked your data in, and they're giving you access only through a way of their choosing (which is usually a lowest-common-denominator webapp). What we see now is a lot of companies trying to commoditize each other. Third-party software developers try to commoditize the platform makers by routing the data through the Internet. So sure, Spotify works and syncs up nicely between your iPhone, Android tablet, Macbook and Windows PC. But why on Earth do I have to use the Spotify app to listen to music, instead of - I don't know - Foobar2000? That's right - because files are not there. > Using a sci-fi film as the yardstick for what interoperability should look like is silly. Actually, I think it's very good and sane. It's a perfect yardstick - because we get to ignore all the market forces and imagine how things could work if they were designed to be actually useful. And then we can ask ourselves, why things are not like this, and how to make them more like this.