5 ms·

The author makes a fair enough point that Android is basically the operating system vendors and carriers have been forced to choose if they have any hope of com

by ryandvm 17y ago

The author makes a fair enough point that Android is basically the operating system vendors and carriers have been forced to choose if they have any hope of competing against Apple and AT&T. But think back 25 years ago when PC vendors were in a similar quandary. The could come up with their own hardware/software stack; they could partner with Microsoft and install DOS (and later Windows); or they could sit out and watch Apple eat up the personal computer market. This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s. Apple wanted to go it alone with a closed, arguably superior ecosystem while the hardware partners and Microsoft (then) / Google (now) are left pushing the open environment. We all know how this story ends...

davidw 17y ago
Except that Android is really open, something Microsoft still isn't.
- shin_lao 17y ago
  I'm not sure the openness of Android is important to customers.
  - davidw 17y ago
    Maybe not "consumer" type customers, but it may well be to more sophisticated customers such as businesses, who want to have more control, not be locked in, want to be able to do their own integrated systems, etc...
    - slantyyz 17y ago
      Not sure I agree with that. The problem with Windows Mobile was that there was no vertical integration. Who do I call when I have a problem? The phone manufacturer? The OS supplier? Blackberry has been very successful in the business world because they control the hardware and the OS. If there's a problem (and you can't tell if it's hardware or software related), you resolve it through one company.
      - davidw 17y ago
        If BB is an example of the "benefits" of a closed system, I'll take Android any day of the week. It completely blows BB out of the water.
      - slantyyz 17y ago
        "It completely blows BB out of the water." Like I said, that's not necessarily the point. From an IT manager's perspective, vendor support is just as important, if not more important than a product's features. When a company owns the OS and the hardware, there is no buck passing for blame. It all goes to one vendor.
  - CapitalistCartr 17y ago
    Openness isn't a desirable quality to most people, outside of the geek circle. It's the results, a richer environment of products and features, better support, customization, and speed of implementation that appeal to people.
- slantyyz 17y ago
  Plus, Android lets you make calls that you can complete, something Microsoft couldn't (and arguably Apple too, in NYC and SF).
pistoriusp 17y ago
Me, as a developer, I can't fault the iPhone. I really enjoy the platform. Sure there are things that I wish it could do, but I tend to agree with Apple's stance on most aspects. I remember developing for J2ME handsets in the past - That was a nightmare: I created an XMPP application and one thing in particular that stuck with me was that I was testing on a Sony Ericsson that was maybe 6 months old. A few weeks in to development I got another midlevel Sony Ericsson handset. The newer phone didn't support a feature that the older one did! (I can't particularly remember what it was - It was something really silly - like it didn't support alerts or something...) You ended up just supporting the lowest common denominator (Or trying too.) Argh! It was a nightmare - Every phone had its own UI and of course you couldn't test on every model (Who could afford that?). Phones didn't have the same amount of physical buttons. Every vendor implemented the SDK differently. Of course back then I wished that Flash Lite was released. I would have happily worked inside a non fragmented sandbox. We didn't even have browsers that you could reliably support. You just had to support the lowest common denominator and that was that. This wasn't even that long ago - Maybe 6 years?
mechanical_fish 17y ago
This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s... We all know how this story ends... Look, we've got to declare a moratorium on this glib analogy. The 1980s were about a hundred years ago in terms of computing history. In 1980, the year the IBM PC was released, there was no such thing as the Web, let alone web standards. The Internet's users, if gathered together, would fit in a fairly small conference room, and they were all academics and DoD researchers exchanging email. Mass-market computers were lonely and isolated. They communicated with each other via tapes -- or, if you had the money, nice big fast 140k floppy disks -- that were sent through the mail, or via the awesome 300 baud modem, which was three to ten times slower than reading speed. There was no standard for data interchange other than the plain ASCII text file: Every program on every platform had its own data storage standard, and its own display model, and had to be custom compiled in place. The X window system was still four years in the future, for god's sake. The free software movement hadn't been invented yet. Linux was ten years in the future. Unix was largely an academic thing. Everything in computing was literally one million times more valuable in 1980 than it is today. [1] This, alone, renders these analogies to the 1980s invalid. These days we have disposable technologies that are a thousand times more powerful than the Apple II. You can buy shoes that are smarter than the IBM PC. If I feel "locked in" to my proprietary iPhone and crave the netbook experience, I spend 200 bucks and buy a netbook. That's less than last week's restaurant budget, I'm afraid. (I splurged.) Apple's "closed" ecosystem is invisibly connected to the net 100% of the time through the air, is largely constructed out of free software maintained by a ragtag network of volunteers, and has a standards-compliant web browser as its core feature. Google's "open" ecosystem depends crucially on a distant, proprietary network of machines, itself more powerful than the dreams of 1980s science fiction, that runs secret algorithms to compile and correlate data on the entire world. And people keep trying to pretend that the lessons of the 1980s are actually relevant. It's like trying to predict the future of auto racing by analyzing the results of the 1899 Kentucky Derby. --- [1] Moore's Law: Everything doubles in about 18 months. 1980 = 30 years ago = 20 doublings; 2^20 is about 1 million.
- davidw 17y ago
  > the lessons of the 1980s are actually relevant Only time will tell if this is a case of history repeating itself or not, but as Varian (now Google's chief economist) and Shapiro wrote: “Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not.” Indeed, their book opens with an example from 100 years ago that is perfectly relevant today.

by ryandvm 17y ago

davidw 17y ago

Except that Android is really open, something Microsoft still isn't.

shin_lao 17y ago
I'm not sure the openness of Android is important to customers.
- davidw 17y ago
  Maybe not "consumer" type customers, but it may well be to more sophisticated customers such as businesses, who want to have more control, not be locked in, want to be able to do their own integrated systems, etc...
  - slantyyz 17y ago
    Not sure I agree with that. The problem with Windows Mobile was that there was no vertical integration. Who do I call when I have a problem? The phone manufacturer? The OS supplier? Blackberry has been very successful in the business world because they control the hardware and the OS. If there's a problem (and you can't tell if it's hardware or software related), you resolve it through one company.
    - davidw 17y ago
      If BB is an example of the "benefits" of a closed system, I'll take Android any day of the week. It completely blows BB out of the water.
    - slantyyz 17y ago
      "It completely blows BB out of the water." Like I said, that's not necessarily the point. From an IT manager's perspective, vendor support is just as important, if not more important than a product's features. When a company owns the OS and the hardware, there is no buck passing for blame. It all goes to one vendor.
- CapitalistCartr 17y ago
  Openness isn't a desirable quality to most people, outside of the geek circle. It's the results, a richer environment of products and features, better support, customization, and speed of implementation that appeal to people.
slantyyz 17y ago
Plus, Android lets you make calls that you can complete, something Microsoft couldn't (and arguably Apple too, in NYC and SF).

pistoriusp 17y ago

Me, as a developer, I can't fault the iPhone. I really enjoy the platform. Sure there are things that I wish it could do, but I tend to agree with Apple's stance on most aspects. I remember developing for J2ME handsets in the past - That was a nightmare: I created an XMPP application and one thing in particular that stuck with me was that I was testing on a Sony Ericsson that was maybe 6 months old. A few weeks in to development I got another midlevel Sony Ericsson handset. The newer phone didn't support a feature that the older one did! (I can't particularly remember what it was - It was something really silly - like it didn't support alerts or something...) You ended up just supporting the lowest common denominator (Or trying too.) Argh! It was a nightmare - Every phone had its own UI and of course you couldn't test on every model (Who could afford that?). Phones didn't have the same amount of physical buttons. Every vendor implemented the SDK differently. Of course back then I wished that Flash Lite was released. I would have happily worked inside a non fragmented sandbox. We didn't even have browsers that you could reliably support. You just had to support the lowest common denominator and that was that. This wasn't even that long ago - Maybe 6 years?

mechanical_fish 17y ago

This is playing out exactly like the personal computer saga of the 80s and 90s... We all know how this story ends... Look, we've got to declare a moratorium on this glib analogy. The 1980s were about a hundred years ago in terms of computing history. In 1980, the year the IBM PC was released, there was no such thing as the Web, let alone web standards. The Internet's users, if gathered together, would fit in a fairly small conference room, and they were all academics and DoD researchers exchanging email. Mass-market computers were lonely and isolated. They communicated with each other via tapes -- or, if you had the money, nice big fast 140k floppy disks -- that were sent through the mail, or via the awesome 300 baud modem, which was three to ten times slower than reading speed. There was no standard for data interchange other than the plain ASCII text file: Every program on every platform had its own data storage standard, and its own display model, and had to be custom compiled in place. The X window system was still four years in the future, for god's sake. The free software movement hadn't been invented yet. Linux was ten years in the future. Unix was largely an academic thing. Everything in computing was literally one million times more valuable in 1980 than it is today. [1] This, alone, renders these analogies to the 1980s invalid. These days we have disposable technologies that are a thousand times more powerful than the Apple II. You can buy shoes that are smarter than the IBM PC. If I feel "locked in" to my proprietary iPhone and crave the netbook experience, I spend 200 bucks and buy a netbook. That's less than last week's restaurant budget, I'm afraid. (I splurged.) Apple's "closed" ecosystem is invisibly connected to the net 100% of the time through the air, is largely constructed out of free software maintained by a ragtag network of volunteers, and has a standards-compliant web browser as its core feature. Google's "open" ecosystem depends crucially on a distant, proprietary network of machines, itself more powerful than the dreams of 1980s science fiction, that runs secret algorithms to compile and correlate data on the entire world. And people keep trying to pretend that the lessons of the 1980s are actually relevant. It's like trying to predict the future of auto racing by analyzing the results of the 1899 Kentucky Derby. --- [1] Moore's Law: Everything doubles in about 18 months. 1980 = 30 years ago = 20 doublings; 2^20 is about 1 million.

davidw 17y ago
> the lessons of the 1980s are actually relevant Only time will tell if this is a case of history repeating itself or not, but as Varian (now Google's chief economist) and Shapiro wrote: “Ignore basic economic principles at your own risk. Technology changes. Economic laws do not.” Indeed, their book opens with an example from 100 years ago that is perfectly relevant today.