4 ms·
It's just too easy to make a case by taking a retrospective look at the winners. I want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which one is th
by wzdd 16y ago
It's just too easy to make a case by taking a retrospective look at the winners. I want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which one is the toy and which one is the non-toy.
Here's an example of why it's hard: iPhone vs Android. Well, obviously the iPhone is the toy. You have to do incredibly awkward things, or pay Apple $100, to run your own code on it; you can't tether it (sometimes); you can't replace the Web browser. It's hard to script it. Want to use your favourite email client? Good luck.
But hang on. Clearly Android is the toy. You can pick up Android phones for a lot less than an iPhone. Most of these phones are nowhere near as pretty or as specced out as an iPhone -- but pick one up and you've got the complete Android experience. If you want to hack on it, go ahead. If what you're looking for isn't built in to the phone, chances are someone's written it for you. Sure, it's messy, but that's democracy.
But hold up again. Smartphones are getting cheaper, but who really needs such a powerful, battery-sucking device in their pocket? Maybe the real "toy" of this generation is yet to emerge.
In five years someone will write an article about how obvious it was that iPhones would succeed because they were the simple accessible choice, or that Android would succeed because it was democratising, or that something else entirely would succeed because the smartphone genre was a fad.
Disclaimer: I agree with the general sentiment of the article.
- cool-RR 16y agoI want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which one is the toy and which one is the non-toy. I agree. I'd be happy to see an additional article which explores a bunch of current technology battles as toy vs. enterprise fights. But, not every battle fits this analogy. I'm not sure the iPhone vs. Android battle does.
- kiba 16y agobut that's democracy. No, a democracy is 50% + 1 votes. A market serve anybody who is willing to pay the price. See the difference? A democracy would be that only Iphone, but not android win. But in a market, iphone will continue to service 10% of the population that want the iphone. The rest, simply use some kind of android.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoYour comment makes me realize a problem with this article: It's not that it isn't true, it is too true. Its title is a tautology. Of course the technological winner will always be a toy. To a proper hacker, every object is a potential toy. The very expensive multiphoton microscopes that I once worked with were, and still are, very serious medical research tools. But they were also wonderful toys. Building them was fun. For an R&D engineer, engineering is fun. Which were the "serious" computers again? The ones that were never used for fun? But that excludes all of them. Sometimes the fun was right out in the open: The DEC PDP-1 of 1959, for example, became famous as a game machine, because Spacewar was written on it. But I'll bet that even old-school bank-account data processing was a lot of fun when it was first being invented. I bet even COBOL programmers had fun, especially in 1960 when COBOL was brand new.
- tommorris 16y ago> If you want to hack on it, go ahead. Except if your mobile network provider says you aren't allowed to. Then you have to jailbreak the thing just like the iPhone kids do... Freedom from Apple, but not from Verizon or Vodafone...