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I don’t know what your personal experience is with OpenDoc is. I’ve used it, although I was never an OpenDoc developer. The developer isn’t really asking a ques

I don’t know what your personal experience is with OpenDoc is. I’ve used it, although I was never an OpenDoc developer. The developer isn’t really asking a question. They’re stating a challenge in the form of a question. This is something that happens here in the HN comments all the time, when people get into heated discussions. If someone asks me a question like that, I sure as hell am not going to try and give it a direct answer. The only reason the question was asked was to provoke Jobs into a particular line of discussion. Speaking of OpenDoc itself—sure, it seemed tragic when it got shut down. But it got completely steamrolled by—well, exactly what Jobs said—Java, in its various incarnations. The vision of how you combine data from different sources and different programs in 1997 onwards and put them in a single place is by writing Java apps, possibly some combination of web apps and applets. There have also been some analysis pieces out there on how Apple missed out on its potential in the 1990s because it didn’t embrace networking the way that, for example, Sun did. HyperCard, for example, could have been the web or it could have been FileMaker or it could have been PowerPoint.

hindsightbias 6y ago
> HyperCard It is interesting how many analysts and opinion folks have talked about that for decades. But Bill Atkinson was smarter than everyone else in that room (probably put together) and he didn't come up with the web either. The web wasn't an end-user physical product you could wrap hardware around. Why would Jobs or Apple think of it? Sun could because they sold web servers.
- scruffyherder 6y ago
  The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.
  - rusk 6y ago
    The barrier was getting people to take it seriously enough to the point where you could create a mass self-sustaining market. There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents. But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs. Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.

hindsightbias 6y ago

> HyperCard It is interesting how many analysts and opinion folks have talked about that for decades. But Bill Atkinson was smarter than everyone else in that room (probably put together) and he didn't come up with the web either. The web wasn't an end-user physical product you could wrap hardware around. Why would Jobs or Apple think of it? Sun could because they sold web servers.

scruffyherder 6y ago
The iPhone was/is an internet product. The barrier was the UI, and portability.
- rusk 6y ago
  The barrier was getting people to take it seriously enough to the point where you could create a mass self-sustaining market. There were some great smart devices before iPhone, in particular Nokia and Palm but even going back to Psion and I remember noting when the first iPhone came in just how poorly specced it was compared to the incumbents. But riding high on the success of the iPod, Jobs could position the iPhone as a fashion accessory. The other smart thing he did was open up the platform for developers. At the time I think smartphone development was limited to crappy Java Apps, which solved the issue of the segmented market by offering a lowest-common-denominator set of APIs. Arguably for a platform to sustain itself and grow you need a virtuous cycle of a large marketplace feeding an active development community, which is sufficiently empowered to make great things for the platform thus further attracting customers to the platform.