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Great find... If you continue listening to Steve ramble on about the what we now call "the Cloud", you can hear him mention hardware-thin/software-thick clients

by ufuk 15y ago

Great find... If you continue listening to Steve ramble on about the what we now call "the Cloud", you can hear him mention hardware-thin/software-thick clients, eg. the iPhone and the iPad. I wonder what held him back from achieving that vision is the first place. AFAICS, Apple is now playing catch-up to Google and Amazon in the cloud computing space.

dualboot 15y ago
Doing it themselves and doing it right is my guess. Just look at Sony for an example of rushing into doing something yourself (PSN.)
- cmgarcia 15y ago
  Exactly this, I think most would agree that Apple attempts to either do it right or not at all.
  - adambyrtek 15y ago
    I disagree. They tried exactly that with .Mac and MobileMe and failed. The problem is that the proprietary approach that worked so well in case of hardware and software isn't compatible with the web. I don't know much about iCloud, but I really hope they had learned the lesson and made it more open by providing APIs, allowing data migration, and supporting tools for other platforms. However, this might be just my wishful thinking.
    - dualboot 15y ago
      When they launched MobileMe there were no iPads or iPad Touches. It's a different ballgame now I think.
smackfu 15y ago
What held them back? Probably two things: 1. They only had the Mac platform (and non-connected iPods). Can you change the world with a 5% market share? 2. They wanted to charge for it. Now, they could have done this a couple of years ago after they conquered #1, but they were still hung up on point #2, and just tried to make a better pay service.
- YooLi 15y ago
  1. In 1997, technology held him back, not market share. The iPhone changed the world with no market share. The iPad changed the world with no market share. Etc. 2. Who gives their service away for free? Apple still charges for it. It's included in the devices you buy, etc.
  - smackfu 15y ago
    On (2), you're right, but Apple always wanted above that, charging $100 a year.
ry0ohki 15y ago
In 1997, the lack of widely available high speed Internet was probably the biggest thing preventing this.
sfgfdhgfdshdhhd 15y ago
The same thing that has held everyone else back until now. 1. Bandwidth started to become conveniently fast and widespread around year 2000, people are just starting to be familiar with that. He's talking about gigabit ethernet in the video, even today most people don't even have 1/1000 of that. 2. Computers in general have just started to become widespread among the general population until now. 3. Trust, 10 years ago privacy had a much higher price than now. Especially considering the people who used computers then were the tinfoil hacker kind as opposed to every random person today. 4. User interfaces was horrible 10 years ago. Just imagine setting up a network connection with settings like baudrate and hundreds of other funny things that nobody except the programmer of the application cares about. 5. Money and effort. Hard drives are cheap, big enough, and last long enough to not scare people away from them. People don't want to complicate things more than necessary. And to be fair, most big companies has had the kind of thin-client setup he's talking about for quite long. You just need a VPN-tunnel and you can access it from everywhere in the world. (again, back to user friendlyness).

by ufuk 15y ago

dualboot 15y ago

Doing it themselves and doing it right is my guess. Just look at Sony for an example of rushing into doing something yourself (PSN.)

cmgarcia 15y ago
Exactly this, I think most would agree that Apple attempts to either do it right or not at all.
- adambyrtek 15y ago
  I disagree. They tried exactly that with .Mac and MobileMe and failed. The problem is that the proprietary approach that worked so well in case of hardware and software isn't compatible with the web. I don't know much about iCloud, but I really hope they had learned the lesson and made it more open by providing APIs, allowing data migration, and supporting tools for other platforms. However, this might be just my wishful thinking.
  - dualboot 15y ago
    When they launched MobileMe there were no iPads or iPad Touches. It's a different ballgame now I think.

smackfu 15y ago

What held them back? Probably two things: 1. They only had the Mac platform (and non-connected iPods). Can you change the world with a 5% market share? 2. They wanted to charge for it. Now, they could have done this a couple of years ago after they conquered #1, but they were still hung up on point #2, and just tried to make a better pay service.

YooLi 15y ago
1. In 1997, technology held him back, not market share. The iPhone changed the world with no market share. The iPad changed the world with no market share. Etc. 2. Who gives their service away for free? Apple still charges for it. It's included in the devices you buy, etc.
- smackfu 15y ago
  On (2), you're right, but Apple always wanted above that, charging $100 a year.

ry0ohki 15y ago

In 1997, the lack of widely available high speed Internet was probably the biggest thing preventing this.

sfgfdhgfdshdhhd 15y ago

The same thing that has held everyone else back until now. 1. Bandwidth started to become conveniently fast and widespread around year 2000, people are just starting to be familiar with that. He's talking about gigabit ethernet in the video, even today most people don't even have 1/1000 of that. 2. Computers in general have just started to become widespread among the general population until now. 3. Trust, 10 years ago privacy had a much higher price than now. Especially considering the people who used computers then were the tinfoil hacker kind as opposed to every random person today. 4. User interfaces was horrible 10 years ago. Just imagine setting up a network connection with settings like baudrate and hundreds of other funny things that nobody except the programmer of the application cares about. 5. Money and effort. Hard drives are cheap, big enough, and last long enough to not scare people away from them. People don't want to complicate things more than necessary. And to be fair, most big companies has had the kind of thin-client setup he's talking about for quite long. You just need a VPN-tunnel and you can access it from everywhere in the world. (again, back to user friendlyness).