10 ms·

You are right. If you do mainstream things and stay within their products it works great. The thing is that what is bleeding edge today is mainstream tomorrow.

You are right. If you do mainstream things and stay within their products it works great. The thing is that what is bleeding edge today is mainstream tomorrow. The worlds brain trust is moving away from Apple, and if Apple wants to keep up they cant rely on anyone else to help them.

ethbr0 5y ago
That's the Nintendo problem: how do you create a platform, when your first party solutions are incredibly well-executed? You need third parties (sort of) for scaling and long tail reasons, but it's always an uneasy relationship. If you don't expand enough, or the market doesn't generate a solution, your platform has a gap. If you expand too much, third party developers feel burned and desert your platform. Microsoft solved this by clearly staking its monetized territory ("the office suite"), and not really expanding in other directions (after those weird 90s attempts).
- quelsolaar 5y ago
  Thats a great example. I love Nintendo. Mario and Zelda is always great, but historically Nintendo has not been a good platform for 3rd party developers (I read somewhere that 30% of wii owners didn't know you could take out wii sports and replace it with another game...). The bets that Nintendo has made that hasn't been smash hits, have been terrible failures, because no one else is there to pick up the slack. If you buy an X-Box, and the next Halo turns out to suck, you are still going to get your moneys worth of 3rd party titles.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    The Nintendo comparison is missing some nuance as well. Nintendo was a gaming company that got caught in a war between the two giants Sony and MS for total control of the living room. For Sony and MS, gaming was just a single division that they were willing to take losses on or invest heavily then wait years for payback due to the consoles filling multiple strategic objectives. MS and Sony dumped tons of cash into developing their 3rd party game libraries where Nintendo relied on their in-house development to seed their consoles with games and make most of their money.
  - coffeeling 5y ago
    There's a big difference between the two in business model: Sony and MS had to care about attach rates and third party software sales, because they (at least initially) took a loss with each console sold: The only way they could make money was if people bought a bunch of software so they'd get licensing revenues. The Wii was designed with different assumptions in mind, which led to a lean machine they could sell at a profit. Someone buying and Xbox and Gears of War was a huge problem for Microsoft, if someone bought a Wii and Mario Kart, it was just fine for Nintendo as long as the customer was happy: Every sale was profit, plain and simple. I don't know about the Wii not being good for 3rd parties either, it's more that the Wii didn't do what the 3rd parties wanted to do (high tech edgelord games). So we got completely moronic things like a Castlevania fighting game, a Soul Calibur that wasn't a fighting game. How about Dead Space, a slow, ponderous horror title? Yeah, the devs turned it into a rail shooter, just about the most anti-horror genre choice imaginable. In simple terms, they thought the Wii userbase were morons who would lap up anything - after all, they'd bought a motion control toaster to play technically really simplistic titles, and in the devs' world, technically simplistic = bad. So they gave people disrespectful shovelware, which, surprise surprise, bombed. They had the opportunity to make solid titles - the Wii may have been a toaster, but it was still beefier than the PS2 or Gamecube which had a lot of really good titles and anyone who's played Metroid Prime knows those controls are crack. I think the big miss with the Wii wasn't how good/bad it was, but communication. What was the philosophy behind the machine, Nintendo communicating that, the devs really trying to understand that.
toxik 5y ago
> The worlds brain trust is moving away from Apple Not really, the M1 is a smashing success with most techies. People seem to like the phones too. The watches are doing really well too. Oh, and the tablets are really popular also. Even with techies. There seems to be a group of people sworn never to be corrupted by the evil Apple and their evil ways. I first saw it on /., and the same group has been ringing out death knells for Apple ever since.
- aphroz 5y ago
  I don't know if I live in another world but I rarely see an Apple Watch or an iPad (not anymore). I've seen maybe 5 Apple watches in my life between Europe and Asia.
  - bregma 5y ago
    Apple is small potatoes outside of the USA. There is a world beyond the Valley and it's orders of magnitude larger.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      I wish I had such "small potatoes" growing in my backyard ... Apple has a significant presence in Central Europe. Not overwhelming one, American market is obviously a stronger one. It might have something to do with purchasing power parity, which is still not that good behind the former Iron Curtain. But it is a big player here, especially in the richer demographics. I have never used any Apple products, but I am tempted. People will sing paeans about how their gadgets just work and interact together. I am more of a tinkering-hacking type, so I do not really mind delving deep into my Windows or Linux installation, but Android messes with me sometimes.
    - coffeeling 5y ago
      One thing about those small potatoes though: They buy software. You can actually get paid for apps on iOS way easier than Android, and it shows.
  - skohan 5y ago

ethbr0 5y ago

That's the Nintendo problem: how do you create a platform, when your first party solutions are incredibly well-executed? You need third parties (sort of) for scaling and long tail reasons, but it's always an uneasy relationship. If you don't expand enough, or the market doesn't generate a solution, your platform has a gap. If you expand too much, third party developers feel burned and desert your platform. Microsoft solved this by clearly staking its monetized territory ("the office suite"), and not really expanding in other directions (after those weird 90s attempts).

quelsolaar 5y ago
Thats a great example. I love Nintendo. Mario and Zelda is always great, but historically Nintendo has not been a good platform for 3rd party developers (I read somewhere that 30% of wii owners didn't know you could take out wii sports and replace it with another game...). The bets that Nintendo has made that hasn't been smash hits, have been terrible failures, because no one else is there to pick up the slack. If you buy an X-Box, and the next Halo turns out to suck, you are still going to get your moneys worth of 3rd party titles.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  The Nintendo comparison is missing some nuance as well. Nintendo was a gaming company that got caught in a war between the two giants Sony and MS for total control of the living room. For Sony and MS, gaming was just a single division that they were willing to take losses on or invest heavily then wait years for payback due to the consoles filling multiple strategic objectives. MS and Sony dumped tons of cash into developing their 3rd party game libraries where Nintendo relied on their in-house development to seed their consoles with games and make most of their money.
- coffeeling 5y ago
  There's a big difference between the two in business model: Sony and MS had to care about attach rates and third party software sales, because they (at least initially) took a loss with each console sold: The only way they could make money was if people bought a bunch of software so they'd get licensing revenues. The Wii was designed with different assumptions in mind, which led to a lean machine they could sell at a profit. Someone buying and Xbox and Gears of War was a huge problem for Microsoft, if someone bought a Wii and Mario Kart, it was just fine for Nintendo as long as the customer was happy: Every sale was profit, plain and simple. I don't know about the Wii not being good for 3rd parties either, it's more that the Wii didn't do what the 3rd parties wanted to do (high tech edgelord games). So we got completely moronic things like a Castlevania fighting game, a Soul Calibur that wasn't a fighting game. How about Dead Space, a slow, ponderous horror title? Yeah, the devs turned it into a rail shooter, just about the most anti-horror genre choice imaginable. In simple terms, they thought the Wii userbase were morons who would lap up anything - after all, they'd bought a motion control toaster to play technically really simplistic titles, and in the devs' world, technically simplistic = bad. So they gave people disrespectful shovelware, which, surprise surprise, bombed. They had the opportunity to make solid titles - the Wii may have been a toaster, but it was still beefier than the PS2 or Gamecube which had a lot of really good titles and anyone who's played Metroid Prime knows those controls are crack. I think the big miss with the Wii wasn't how good/bad it was, but communication. What was the philosophy behind the machine, Nintendo communicating that, the devs really trying to understand that.

toxik 5y ago

> The worlds brain trust is moving away from Apple Not really, the M1 is a smashing success with most techies. People seem to like the phones too. The watches are doing really well too. Oh, and the tablets are really popular also. Even with techies. There seems to be a group of people sworn never to be corrupted by the evil Apple and their evil ways. I first saw it on /., and the same group has been ringing out death knells for Apple ever since.

aphroz 5y ago
I don't know if I live in another world but I rarely see an Apple Watch or an iPad (not anymore). I've seen maybe 5 Apple watches in my life between Europe and Asia.
- bregma 5y ago
  Apple is small potatoes outside of the USA. There is a world beyond the Valley and it's orders of magnitude larger.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I wish I had such "small potatoes" growing in my backyard ... Apple has a significant presence in Central Europe. Not overwhelming one, American market is obviously a stronger one. It might have something to do with purchasing power parity, which is still not that good behind the former Iron Curtain. But it is a big player here, especially in the richer demographics. I have never used any Apple products, but I am tempted. People will sing paeans about how their gadgets just work and interact together. I am more of a tinkering-hacking type, so I do not really mind delving deep into my Windows or Linux installation, but Android messes with me sometimes.
  - coffeeling 5y ago
    One thing about those small potatoes though: They buy software. You can actually get paid for apps on iOS way easier than Android, and it shows.
- skohan 5y ago