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Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You
- digipen79 15y agoYou have a great point, sir, and Apple (along with other companies) does need to be called out when they say they will allow the general user access to something and they do not put it into practice. What can we do about it, though?
- ugh 15y agoWhatever gain (if any) they had from claiming that FaceTime would become an open industry standard must certainly dwarfed by the embarrassment of being unable to actually make that happen. Or, to put it another way, had Steve Jobs known that their attempt of making FaceTime an open industry standard would fail (for whatever reason) he would never have said that Apple wants FaceTime to become open. It just wouldn’t make any sense.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- varunsrin 15y agoDo you really think that a company with the engineering talent that Apple has couldn't make an existing standard open? More than likely, it was something else that took higher priority (improving performance, version 2.0, supporting OS upgrades etc) and standardizing FaceTime took a backseat to these other needs
- mrkurt 15y agoI dunno, they got a great deal of press when they announced FaceTime, and a huge amount of it harped on the "open standard" feature. A year later, no one really cares. It's not an embarrassment. It's a shrug.
- buster 15y agoone cent for every lie, and i'd be millionaire by now.. (this had to be said and will be worth the massive downvotes)
- buster 15y agoAlso, on a more serious note: Why isn't there a website for all those massive marketing lies about every company throws at the customers, it's sickening.
- emehrkay 15y agoSounds like a weekend project. Add rankings and this site could actually change shit
- buster 15y agoi am actually just searching for a domain right now
- jasonlotito 15y agoI picked up companylies.org Fairly simple and straight to the point.
- buster 15y agoi registered two.. it really should make a nice weekend project :)
- ethank 15y agoSickening? ITS MARKETING. The promise that something will make your life better is rarely true, but we deceive ourselves into thinking so because it helps fulfill the prophecy being told.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- drivebyacct2 15y agoI don't understand. What logic is faulty? Steve made a statement and hasn't followed through, over a year later. That sounds like a lie to me. It's not like he said "We might look into interoperability" or something, it's pretty damn cut and dry from the quote. I remember being giddy about it. Now I'm giddy about WebRTC instead.
- Bud 15y agoWhat you're choosing not to understand is the operative definition of "lie": lie [lahy] noun, verb, lied, ly·ing. –noun 1. a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.
- drivebyacct2 15y agoSigh, a snarky reply based on a hand chosen definition that is rather irrelevant to the conclusions drawn from this article... An alternative definition that is also commonly accepted, likely listed right next to the one you selected: "an inaccurate or false statement." It crossed the line when there was no clarification or retraction of the statement. It still stands, and as far as I'm concerned, people making claims on a stage while announcing "visionary" magic, ought to deliver on those commitments, and failure to do so is wrong. Call it lying, call it talking out [his] rear, the point really is the same as far as this discussion is concerned. Jobs got a lot of positive and excited attention when he said FaceTime was going to be open (with the implication of interoperability). It feels wrong and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If you want to call it something other than "lying", that's fine. For example: http://www.google.com/search?q=facetime+to+be+open+standard http://www.google.com/search?q=facetime+to+be+open+standard http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411352 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1411352
- Bud 15y agoUh, no. It wasn't snarky, despite your downvoting. And no, it wasn't a "hand-chosen" definition. It's the commonly accepted definition, which is why it's listed first in any dictionary you can find. Everyone knows that a statement made in good faith about something like this, which later turns out (perhaps temporarily) to not come true, is not a "lie". A lie necessarily includes intent to lie, in this situation. Once again, you are being intellectually dishonest by not accepting this. It's difficult to debate with those who won't debate honestly. Do you have any evidence, of any kind, that Jobs did not intend, in good faith, to follow through on his idea of making FaceTime an open standard? No, you don't. If you did, you would post it. Just who is being snarky here? Let's try another tack: do you even have any made-up theory as to why Jobs would make such an announcement, if he had no intention to follow through? Apparently not, or you would post that, which you haven't. Lose the ad hominem and participate in the discussion. And no, downvoting is not participation.
- mmahemoff 15y agoGood point. Skype haven't been too quick about innovating anywhere lately, but companies like Tango and Fring, would be all over it if it was open. And maybe Google too, given GTalk, Android, and Google+.
- varunsrin 15y ago' “Open” isn’t just a buzz word. People like the word “open”. Marketers love it. ' A very valid point, everyone these days in jumping on the open bandwagon. This problem isn't limited to just Apple unfortunately - several companies have been guilty of twisting open to suit their needs (HTC not releasing some modified Android code which was under GPL a while ago, and Google not releasing the Honeycomb source come to mind). Not that any of these are wrong from a legal standpoint (OK, maybe the HTC one was) but it's still twisting the nature of open standards & platforms to suit business / marketing agendas. Open is quickly becoming the next Web 2.0. Apple & Google have both done great things for the open standards community ( Webkit, Android etc.) but there is always a conflict between 'true' openness & business interests. Never forget, corporations exist to serve their shareholders - embracing openness is simply a means to that end.
- trout 15y agoWhat I heard on the Google/Honeycomb was that they released it earlier than intended. Part of it was the Xoom driving it, some was to compete with iPads, but it wasn't so much of a planned release. Google actually requires you to sign a license agreement if you want to release a 3.0 device, from which I've heard, requires for you to not change your hardware for X years. The next release, 3.1 Ice Cream Sandwich, is the planned release and will be open source.
- masklinn 15y ago> several companies have been guilty of twisting open to suit their needs Not just companies. Many individual are wont to try and blend "open" into "open source" or "free software", which as far as computer standards go, is at best revisionism.
- andrewpi 15y agoThe lack of any apparent activity regarding an open FaceTime protocol is pretty annoying. Has anyone emailed Steve to ask what the holdup is?
- ryanisinallofus 15y agoMy wife: "Will you take the trash out?" Me: "Yeah, for sure. I'll take it out tonight." Tonight rolls by and the next day she tells me "You didn't take out the trash. You lied." Did I lie? Or did I have honest intentions of taking out the trash with circumstances getting in the way? Maybe I just forgot? I don't presume to know Jobs' intentions but without a history of lying during presentations I'm going to assume his were true. Maybe the team pushed back? Maybe he just changed his mind? Maybe they are still working on it? "Steve Jobs Lies" just attracts allot more clicks I guess than "A Year Later, FaceTime is Still Just A Tech Demo." I would have preferred the later.
- bheemboy 15y ago> I would have preferred the later. Sure, but then no one will read it. Sensational headlines is the way the internet rolls.
- ethank 15y agoYeah well, that's what I said by the logic being faulty and got nicely down voted.
- ugh 15y agoI view it more as a broken promise than a lie. I do, however, think that both are, morally speaking, on a similar level. Lying is worse but a broken promise isn’t all that much better.
- tomazstolfa 15y agowrote this a while ago. might be relevant for the debate - http://www.funkykaraoke.com/2010/10/on-facetime.html http://www.funkykaraoke.com/2010/10/on-facetime.html
- napierzaza 15y agoHe's not in political office. He's not beholden to your or me. Unfortunately they didn't open it. It would be great if they had. But it's just a dead feature. Steve Jobs actual legally binding responsibility is to the share holders that he will make Apple money. Why not reverse engineer FaceTime and release a OpenSource version? Anyway,if you REALLY want someone to dilly dally with the term "Open", you should get an Android phone.
- jm4 15y agoI'm genuinely curious why it even matters whether it's open or not. I get that he said it would be open and now it's not. But beyond that why does it even matter? I can use Tango, Qik, Skype, etc. I think there's an iOS app out there that does Google Talk video. They are even easier because I don't have to explain to my parents how to connect the phone to wifi. Maybe with the proliferation of all these other video chat apps opening up Facetime became a lower priority?
- wtracy 15y agoNone of them inter-operate. So, when you have a friend on Tango, a friend on Qik, and a friend on Skype, you have to install Tango, Qik and Skype. We don't have a single protocol for everyone to standardize on, and we don't even have enough access to the various protocols to build a Trillian-like client that supports everything.
- jm4 15y agoThat makes sense, but opening up Facetime doesn't necessarily solve that problem. It has to be open and all these video chat vendors have to decide to embrace it, possibly abandoning years of investment in their own protocol. In general, I prefer open protocols and standards. I'm just not sure opening Facetime meets any pressing demands of consumers. I suspect this is a matter of not wanting to allocate resources to something no one is asking for. I can't say I'd blame Apple for that decision if it is, in fact, the case. I'm a new iPhone user so I haven't necessarily kept up to date with App Store developments until recently, but I believe that prior to Facetime Apple was a bit reluctant to approve video chat apps. Maybe that played into the announcement to open it up. If people start clamoring for open video chat standards I'm sure someone will step up to the plate.
- xash 15y agoObligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/
- 18pfsmt 15y agoWe don't have a single protocol for everyone to standardize on, and we don't even have enough access to the various protocols to build a Trillian-like client that supports everything. I thought both XMPP and SIP were supposed to solve that problem. What happened?
- jasongullickson 15y agoWhat are your thoughts on this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facetime#Standards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facetime#Standards It would appear that FaceTime is built on top of open standards, is Steve more explicit than that in the original presentation (for example, does he say that access to Apple's FaceTime servers will be available openly, etc.)?
- smackfu 15y agoThere is a direct quote in the article that says they will be taking it to the standards body.
- Kylekramer 15y agoIf you watch the actual presentation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1edQuxclUs&feature=player_detailpage#t=5806s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1edQuxclUs&feature=playe...), Steve makes a clear distinction between being built on open standards and what they plan to do. What he means by going to standards bodies and making Facetime an open industry standard isn't really clear, but it is clear they didn't do that.
- trout 15y agoThis can be said of almost every single video implementation ever. Nearly every single one utilizes H.323, SIP, RTP, H.2XX codecs, NAT traversal (ICE, STUN, etc), SDP, ISDN, etc. Each one of those protocols has many optional characteristics and properties that don't operate together unless they're planned or someone has created the super-stack which is fully compliant with every deviation from the specification. Even then, many of the specifications aren't truly specifications (SIP), and even some of the specifications have portions for customization (SIP) that don't require adherence to specification (recommendation). This literally means nothing other than you could probably reverse engineer it and create something that would work with it. Until they change it.
- rdl 15y agoI might care more if I'd ever actually observed someone using FaceTime. I have 3 MacBooks, an iPad, an iPhone 4, my coworkers and girlfriend and friends have FaceTime compatible devices too, but I've never seen anyone use it. Maybe they don't open it because it is a dead product.
- iron_ball 15y agoIf people did use it, it would be a competitive advantage. "FaceTime, an enchanted service that changes your life. Only on iStuff."
- Spines11 15y agoMy family uses it a lot, but only between family, and mostly at home. It's a more personal form of communication, so I feel like it's more likely to be used in a private space.
- bni 15y agoIts great to keep in touch with family when travelling. I use it a lot that way.
- rflrob 15y agoMy cell reception at home and work is flaky at best (thanks, AT&T!), so when I call my parents (both of whom also have iPhones), I'll usually do it over Facetime, which uses the much stabler WiFi.
- bane 15y agoPretty much my entire company has iPhone 4s and a handful of Macbook Airs, and I know that other than the first couple of weeks when it was still novel, nobody uses Facetime. All those pronouncements about videochat being something nobody really uses are more or less true. However, I've heard from some other folks that they use it purely for inter-family communications, where appearances don't matter nearly as much.
- delackner 15y agoOf course of course, because if our own circle of friends are all [x] then everyone everywhere must also be. Ever since Facetime came to the iPod Touch, I have used it routinely with my parents on the other side of an ocean, and it remains the only video solution I've seen that actually WORKS. Skype video and Fring video on the iphone are just horrifyingly bad in comparison, occasionally comically bad, with seconds per frame blobs of color that vaguely resemble heads). Facetime just works, with quality that matches the output when you record an HD video on the device.
- juliano_q 15y agoI think Facetime is already open. You can use it on your Mac, on your iPhone, on your iPad. Looks like this is open to Steve Jobs, open to all your iOS devices. Why would you need to have another kind of device anyway?
- delinka 15y agoYou make an important observation. I recall an email exchange[1] between a reporter and Jobs about "freedom." He does not define words the way we tend to define words. He defines them as a CEO in the corporate world whose company uses marketing to its benefit. [1] http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-from-porn http://gawker.com/5539717/steve-jobs-offers-world-freedom-fr...
- zyb09 15y agoIs this fucking Scientology, where we replace the meaning of words with their opposites?! The fact that Apple is the only provider of FaceTime software and it's only available on Mac and iOS means it's proprietary. Jobs said they're going make it an open standard. They didn't. There's no third party client, there's no FaceTime for Windows or Android.
- mmuro 15y ago"Open" does not always equal "Open Source."
- marioestrada 15y agoHere's the only information we have publicly about what happened with the FaceTime open standard: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standard http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standar...
- jgh 15y agoOh gosh, I'm glad all these good people on HN have lined up to defend Steve Jobs, I don't know what I would do if I found out that he, at any point in time, lied to me. I would just... I would probably faint. Just thinking about that possibility has made me all lightheaded. I need a fan. I need to sit down. Steve Jobs will not lie to me! He is a good man! He makes the devices I crave! Electrolytes!
- 18pfsmt 15y agoI sense a bit of disrespect for the community in which you opt-in in order to participate here. In general, HN is the most logical and reasonable internet community I have ever come across outside of NNTP (certainly on the web). Please don't make this community "snark-central". EDIT to add: Curious what the counter arguments to mine look like.
- jgh 15y agoHN has become a steaming turd of a circlejerk.
- ara4n 15y agoAt least Apple's failure to deliver on their promises on Open FaceTime leaves an opening for other folks to deliver (e.g. http://jointheseen.com/sdk http://jointheseen.com/sdk)
- benihana 15y agoDidn't Apple do something similar when they forked KHTML? I think it took them a few years to make it completely open source after they said they would.
- cma 15y agoThey still take up to a year to release the changes they made to khtml for a given iOS release.
- tobylane 15y agoThere are plenty of (insert absolutely any apple product here)-killers that are loudly touted by the manufacturer, and any apple-hater that we have never heard of since. Do we whinge that there hasn't been more proof that the iphone/etc are best? Silence isn't incriminating, it's silence. How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream?
- technomancy 15y ago> How open is Honeycomb, or Ice Cream? Do you have any idea how much crap they are getting for that? People made a stink, and they learned their lesson.
- glassx 15y agoAnd it's a cool thing. I hope Apple learns their lesson too, with articles like this. My guess is that, in both cases (Honeycomb and FaceTime), it was more a problem of corporate inertia or laziness rather than evil.
- tobylane 15y agoSounds evil to deliberately allow anyone to see the 2.x source but not the 3.x which is only a continuation, not a rewrite.
- ConstantineXVI 15y agoHoneycomb remains a closed source system. ICS is still unpublished in any form; Google's claimed that it will be open source, but (as with FaceTime) words mean nothing until they're backed up with action. I'm not ready to say they've "learned their lesson" until they've actually /done/ something about it.
- Maakuth 15y agoMy understanding of the situation has been that most of the FaceTime technology is indeed in the open just because they mostly used already existing technology. What is not in the open is the cryptographic key that is used to sign all the FaceTime client keys. So technically you could create a FaceTime compatible client by following open specifications and filling the gaps by reverse engineering, but Apple devices wouldn't want to talk to it without Steve's cryptographic signature.
- garbageInnerLo 15y agoThe author of this blog post is a known loud-mouth, a know-it-all, yet wrong 99% of the time. There's got to be a way to block these ignorant kids and their bullshit, ignorant blog posts. They are stuck in a 12-year-old mindset, and don't know why the tech world operates like it does. Seriously... look at all of his bullshit blog postings. I'm glad he's focused on that, instead of using his stupidity to harm others. Usually it can be ignored (unless it pops up on 'Hacker-Wannabe-Script-Kiddie-Failed-Businessman' News)
- jsz0 15y agoMost people have a motive for lying. I don't really see that here. What does Apple have to gain by suggesting FaceTime would be an open standard? Did lines of people show up to buy iPhones because FaceTime would be an open standard? I doubt it. Quite the opposite I think. If you could only FaceTime between iOS devices (and Macs) that might be a competitive advantage. My guess is they simply calculated it was not worth the effort in the end. Making something an open standard and supporting centralized authentication/etc is a nontrivial thing for what purpose?
- donaq 15y agoWell, the motivation is not the issue here, is it? Nor is whether opening FaceTime is a competitive advantage. The issue for the author is that a promise was broken.
- saturdaysaint 15y agoThis strikes me as an affront to Jobs' integrity a little more severe than his failure to deliver a white iPhone in a timely manner. In other words, this author is going to need to write an article of PG-level insight before I read another word of his. This is almost as bad as the "5 reasons why exercise makes our startup awesomer" guys.
- joshaidan 15y agoReading this makes me think of the iPhone commercial about FaceTime. http://youtu.be/EmAIptWS7Mk http://youtu.be/EmAIptWS7Mk "If you don't have an iPhone, you don't have FaceTime on your phone." Perhaps it was the marketing department that was not informed of Steve's intentions to open up the FaceTime protocol, or maybe Apple really has changed their position on opening up the protocol. I really wish they would open up the protocol. It would be very cool. And just think, all these android users would have to get iTunes accounts.
- trezor 15y agoAnd just think, all these android users would have to get iTunes accounts. I don't think you will find a international standards-body which will standardize anything which requires an iTunes account. I may be wrong, but I sure as hell hope not.
- joshaidan 15y agoTrue, but I wonder if Apple really needs to have a standards body overseeing it. They can still open up the protocol without going through a standards body, which is probably in their best interest. Then third party developers would develop FaceTime apps for Android, etc. But then of course you won't get the seamless user experience.
- jmspring 15y ago"Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You" but following other posts... "Does he respect you in the morning?" I'm sorry, but re: FaceTime, not opening it up is old news. There is probably more traction in following what is going on in the RTCWeb world than there is in any particular company's opening of their video calling API. Keeping eyeballs in the realm of the proprietary app is key. Many companies are in paying attention to WebRTC, but it's not there yet. Some companies, I suspect, like Apple, probably don't care (at least for now). It's better to focus on the primary customer experience. Speaking of experience, I haven't researched, but how do the assorted non-facetime apps compare w/ facetime?
- known 15y agoYou cannot successfully run a business without lies.
- Hov 15y agoI think people are taking issue solely with this particular case. Perhaps in this particular instance one could make a weak argument that Steve Jobs didn't lie. That's fine. But the headline as a generality is obviously true. Everybody lies, including Steve Jobs. A recent lie is the whole "TweetDeck are having a nightmare dealing with Android fragmentation" comment for example. Or going further back, the little Woz "business deal" of old or even the G5 benchmark controversy. We all lie. No need to defend Jobs at all.