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The point I was trying to make is not that Apple is bad at designing these things. My point is that they seem to consistently miss the fact that communication i
by aufreak3 15y ago
The point I was trying to make is not that Apple is bad at designing these things. My point is that they seem to consistently miss the fact that communication is a platform agnostic need. To give an exaggerated example, would you buy an iPhone if it only let you make phone calls to other iPhones, despite it's super super design? Would you buy a Mac that only let you send emails to other macs?
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoThat's a really good point. However, it is easier to create the protocol in a homogenous environment than to backfill a heterogeneous one. Case in point: FaceTime. I wouldn't buy an iPhone if it could only talk to iPhones, because the precedent has been set before. I don't have a problem with FaceTime being Apple-only, because 1) there is no precedent and 2) Apple can potentially make FaceTime better by limiting the platforms they worry about. There may come a time where a competitor has all the features of FaceTime (especially its ease of use) and have platform agnosticism. Then the decision might change.
- aufreak3 15y agoIf you go by "skate to where the puck is going to be", the puck, when it comes to communication, always moves towards platform agnostic protocols. (.. and Skype provided a decent fraction of Facetime's functionality well before Facetime). If the likelihood of a person using platform A is P(A), then the likelihood of two of them communicating is of the order of P(A)^2. So even if you have 20% platform penetration, that only gives you a communication likelihood of 4%, leaving plenty of space for other providers to fill.