4 ms·

Please, everyone, when talking about "wins"—do specify, what is won. In this case—the race to the bottom?

btilly 14y ago
What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant. For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market. For other historical examples compare VMS vs Unix, Lisp vs C, OSI protocols vs TCP/IP, Smalltalk vs Java, traditional client-server vs web apps, CORBA vs SOAP (vs JSON rpcs), Perl vs PHP, and so on. In many cases the losing technology was technically much nicer to work with. But the winning technology won. For a famous essay reflecting on why, see http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html from the Lisp vs C war.
- rimantas 14y ago
  So how your theory explains Apple's success in recent years? Comparing Mac to windows makes no sense, but still: just look at the sales trend of Mac's vs. other computers. Then see how much companies are making with Android: many adopted the OS but only a couple actually get profits from it.
  - btilly 14y ago
    Apple's recent success has come from recognizing and creating new markets. Even in traditional computers, a large part of their current success is that they pioneered the market for people who want physically attractive computers. This is unlikely to continue to succeed for them without Steve Jobs a the helm. As for Mac vs Windows, I'm referring to the old macs, OS 7, etc. That story ended with Apple almost dying before Steve Jobs came back and did what he did best - focused the company on creating new markets. Moving back to your focus on profits, I think you could benefit from reading The Innovator's Dilemma and its followup The Innovator's Solution. What you'll learn is how across many types of technologies (examples include ship design, steel production techniques, earth moving machines, disk drives, etc), across many decades, whenever two technologies compete head to head, the odds very, very strongly favor the one that is cheap and crappy. Throughout the competition, all of the revenue to be made is in the established, strong technology - until they suddenly have no market left. Given that history, there is no question what to expect in phones. The iPhone is clearly the superior option that makes more money. Android is clearly the cheap crappy option that ships more units. But both are going to improve faster than people's needs increase, and Android is going to win.
ZeroGravitas 14y ago
Yes. Because the people who benefit from a "race to the bottom" are the customers. It's a basic tenet of free market capitalism and seems, more or less, to be working. Why the apple community feels the need to attack the concept of free market competition I have no idea, I think they just like the sound of the phrase, it's certainly become popular recently without any outward sign that most people who use it even know what it means.

What I mean by win is that they will wind up becoming the dominant technology with the lion's share of the market, revenue, and other companies building on top of. The also ran technology may survive, but it becomes relatively insignificant. For example compare the Mac vs Microsoft Windows. The Mac was better, had better product margins, etc. Microsoft was the commodity and completely owned the market. For other historical examples compare VMS vs Unix, Lisp vs C, OSI protocols vs TCP/IP, Smalltalk vs Java, traditional client-server vs web apps, CORBA vs SOAP (vs JSON rpcs), Perl vs PHP, and so on. In many cases the losing technology was technically much nicer to work with. But the winning technology won. For a famous essay reflecting on why, see http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html from the Lisp vs C war.

rimantas 14y ago
So how your theory explains Apple's success in recent years? Comparing Mac to windows makes no sense, but still: just look at the sales trend of Mac's vs. other computers. Then see how much companies are making with Android: many adopted the OS but only a couple actually get profits from it.
- btilly 14y ago
  Apple's recent success has come from recognizing and creating new markets. Even in traditional computers, a large part of their current success is that they pioneered the market for people who want physically attractive computers. This is unlikely to continue to succeed for them without Steve Jobs a the helm. As for Mac vs Windows, I'm referring to the old macs, OS 7, etc. That story ended with Apple almost dying before Steve Jobs came back and did what he did best - focused the company on creating new markets. Moving back to your focus on profits, I think you could benefit from reading The Innovator's Dilemma and its followup The Innovator's Solution. What you'll learn is how across many types of technologies (examples include ship design, steel production techniques, earth moving machines, disk drives, etc), across many decades, whenever two technologies compete head to head, the odds very, very strongly favor the one that is cheap and crappy. Throughout the competition, all of the revenue to be made is in the established, strong technology - until they suddenly have no market left. Given that history, there is no question what to expect in phones. The iPhone is clearly the superior option that makes more money. Android is clearly the cheap crappy option that ships more units. But both are going to improve faster than people's needs increase, and Android is going to win.

ZeroGravitas 14y ago

Yes. Because the people who benefit from a "race to the bottom" are the customers. It's a basic tenet of free market capitalism and seems, more or less, to be working. Why the apple community feels the need to attack the concept of free market competition I have no idea, I think they just like the sound of the phrase, it's certainly become popular recently without any outward sign that most people who use it even know what it means.