3 ms·

And Amazon will always trail in terms of innovation, because selling things at a loss doesn't give you much room to spend on R&D. And your view of history is s

by greedo 14y ago

And Amazon will always trail in terms of innovation, because selling things at a loss doesn't give you much room to spend on R&D. And your view of history is skewed; IBM released the PC (5150) in 1981. Compaq shipped the first compatible in 1982, and by 1985 the PC market was thoroughly commoditized. Jump to the iPad's release in 2010. It's been 2 1/2 years, and still no signs of the tablet market being commoditized. It's still an iPad market, and not a tablet market.

jerf 14y ago
Innovation doesn't run forever. What's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware? Non-zero, but it's not like next year Apple's going to equip them with little robotic arms and legs or anything. There's more room for innovation in the laptop market, and that's a market that hasn't been driven by very much "innovation" for a long time. Innovation isn't a magic word you can just wave around like a mantra, it has to concretize into something real if it's going to have any effect. There is, quite literally, not much room left for tablet innovation.
- greedo 14y ago
  Wow. I guess I disagree with you about the innovation in the laptop market. I showed my wife the MacBook Air yesterday, and she was amazed at how different it was from the stuff she was used to. And your argument about "what's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware" is also pretty shortsighted. I'm sure that you had the foresight to predict the iPad? Change and innovation aren't magic. But saying that there's no more room for innovation has been proven wrong, time and time again.
  - gfodor 14y ago
    He's just saying there is little room for innovation in the tablet hardware space. I'd tend to agree. Once all tablets are light, responsive, high resolution, reasonably powered (RAM/CPU), and have all the standard frills you're really past the point of diminishing returns IMHO. There's not much you can do with an iPad 3 you could't do with the first iPad, though it's a nicer experience. The iPad 6 is probably going to be much less of a leap from the iPad 3 than the 3 was from the original.
    - greedo 14y ago
      And again, that's 20/20 hindsight. Go look at the tablets that were on sale in 2009. Do you think that the innovation fairy just started shooting Skittles out that magically gave the iPad a huge leap? Innovation isn't always in engineering terms, boosting cycles etc. Sometimes it's in reimagining how things can be done. Even a technology considered relatively mature (cars) changes a lot, in subtle yet important details. Just because you can't foresee change in existing markets doesn't mean it won't occur.
  - jerf 14y ago
    My saying it was "non-zero" is an important part of my point. It isn't zero. But it isn't going to be the driver of the market anymore. Just as your MacBook Air is merely "an interesting offering" and not an "OMG this rewrites everything!". (It was hyped that way at the time but I don't think it worked. The iPhone killed everything that came before it. The Air certainly did not; laptops are alive and well.) "Trailing in innovation" to grab market share is probably a very good move at this point. I know it's chic to talk a lot about innovation, but take a serious look around yourself and what you'll find surrounding you on all sides are markets of incremental improvements, not "innovation"-driven markets. I think the tablet market is here now, or very nearly.
    - greedo 14y ago
      I guess we have to disagree about the Air. I don't think it revolutionized computing, but it was a huge shift for notebooks. And grabbing market share with no foreseeable plan for decent profits seems hard to sell, but Wall St. seems to love Amazon.
      - jerf 14y ago
        Of course Amazon has a plan for profits. They've all but spelled it out, sell the hardware to sell the services. "They don't have a plan" != "I don't think their plan will work", or whatever else you've got on the right side of that !=.
        greedo 14y ago
        I meant in more general terms for Amazon. Their margins are incredibly low, their P/E ratio is way out of whack, and they seem to epitomize the old "we'll make it up on volume" angle that proved so helpful in 2000. Maybe they just want to be like a grocery chain that ekes out a 1-3% margin. But if that's the case, Wall St. won't be happy. Wall St. expects outsized profits based on their P/E ratio.
ido 14y ago
It did take it quite a while to get really cheap tho - I remember reading a PC magazine article in the late 90s declaring the arrival of the till-then mythical "$1000 PC" era - computers used to cost $2-3k, and these are USDs of 2-3 decades ago (probably worth double in today's dollars). if you spend $1k on a pc desktop today you'll get absolute top of the line hardware, even $500 will get you a solid mid-range desktop. only in the last ~5 years with the arrival of netbooks did we start seeing PCs get really, really cheap.
- greedo 14y ago
  Agreed. Relatively speaking, an iPad (with far more horsepower than the Dell XP I bought in 1994) is a tremendous bargain. Adjusted for inflation that would be $385 in 1994 (for a $600 iPad).

by greedo 14y ago

jerf 14y ago

Innovation doesn't run forever. What's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware? Non-zero, but it's not like next year Apple's going to equip them with little robotic arms and legs or anything. There's more room for innovation in the laptop market, and that's a market that hasn't been driven by very much "innovation" for a long time. Innovation isn't a magic word you can just wave around like a mantra, it has to concretize into something real if it's going to have any effect. There is, quite literally, not much room left for tablet innovation.

greedo 14y ago
Wow. I guess I disagree with you about the innovation in the laptop market. I showed my wife the MacBook Air yesterday, and she was amazed at how different it was from the stuff she was used to. And your argument about "what's left to innovate on a tablet's hardware" is also pretty shortsighted. I'm sure that you had the foresight to predict the iPad? Change and innovation aren't magic. But saying that there's no more room for innovation has been proven wrong, time and time again.
- gfodor 14y ago
  He's just saying there is little room for innovation in the tablet hardware space. I'd tend to agree. Once all tablets are light, responsive, high resolution, reasonably powered (RAM/CPU), and have all the standard frills you're really past the point of diminishing returns IMHO. There's not much you can do with an iPad 3 you could't do with the first iPad, though it's a nicer experience. The iPad 6 is probably going to be much less of a leap from the iPad 3 than the 3 was from the original.
  - greedo 14y ago
    And again, that's 20/20 hindsight. Go look at the tablets that were on sale in 2009. Do you think that the innovation fairy just started shooting Skittles out that magically gave the iPad a huge leap? Innovation isn't always in engineering terms, boosting cycles etc. Sometimes it's in reimagining how things can be done. Even a technology considered relatively mature (cars) changes a lot, in subtle yet important details. Just because you can't foresee change in existing markets doesn't mean it won't occur.
- jerf 14y ago
  My saying it was "non-zero" is an important part of my point. It isn't zero. But it isn't going to be the driver of the market anymore. Just as your MacBook Air is merely "an interesting offering" and not an "OMG this rewrites everything!". (It was hyped that way at the time but I don't think it worked. The iPhone killed everything that came before it. The Air certainly did not; laptops are alive and well.) "Trailing in innovation" to grab market share is probably a very good move at this point. I know it's chic to talk a lot about innovation, but take a serious look around yourself and what you'll find surrounding you on all sides are markets of incremental improvements, not "innovation"-driven markets. I think the tablet market is here now, or very nearly.
  - greedo 14y ago
    I guess we have to disagree about the Air. I don't think it revolutionized computing, but it was a huge shift for notebooks. And grabbing market share with no foreseeable plan for decent profits seems hard to sell, but Wall St. seems to love Amazon.
    - jerf 14y ago
      Of course Amazon has a plan for profits. They've all but spelled it out, sell the hardware to sell the services. "They don't have a plan" != "I don't think their plan will work", or whatever else you've got on the right side of that !=.
      - greedo 14y ago
        I meant in more general terms for Amazon. Their margins are incredibly low, their P/E ratio is way out of whack, and they seem to epitomize the old "we'll make it up on volume" angle that proved so helpful in 2000. Maybe they just want to be like a grocery chain that ekes out a 1-3% margin. But if that's the case, Wall St. won't be happy. Wall St. expects outsized profits based on their P/E ratio.

ido 14y ago

It did take it quite a while to get really cheap tho - I remember reading a PC magazine article in the late 90s declaring the arrival of the till-then mythical "$1000 PC" era - computers used to cost $2-3k, and these are USDs of 2-3 decades ago (probably worth double in today's dollars). if you spend $1k on a pc desktop today you'll get absolute top of the line hardware, even $500 will get you a solid mid-range desktop. only in the last ~5 years with the arrival of netbooks did we start seeing PCs get really, really cheap.

greedo 14y ago
Agreed. Relatively speaking, an iPad (with far more horsepower than the Dell XP I bought in 1994) is a tremendous bargain. Adjusted for inflation that would be $385 in 1994 (for a $600 iPad).