6 ms·

Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That includes things like Windows Phone, Fire Phone, all the glasses, Hum

• Apocryphon 3mo ago
  A decade ago Uber seemed poised to be the big tech powerhouse. Maybe not a platform per se (certainly not an ecosystem as other companies had it) but a major provider of software for all kinds of verticals beyond their core business. What happened to that?
  • therealdrag0 3mo ago
    Many of them left and turned into startups around that tech, like Temporal.
  • mprovost 3mo ago
    Most of Uber's "platform" seemed like pet projects that engineers used to justify promotions, and then were quietly abandoned.
  • nicce 3mo ago
    Uber managed to make the business by lobbying so hard. In some countries they broke the regulation of tax drivers and made the environment like wild jungle. Now, people don't feel "safe" anymore for random Taxis and prefer Uber in many places.
• JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > And they blew it This could be a blessing in disguise for OpenAI. This mess was conducted under Altman’s watch—it could be an opportunity to Kalanick him. The Board could elevate Altman to Chairman emeritus or something, choose a new CEO and settle with Apple. That will probably involve shutting down the hardware project and clawing back comp from its employees who helped make this mess.
  • dymk 3mo ago
    Maybe, but remember what happened last time The Board tried to demote sama?
    • avaer 3mo ago
      Sama was kept because of the cheddar to be lost if he left. If this interferes with the IPO, he'll get removed for the same reason.
    • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
      > remember what happened last time The Board tried to demote sama? That was a board. Not the Board. The Board represents shareholders. The board that tried to fire him was some B-corp wannabe bullshit.
• aprilthird2021 3mo ago
  Your comment assumes they have stolen some propietary info or trade secrets but it hasn't been determined yet that they have, no?
  • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > it hasn't been determined yet that they have Legally, no. Reasonably, for purposes of discussion, I think it has. The “LOL” dumbfuck who airlifted files into OpenAI isn’t particularly ambiguous [1]. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-engineer-s-lol-moment-set-stage-for-legal-fight-with-apple https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-11/openai-en...
    • aprilthird2021 3mo ago
      It is ambiguous still at this stage though. There's no proof he used this info at his job or that he was directed to take it by anyone (he may have thought it helpful to his career in a way OpenAI never asked for or even invited).
      • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
        > There's no proof he used this info at his job LOL Liu hasn’t—to my knowledge—been fired. When OpenAI was notified of his conduct, they didn’t confidentially settle. Instead, OpenAI’s legal went cold on Apple. It’s not legally certain. But you really have to stretch the facts to make this seem ambiguous.
        • aprilthird2021 3mo ago
          He should not be fired while trials are going on to determine if his conduct was criminal, against policies or not. That would open them up to wrongful termination if he prevails in court. Why would they settle if they never directed employees to do any of these actions?
      • shimman 3mo ago
• bellowsgulch 3mo ago
  Yes, but how do we know specific manufacturing processes weren’t in employee contracts like, “If you leave Apple you can’t utilize the invisible weld process invented here for the iMac.” I mean regardless of whether it’s a trade secret, you’re going to know how to do specific things that can’t be protected against copying. There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing.
  • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
    > There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy Except there are. It’s why clean-room design [1] is a thing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design
    • bellowsgulch 3mo ago
      Clean-room design isn’t a thing in manufacturing.
      • JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
        > Clean-room design isn’t a thing in manufacturing What are you basing this on? Source?!? I've personally done this in an aerospace context.
        • bellowsgulch 3mo ago
          By the time you’re sawzall’ing a design it’s not a clean room process.
  • freejazz 3mo ago
    > There are no practical laws against understanding the laws of physics, chemistry, and metallurgy when it comes to anodizing And unsurprisingly, that's not what the lawsuit is over!
• delusional 3mo ago
  > Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. Ahistoric jibber jabber. Microsoft gave it their very best shot with Windows Phone. Facebook renamed the entire company to make VR happen. These companies have shoved everything they got into making these platforms, and their fate would not have been different if they had been given another billion. Platforms are hard to make, and wanting it bad enough is not enough to make one. Stealing from the one company that has managed to court success makes a lot of sense. They are the only company with any successful experience.
  • Zigurd 3mo ago
    Fair enough, but I'd point out that, unlike Second Life, Meta didn't buy pants. If you want a chronicle of wasted spending regarding Microsoft and mobile devices, Google "Tomi Ahonen."
    • StableAlkyne 3mo ago
      > Meta didn't buy pants They also succeeded in the monumental task of making VR look boring. VR platforms are an escapist's dream: you can be anything you want doing whatever you want. And how did they show off their fantasy world machine? They did office meetings in avatars of their real life selves. Just spend one night in VRChat and everything Meta did will look like Plato's cave shadows.
    • keeda 3mo ago
      Ehh, Tomi Ahonen always came across as someone who was letting his emotions cloud his judgment (maybe the N9 was his pet project?) which was not great for a "consultant." Sure enough when I looked around there was substantial criticism to be found, e.g. https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/top-ten-reasons-why-i-say-tomi-ahonen-should-not-be-trusted/ https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2014/06/25/top-ten... Also wasted spending is not quite the same as "not wanting to spend" -- it's more, to GP's point, "spending a lot unsuccessfully." I got the sense a lot of the friction Nokia and Windows Phone faced were due to Google (and to some extent Apple) using the market dominance of their properties (Android, YouTube, Search, Maps) to suppress competition. I suppose it's fair play for what MSFT did in the OS and browser wars, but they got dinged pretty hard by Antitrust and played nice for a decade+ after that. Google is starting to see the antitrust blowback for it's actions only now, long after the competition has been crushed.
• devin 3mo ago
  Forgive me, but what does Jony Ive know about building platforms?
  • joe_mamba 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • grouchomarx 3mo ago
    being an exec at apple for decades you probably pick up on a few things, even if they're beyond your department
    • ironman1478 3mo ago
      The Luce seems to disprove that, at least in his case.
      • blitzar 3mo ago
        I believe "Luce" is correctly pronounced "Apple Car"
      • xp84 3mo ago
        It's the Apple Watch Edition of cars.
        • dramm 3mo ago
          It’s the Apple Watch Edsel of cars.
      • whyenot 3mo ago
        The car that has sold out in almost every market outside the US?
        • estearum 3mo ago
          Aren't there like a hundred of them? And yeah, sure, it'll obviously be a collector's item. Provides no evidence to this discussion.
• ricardobayes 3mo ago
  AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. This week ChatGPT, next week Claude. The real value is and going to be in hardware - as long as China doesn't enter the GPU/RAM race. I increasingly see AI investment, generally speaking, as a lost cause. It has very little chance to pay off.
  • petterroea 3mo ago
    I'm just happy we get to reap the rewards "for free" (i.e open models are slowly becoming usable, and the winner of the arms race will definitely stand on the shoulders of their competitors that didn't make it)
  • joelthelion 3mo ago
    > The real value is and going to be in hardware Unless someone comes up with a brilliant optimization strategy or new hardware that renders all that inefficient Nvidia crap overnight.
    • BowBun 3mo ago
      I'm privy to dozens of people working on this problem every day and I imagine there's many more people working on this problem out of sight. I'm bullish on this idea, but it's going to be a slow burn.
  • nxobject 3mo ago
    > AI model providers have zero "moat", clients change them as they see fit. That might be true in tech-savvy industries -- but in non-tech industries where the biggest software purchase might be the office suite or the ERP, inertia means the GSuite shops stick with Gemini, and the Exchange/Office 365 shops stick with Copilot.
    • mathisfun123 3mo ago
      I think you don't understand moat - that's not a moat.
• duped 3mo ago
  What does that have to do with employees stealing documents?
• isodev 3mo ago
  Why are we taking Apple’s side here? They made accusations, nothing had been proven yet. Who is to say Apple employees (at Apple) haven’t been vibe coding or asking gpt for technical topics? Also, funny timing from Apple - there is a lot of PR and optics riding on this lawsuit.
• dofm 3mo ago
  I don't think Jony Ive has this skillset either. They might make a very nice device (I'd expect it to be polarising).
• dzonga 3mo ago
  the rot starts from the top. sama plays loose with the truth. so likely the employees are gonna follow their boss in cutting corners. you see it everywhere in gvt/large organizations - if you come from a poor country - if the president is corrupt - the whole gvt gets corrupted.
  • a_victorp 3mo ago
    You don't need to "come from a poor country" to have seen this
• amelius 3mo ago
  > Everybody wants a platform but nobody wants to spend what it takes to make a platform. That's why Apple used open-source software to build a kernel. And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications.
  • rjrjrjrj 3mo ago
    > And why they used third party developers to develop the ecosystem of applications. Isn't that the very definition of a platform?
    • ClumsyPilot 3mo ago
      Platform must be the most abused word ever Apparently, everyone is building the platform all the time, even when it’s just a user facing application
  • Danox 3mo ago
    Apple originally was gonna use the Internet for apps on the iPhone, but the third party developers convinced Apple otherwise?
• joshstrange 3mo ago
  Small nit. > they did buy Jony Ive and are presumably giving him everything he wants to build a platform for them If they hired Jony Ive to build a "platform" they will be very disappointed. He has no experience in doing that. They hired him to design a device, probably comment on the UI (if there is any, though I don't think he is qualified to direct either UI personally). Aside from that, yeah, they royally screwed up here. Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them. I've said it before on this topic: this goes _way_ past non-competes and the like. If you learn a novel method for doing something you are free (in my book) to recreate it at another company. You are not free to steal code/designs/etc verbatim and you are absolutely not ok to encourage people you are poaching (poaching is fine itself) to steal secrets/ideas on their way out. Also the whole "lying to a manufacturer to say Apple gave OpenAI permission to use the same proprietary technique" is really gross.
  • watwut 3mo ago
    > Either by hiring unsavory people who think this acceptable behavior and/or by not managing/supervising them. Is there any reason to think this is roque employees doing something? We know Altman is ethically challenged. It is equally or even more likely that management welcommed employees to doing this.
• proee 3mo ago
  At this point in his career, Jony Ive is best suited for doing deep dive studies on the corner-radius of new products. And even then, you might as well just default it to that of an ipad, because that seems to be his preference for all things, including $650k Ferraris.
  • jazzpush2 3mo ago
    He has no taste anymore. He was right once, made too much money, and lost touch with everything. Now he's a tasteless boomer.
    • bigyabai 3mo ago
      [dead]
      • nyc_data_geek1 3mo ago
        Taste changes. Teslas now feel like janky, shoddily assembled, cheaply sourced ipad cases with wheels and a passenger compartment. Novelty wears off.
        • bigyabai 3mo ago
          That's quite a coincidence, because marketing campaigns also change with time and wear off after a while.
    • joe_mamba 3mo ago
      [dead]
    • redorb 3mo ago
      I would say he isn't what he once was, age will get us all. However 'has no taste anymore' is too far the other way AND 'tasteless boomer' is in itself a tasteless comment.
    • paradox460 3mo ago
      Even that's a stretch. Without Dieter Rams Braun designs, he likely wouldn't have anything
• MattDamonSpace 3mo ago
  I maintain that if Humane wasn’t arrogant as hell and had just put a screen on their device, theyd have been PERFECTLY placed to become the open-platform AI Phone Hell they might’ve been bought by OpenAI for billions instead of… HP lol
• duxup 3mo ago
  As far as I can tell Ive's expertise isn't "build a platform". All they seem to have gotten out of it is some creepy blogpost: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/ https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/
  • hn_throwaway_99 3mo ago
    I think the other thing folks underestimate is how important Jobs was as an editor for Ive's designs. Ive always leaned more to form over function IMO, and Jobs (or the Apple environment in general as it existed under Jobs) helped temper that. I don't think the butterfly keyboard would have seen the light of day under Jobs, and the released Ferrari interior doesn't seem like a stroke of genius to me. Easy to say from the peanut gallery I know, but I still think Jobs was best able to harness Ive's greatness.
    • selfmodruntime 3mo ago
      Ive has potential that needs to be steered, and if Altman has shown one thing it's that he can't direct this employees.
  • LarsDu88 3mo ago
    I don't get this "build a platform" nonsense. He's a designer. A good one. Who ripped off much of his aethetics from vintage Braun products.
    • duxup 3mo ago
      I also wonder where that idea came from. Dude is about design last I checked.
• freejazz 3mo ago
  Unnecessarily cute? It's a documented campaign of industrial-scale theft...
• dylan604 3mo ago
  > they could've been above reproach. This is hilarious. The company run by sama? The company that started as the largest copyright violation ever? How can you be above reproach when you start with such disregard like that?
• tedggh 3mo ago
  “ Or maybe it was a loose ethical environment in general” Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics. There has to be a reason why almost every single important partnership OpenAI had, abruptly ended, except for maybe Nvidia. Just recently Satya Nadella publicly implied that OpenAI should not be trusted. They are slowly becoming the STD of the AI industry, it’s like they think they are too big and awesome to need friends. Maybe pissing Apple off will teach them a lesson?
  • groby_b 3mo ago
    "Altman doesn’t appear to be a beacon of corporate ethics." Do those exist? I'm usually happy to see a mild candle flicker in the ethics window.
    • _doctor_love 3mo ago
      They exist but their defining characteristic seems to be that they are not well-known and generally much less wealthy than celebrity CEOs. Similar to the music world, the better you are, usually the more obscure you are as well. (e.g., Allan Holdsworth is a name known to most pros but the average Jack or Jill have no idea who he is or why he's considered important.)
    • Zigurd 3mo ago
      When Intel was on top of the world I was fortunate enough to work at one of the partner companies on a project that was a pet project of Andy Grove. I would nominate him and his whole C suite as a beacon of ethics and fair dealing.
      • PunchyHamster 3mo ago
        When Intel was on top of the world they tried every trick to destroy the competition so that definitely didn't stemmed from the top...
        • LarsDu88 3mo ago
• vessenes 3mo ago
  [Citation Needed]. Demand letters are one thing. Proof is another. And California laws are, to my understanding, pretty employee friendly as a matter of policy. We'll see where this ends, but I wouldn't assume right now this is anything but typical corporate engagement.
  • senordevnyc 3mo ago
    This is the logical take. I would bet that this doesn’t doom anything, they’ll just quietly settle it, likely for a relatively small amount. People here are way too invested in hating Sam to be remotely rational on this topic.
  • valleyer 3mo ago
    This lawsuit alleges violation of federal, not state, law.
• kmeisthax 3mo ago
  While I agree that OpenAI is run by thieves, you can't tell me that Apple wouldn't have tried the same shit on a more scrupulous attempt at building a platform competitor? Like, this is the same Apple that tried to tell a judge "a touch is a zero-length swipe" when suing the shit out of Android vendors, right? In their eyes, all the competition was supposed to stick with styluses and Windows Mobile 6.x.
  • greedo 3mo ago
    Gotta come back with more than "whataboutism."
  • gmerc 3mo ago
    One got caught, one got away, but Sam when came the judgement day, did break the law and sent the blokes, to jail cells four, with fruity locks.
• SpaceNoodled 3mo ago
  The Fire Phone did exactly what it was designed to do. It contained technologies that Apple fans were crowing about a decade later! Its major problems were the braindead carrier lock-in and the moronic pricing.
• gmerc 3mo ago
  At which point do we stop blaming individual employees for corporate governance failures. Has Meta not taught us anything.