Companies can iterate on their products much faster if they're not required to publish all of their functionality as public APIs. Once the APIs have been published, it's much harder for them to be changed.
Doing this also puts them at the mercy of whether or not client applications are willing to support their new functionality. Maybe YouTube wants clients to adopt some feature, but a powerful client application doesn't like that feature and so won't support it.
The protocol/platform lock-in is a problem, but preserving companies' ability to iterate quickly on features is also very important.
The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.
For the data side, likely any requirements wouldn't go into effect until a dataset is deemed sufficiently large/societally important, and there could be a period of exclusivity similarly to the patent system to encourage innovation. This system works very well for new drug creation, with competitors free to copy the drug for pennies on the dollar after patent expiry, so I very much doubt it would stifle innovation in tech, especially given the lower capital requirements to innovate.
I'm not suggesting at all the government mandates private companies implement a public write api into their own datacenter. I'm suggesting the privately hosted data must be replicatable and thus hostable by competitors. Likely the practical way to do this, technically, is to support a public kafka/persistent eventing system such that anybody can firehose all historical and new data. Ideally with funding help.
Hosting data is cheaper than ever, and continues to deflate in cost. The companies in this line of fire are already quasi-monopoly behemoths, so I don't buy into the cost-prohibitive/stifling innovation perspective.
> The company doesn't need to expose custom APIs on their data. If they implement a chat protocol, they must allow other clients to interface with it.
And how would that work without a way to talk to the company’s chat server, and document the way to do that, and commit to keeping that way of communicating reasonably stable? In other words, an API?
Which implies sort of a commitment to the way that chat protocol works, maybe even before the company knows how that looks like. Modern development methodology, that is, working in sprints and iterating towards a local maximum, doesn’t really go well with an API that’s required to work pretty much stable from day one. So when would the point in time be where you’d be required to open up to other clients?
not really. An API doesn’t necessarily have to be a HTTP interface. A data schema is also an API, if the documents are made available. The endpoints where that data is available is. And you still need heaps of documentation that someone needs to maintain. Not every system has simple to, from, and content fields.
Most of the APIs that do get published or standardized are so large and complex that they form a kind of regulatory capture. Almost nobody but the biggest boys can afford to make them. Add a few laws that increase overhead, and Bob's yer Uncle.
"Public API" doesn't mean you can't change the API, nor does it limit how quickly extensions or new versions can be added to that API. It just means you have to actually inform people of what you're changing and when.
If a client application refuses to implement functionality, that's on them, not the original developer. If I want the new feature, I'll switch.
These days however, new features nowadays are usually things I don't want. Not strictly outright anti-features, but usually completely pointless "Bob needs a bonus[0]" changes that lets a middle manager put something good in their promo packet. The whole reason why people want compatible file formats and third-party clients is specifically so we can dictate to the originator of those formats and protocols how and how fast they can iterate on their products and limit how bad they can deliberately make them to increase profits.
* There are many more integration points between their products now. Shipping only the Mac or only the Mac and an iPod or even a first gen iPhone that can only get data into system apps via a USB cable is very simple compared to what they're making today. For Apple's best-cast customer, who owns a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple TV, an Apple Watch, and who uses iCloud, how many integration points are involved now? Integration points are like the exponent on software complexity. It's where software goes to die.
* They are still essentially a fat client company that's trying to build more cloud-oriented applications. This leads to additional complexity in the product that other companies just don't have to deal with. An obvious example that jumps to mind is iTunes vs. Spotify. If iTunes was just Apple's version of Spotify, how much better would it be?
* Brain drain. Apple's stock made a lot of people a lot of money, and if you work there, you can't participate in the mobile revolution they started. Steve Jobs's passing could also be a natural book end for people in their careers to try something new, or find a job where they're not working 80 hours regularly, or to just take some time off.
I guess the last one isn't really "concrete", and is more just me speculating, but I threw it out there because of a decent amount of anecdotal evidence I've seen. Here are some other things that are also just speculative but interesting to consider:
* Apple is a product company that succeeds or fails on innovation. As capable of an executive as Tim Cook clearly is, he's not a product person. How does this trickle down into the product development process?
* Product development was micromanaged by Steve Jobs basically until he died. That leaves a HUGE vacuum in an organization and executive team he built to amplify his personal strengths and weaknesses. Who is filling that vacuum now? Is it Jony Ive? Does his new role of "Chief Design Officer" mean he's kind of the new Steve Jobs, in charge of product design, retail stores, office space, etc.?
* If Jony Ive has the final say of all software still (not clear to me in this new role), how good is he at software? How interested is he in it personally? He clearly loves the physical design of things. Steve clearly loved software. If Jony is in charge, does he have that love as well? Does he devote the time and attention into the software as he does with the hardware? Or, to take the iTunes example again, is Eddy Cue basically in charge of that product?
* How good are the people there at software design without Steve? There's a great story about Steve Jobs coming into an iDVD design meeting where he ignored what the team came up with and drew a window on a whiteboard with one area to drag files and one button that says "burn".[1] Is that just one story? How important was that to the day-to-day of the products they shipped? Who does that now?
The key point to me is that, according to Steve himself, Apple is a software company.[2] They make hardware so they can make really great software. Software is what's most important, and I hope stories like this are a bit of a wake up call to re-center their focus on what's truly important.
> There's just no way in hell Steve Jobs would be putting up with this
Says everyone who disagrees with any decision Apple makes. "Steve would have had the same opinion about this I do!" Statements like this are just you projecting your own opinion onto him.
How's that? To search the web, I'd go to DuckDuckGo or Bing or whatever. Other companies also provide web mail, maps, office document solutions, etc. Google's definitely better at those things, but using a worse version of those products would not cause the world to "screech to a halt."
Probably the most disruptive thing if Apple vanished would actually be every tech company suddenly needing to figure out how to use Windows or desktop Linux.
As far as "screech to a halt." is concerned, it's maybe a little on the exaggerated side, but I'd believe it. I've worked for 5 different companies of varying sizes from 5 to 1000 employees. All of them have used Google Apps to run their business. Email, Calendars, Docs, Basically the Apps suite in it's entirety is the core of communicating and information storage.
There's arguments for backups, etc but in reality if the common business person working at these companies sits down and none of their Google products work, their day will halt.
Having worked on the Drive team, I can assure you Google Apps (which includes GMail, the Docs editors, and Drive) has much more than 50 million. A quick search on public figures for these services will give better numbers.
Edit: Those are Apps for Work numbers, excluding consumers - obviously you can't compare just a subset with a total.
User Interface. Dropbox presented a beautifully clean metaphor for how your files get synced. It doesn't matter if you understand what "the cloud" is. My grandmother understands: "put things in folder, folder available elsewhere".
On the other hand we've got Google Drive. Is GMail using Google drive? Is Google Photos using Google Drive? Why don't folders other people have shared to me not appear in my folder? Why isn't 'Shared with Me' the same as "Mine". Is Google Drive the same thing as Google Docs?
Not to mention - Dropbox really pushed the "Desktop App", while Google Drive pushed the "Web First" approach. Add on referral bonuses, Dropbox had some good solid adoption - well, at least among free users.
I use both extensively - Dropbox Pro for everything personal, and Google Drive for everything at work, and I still get confused about the where I saved/shared files to in Google Drive.
> Google Apps has 50 million users, iCloud has 125 million
That source is pretty old and cites an even older source (it looks like it may be from Google I/O 2012). Searching for "Google Apps has 50 million users" actually gives articles from last year saying they have 50 million education users alone, so I'd say the number is a pretty extreme lowshot now.
But more importantly, why would you compare Google Apps and iCloud? The closer thing would be Android backup and iCloud, maybe?
We could probably think of alternatives for most of these things, but there are a lot of people who just use what came with their phone/browser.
Additionally, think of all of the Google-backed services out there provided by other companies. How many companies use gmail heavily that would lose all kinds of records?
Normal people would lose their e-mail too, and businessmen would lose a lot of their calendars. The actual solution doesn't matter as much as the data already invested in Google's solutions that would be lost if Google just vanished.
The world wouldnt screech to a halt though. We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010. People who used Google services were very upset. Replacements sprung up and quickly improved. They never caught up to Google but they were good enough, along with propaganda and the threat of prison, to keep people from making more of a commotion.
The biggest loss to humanity (in my opinion) would be all the translation data they hold privately. But Google really just people and money. If Google the entity disappeared tomorrow all those people who still know how to do the work will just start working on it elsewhere and catch up quickly.
> We're talking about what would happen if Google disappeared and its not a hypothetical situation. It happened in China for a five year period starting in 2010.
My bad. I was thinking about what would happen if Google disappeared as in, one day their servers and services just aren't available for whatever reason, rather than a staged transition/fade out.
None search engine comes close to Google atm.
Also Google marketing and SEO employs a much, much bigger number of people than people working as a freelancers related directly to Apple I assume. (not employees, the freelancers and companies that use the Google/Apple as platform to run their businesses)
I love the idea of DuckDuckGo, and I used them for a year or so before I realized every other search resulted in frustration and me appending a !ge to it. So yes, there are alternatives, but I don't find them to be nearly as good.
Please don't spread information that is factually incorrect, especially not if it concerns a small company trying to compete with a much larger one.
"In fact, DuckDuckGo gets its results from over four hundred sources. These include hundreds of vertical sources delivering niche Instant Answers, DuckDuckBot (our crawler) and crowd-sourced sites (like Wikipedia, stored in our answer indexes). We also of course have more traditional links in the search results, which we primarily source from Yahoo!, and in some regions and scenarios, Yandex and Bing.
I think there's almost no chance that the percentage of iOS users blocking ads is enough to meaningfully impact Wired's overall revenue from that story. Even given that ad blocking apps have been top sellers, it's still only available on iOS 9, which has been out less than a week. So surely revenue from all web users (without an ad blocker) outweigh the (presumably) tiny amount of ad revenue Wired will earn from Apple News. And even if all that were false, why would Wired alone give in so readily to what's basically bullying? It's just not a credible theory.
Way more likely is that Apple is paying them a nice chunk of cash for the exclusivity to help market their News app. Same thing they did with HBO Now for the Apple TV, and with various albums for the iTunes Store and Apple Music.
My understanding of Apple News is that it has nothing to do with iOS 9 content blocking. Apple News is a dedicated app that functions somewhat like an RSS reader serving up a special Readability-style version of the content. Even if you don't install an ad-blocker in iOS 9, you still don't see banner ads and such in Apple News.
That said, I imagine you're right and Apple just paid for the exclusive for marketing purposes.
The point that is being made is that by cutting off a fraction of mobile ad revenue by allowing blockers, Apple might be seen to be cynically herding content providers towards its walled-garden platform wherein iAd is the exclusive provider of adverts, which cannot be blocked. Whether this is the true intention of their strategy or merely a coincidence is a matter of some (understandably contentious) debate.
Every single user could block ads until mobile began taking over. Media companies hyping how damaging ad blockers are this past week and a half is that they have successfully created mass awareness that you may block ads.
If you are a publisher there are scripts and tools you may use to detect ad blockers. I would recommend running one.
Software in smart TVs need drastic changes. I won't go over the problems with the ui right now as I feel they are all pretty obvious, but what I think needs to get pushed is the connection between TVs and phones. Samsung is already starting to do this by having IR blasters on the galaxy phones and having ways to use to use the phone keyboards as a replacement for the on screen ones but it can go so much farther.
For example, parental controls should be available through your phone. You should be able to see what your kid is watching and also force them to watch something else "remotely", even if you're on vacation. or maybe they are staying up too late and you turn the TV off for them.
There are many other ideas but that sounds like one of the more useful ones as opposed to being more gimmicky (like gesture commands).
Totally agree. Samsung makes great hardware, but consistently fails at putting decent firmware/software on it. I've had numerous Samsung smartphones and all have performed so much better with pure Android vs. the Samsung "improved" Android.
Their TVs seem to be getting better at least. Some previous Samsung TV's I've owned have been atrocious in the UI department.
> Elop needs to go now. What an ass clown. It's been a while since we've seen someone with such bad ideas making such horrible decisions, one after another. He reaped what he sowed, and the board can thank him for decimating a once fantastic phone company.
Shipping phones running Android is far from a guarantee of success. Indeed, only Samsung is doing well with Android right now, and even then only in the last year or so. Every single other Android handset maker is struggling. Android turns your hardware into a commodity, just as Windows turned PC hardware into a commodity. It's very hard to overcome this simple fact, even if you do make great hardware (see the HTC One). Don't take my word for it, ask HTC, ask LG, ask Motorola/Google, and so on.
Elop surely doesn't deserve to be dismissed as an "ass clown" for adopting what almost every critic agrees is a first rate phone OS. If Windows Phone had just a tiny bit of momentum, partnering with Microsoft would be a great strategy for establishing differentiation from Apple and the various Android phones.
Agreed that Android is not an easy gig for mobile-phone manufacturers; it isn't intended to be, after all. But if you look at why Samsung has done well with Android, the reasons appear to be 1) a fairly consistent record of delivering strong hardware, in good time 2) decent public brand recognition and loyalty and 3) not screwing around too badly with the Android software. All of the Android also-rans seem to have had significant problems with at least two of those. Nokia has 1) and 2) pretty much nailed, so if it could only restrain itself on 3) it would be in a position to contest the top of the Android pile with Samsung.
There's also Nokia's strength in featurephones and in the developing world; to maintain that position it will need a smartphone OS it can take to the real masses in the fairly near future. No-one is even suggesting that WinPho can play that role. Android may or may not be the best candidate for the role, but if OP is correct then Nokia's MS relationship hasn't just precluded it from putting Android on entry-level smartphones, it has prevented Nokia from deploying any other smartphone OS at all.
Some android vendors are struggling, because they fucked it up, plain and simple.
Who would buy LG, once they had one in past? Nobody, exactly, chalk it up to bad experience.
Who would buy HTC, if they had Thunderbolt in the past? Or how they didn't support their other models? Who would take risk with the HTC One? That would do only those, who weren't burned by HTC in the past.
See the trend?
Samsung, on the other hand, is successful, because their products are actually good. Someone who had SGS2 in the past has no reason to avoid Samsung in the future.
I had the same problem with a rMBP. Apple replaced mine at the Apple Store even though I couldn't show them the problem while I was there. They even gave me the extra charging brick that came in the new machine's box.
I have a friend with a base model rMBP who took it into the Apple Store, and they replaced his with the maxed out model because that's the only configuration they had left in stock.
"I have a friend with a base model rMBP who took it into the Apple Store, and they replaced his with the maxed out model because that's the only configuration they had left in stock."
That surprised me - I was looking at an MBP purchase at an Apple Store (fairly large one, Tacoma WA).
My options were only 4GB and various sizes of HDDs.
They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not.
They offered to install more memory, but at the (already extortionate Apple price) cost of the full 8GB (and give me 4GB back).
I ended up buying a Vaio Z, and have been fantastically happy with it: Carbon Fiber body, 13" 2.5lb, with a better processor (Core i7 3612), better screen (1920x1080), better graphics, and 8GB of memory. Oh, and it was cheaper.
> They "did not" stock 8GB models, or SSD models. Not "were out of", but did not.
This is a Retina MacBook Pro, not the "traditional" MacBook Pros with the optical drive. All Retina MacBook Pros have SSDs, so I'm not sure what models you were looking at. In any event, Apple does carry the fully maxed out Retina MacBook Pro in the stores. I know because I bought one myself.
Linux itself works fine - I installed Ubuntu 12.04 for a while, but am now back with Windows 8. To be honest, I never tried the power dock - at home I use my desktop, and only use my laptop away from the desk.
Doing this also puts them at the mercy of whether or not client applications are willing to support their new functionality. Maybe YouTube wants clients to adopt some feature, but a powerful client application doesn't like that feature and so won't support it.
The protocol/platform lock-in is a problem, but preserving companies' ability to iterate quickly on features is also very important.