Posted by
Robert J. Cordingley on
Jun 01, 2010; 1:49pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-new-evil-empire-tp5123132p5126057.html
Owen
Why are cars better than boats (to extend your vehicle metaphor)? Is
it the promise of flying cars, amphibious cars, submarine cars, etc.
etc. ?
Perhaps the truth lies in what the user (public) is prepared to buy
into (literally) and price performance. We are suckers for hype.
Then there is the painless payment models that Apple has tapped into
and perhaps the painless app development environment so anyone can make
an 'app'.
Tom has a point about 'horses for courses' (tho' he didn't use the
phrase). Web latency kills some application ideas. Insufficient
computing power kills others. The browser computing overhead can get
in the way. But browsers, desk(lap)tops, smart phones, tvs, bicycles
still have a place. Standards will continue to be discussed. Computing
power continues to increase. Developers will load up software
(including browsers) to take advantage of increasing hardware power.
Gadgets are great. The sun will rise in the east. Technical
convergence is fine until someone finds a business opportunity in
divergence.
Aren't creativity, innovation, cost externalization, proprietary
technologies, free enterprise great?
Mind you, I think Apple has a real long term problem with developers'
needs to create once and deliver on multiple platforms. Meanwhile,
Apple makes hay while the sun shines, so this too will change.
The world is made of two kinds of people:
- Those who like to make it complicated and those who then try to
make it easy. Urban environments are complicated, apps let you
navigate them.
- Those who want to digitize everything and those who want to make
it analog. Capturing the world digitally in cameras, sound recorders,
film, smart phones, etc, then play it back in a way that makes it seem
continuous.
- Those who think the world is made of two kinds of people and
those who see a richness in culture beyond measure.
I'm not sure why you sound so surprised. May be you aren't. The quick
answer is "they are not" (it's really a loaded question)!
Thanks
Robert C
On 5/31/10 9:48 PM, Owen Densmore wrote:
I think an interesting question is "why are apps better
than web-apps?". In other words, we were all on the bus that felt the
browser was the new OS, and that web-apps were the new replacement for
"old fashioned" desktop apps. But now we find we were wrong, folks
preferred apps after all.
Why? What is the evolution we're seeing? After all, wasn't
last month's discussion about Flash vs HTML/CSS/JavaScript standards?
Where in heck did these puny little apps (not web-apps) come from?
Is the browser not the OS of the future? Are apps back? Have
we lost platform-independence?
What's going on?! :)
On May 31, 2010, at 5:42 PM, Saul Caganoff wrote:
The paragraph before your quote is pretty interesting too.
Interesting tension between developers who want to monetize their apps
and consumers who want everything free. Perhaps the App Store model is
a good compromise where $2.99 is close enough to free to suit everyone.
Apple
prefers the app model for two big reasons. First, it makes their
products stickier, since you’re not just buying an iPad, you’re buying
Apple’s whole system for delivering stuff onto the iPad. Second, it
seems that people are willing to pay for apps while they are unwilling
to pay for anything through a browser. So people will pay $1.99 for an
app that plays some game when you can already play the same game for
free on a web site somewhere. Maybe people think of apps as standalone
objects that have some value and that they can buy, while they see web
sites just as destinations that they go to and that should be free. But
as long as people will pay for apps, that means that Apple can make
money by selling them to you — and by preventing developers from
selling them to you directly.
Sent from my iPhone
From:
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/30/personal-computing-apple-google-2/
- Sent using Google Toolbar
Apple wants to be the new
Microsoft. It wants you to buy applications that run locally on your
computer iPad, and it
sees its competitive advantage as having the most developers and the
most applications (hence all those “there’s an app for that” ads). As
Microsoft showed, if you can get a lead and become the developers’
platform of choice, you can benefit from network effects. ...
In April, Apple
changed the terms of the iPhone developer
agreement to prevent developers from using cross-compilers to create
iPhone apps. A cross-compiler is a tool that allows you to take an
application you wrote for one platform, push a button, and repackage
the application for another platform (in this case, iPhone OS). The
immediate target of this was Adobe, which was developing a tool that
would enable developers to take Flash apps, push a button, and make
them into iPhone apps. This simplest explanation for this is that
Apple, as the market leader, wants to make it
harder for
people to develop for multiple platforms at the same time. “Write once,
run anywhere” — the slogan of Java, but also the essence of developing
for the web — is
bad for Apple, and they want to make it as
hard as possible. (
John Gruber makes a different argument that Apple
wants control over their platform and doesn’t want cross-compilers
between it and the developers, but that interpretation is not
inconsistent with mine.) In other words, if you’re number one, then
openness just helps the competition, because if developers have to
choose just one platform, they’re going to choose yours.
So Apple is competitive; we knew that already. And they don’t want to
repeat the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s; we knew that already, too.
But I think the important point is that they are promoting a model of
personal computing where most of the developers write for the iPhone
OS, and if you want to use their applications you have to buy an Apple
hardware product.
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org