Two More Weeks

[Peter Korsten]

Op 18-2-2013 22:21, Andrew Tarpinian schreef:

> As we see with android, if it was more generic it may not exist. Whether you like Apple or not, they had the vision to build an audio engine into iOS that gave developers the hooks to dig deep. Android is as you say generic, but their vision is generic too. It's a vision of technology without including art.

The way I see it, Apple is mostly a marketing firm that also sells 
hardware, because otherwise there would be nothing to market. I imagine 
that they have a lot of non-technical people dreaming up new features, 
in meetings that see a lot of buzzwords such as 'synergy', 'the way 
forward' and 'win-win situation'.

Google, in contrast, is more of a firm that thinks 'now what would 
happen if I press this button?', even though there's a big sign saying 
'do not press button – will cause thermonuclear blast'. They just come 
up with a product that often nobody likes (Pulse, Wave, Plus), and 
sometimes it's actually a success (Chrome). Almost everybody working 
there has a PhD, which is a bit of an issue because practically none of 
their customers have one.

In a sense, Apple is doing what it has always done, which is selling 
high-end devices where they control both the software and the hardware. 
Google, on the other hand, is selling a platform, very much like 
Microsoft did in the nineties. So it wouldn't surprise me if things go 
the same way it did with personal computers, unless Apple are willing to 
get lower profit margins, and tap the lower end of the market.

Google, though, needs more direction. I personally prefer Android over 
iOS, but it's crazy that my phone has a 4-core CPU, and yet often it 
takes a few seconds for the messaging to come up. And this has gotten 
worse as time progresses.

> The good news is by accident (or maybe on purpose) the excuse of a phone has thrust us into the future of computers.

Well, that I'm not so sure about. Computers at home, maybe or even 
probably, but computers at work, no. There's no way I could do my day 
job on a 10" screen, without a keyboard and mouse. Things will 
diversify, though.

> Actually probably over 10 years ago I heard a talk at a video editing confernce about how we would be moving away from the desktop into a future where instead the computers we would use would actually just live in the devices we use, camera's etc..

Well, apparently my favourite car maker is going to run its in-car 
entertainment and navigation system on Android. And the first Android 
cameras are here as well. But rather than replacing the desktop 
entirely, we'd be using devices like these for things that we didn't 
have any better solution than the desktop. But let's face it: you're not 
going to do word processing, spreadsheets or graphic design on a tablet. 
Because you would see that a new message had come in, you'd check 
Facebook, look at photos of cats... :-)

- Peter