But actually, that could be a great content authoring strategy: create a really good, smart name for yourself. write articles that the smart people of the internet like to read. give them the wrong answer, they will be forced to correct you. collect replies(including those from you your closed forum) and grab the right answer. publish and charge.
Don't know if that's the strategy. But it could work.
Before Stack Overflow, the savvy knew that this was a great way to get help with anything Unix-related. If you just went to Usenet or mailing lists and asked "how do I X?", you'd be pummeled by uppity greybeards going "RTFM, n00b". Ah, but if you created a sockpuppet and posted the wrong answer in reply to your question, then you'd be guaranteed to get useful advice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham.27s...
I've gotten some great information on forums like this doing exactly that. I usually pose it as a challenging assertion or question rather than a statement of a fact I'm sure about. Gotta balance using that for it's benefit vs effects on one's own reliability.
[1] Which is what happens after an event it then seems as if someone should have known in advance it could have happened the way that it did and taken steps to prevent it from happening the way that it did.
That just comes off to me as though even he didn't realize how ubiquitous phones would become, and how integral to our lives they would become, even replacing computers for so many tasks. It's my phone, my iPod, my work outside of office hours, schedules and times my workouts, my alarm clock, my camera, my GPS and mapbook, my library, my notebook, my flashlight, my scanner, my TV, the way I look at cat pictures and the way I look up where to find an AED in an emergency.
Phone + iPod + Internet communications device...you are pretty much describing a general purpose computer, no?
And if you go back to the keynote, that was kind of the joke. He started out describing these as if they were separate products being introduced. The punch line was it was just one device. In other words, subtly mocking the idea you needed a separate device for each kind of functionality you wanted.
Lastly, Apple was a computer company from top to bottom. How else would they envision a solution to the problem of crappy phones, but to turn them into computers with really good software? That's just who Apple was.
So the idea of the Apple strategy being replacing the mobile phone with a mobile computer is only obvious in hind sight just isn't true, it was obvious as soon as the iPhone was introduced.
I would have suggested the latter, otherwise the system would have been a lot more open.
General purpose computers give purchasers administrator/root access by default. If you don't have that, you have a thin client run by someone else.
No one did, though. Go back and watch that keynote — there's thunderous applause for the iPod and phone portions of that sentence, and (relative) awkward silence for the "internet communicator" bit.
Reading through the Jobs biography, there's a great segment on the development of the iPod wherein Tony Fadell (I believe) details how he was coached to present the best mockups to Steve last.
Given the ordering of the three statements in that sentence you quoted, I have to imagine that someone at Apple — maybe not Steve — understood the eventual ubiquity of the smartphone.
http://www.theverge.com/2017/6/13/15782200/one-device-secret...
The gist of it is the entire company wanted to do a phone because of how cool it would be. The work of three secret teams unbeknownst to Steve Jobs came together in just the right ways to make the iPhone.
"I have a 17-year-old daughter who went to a private school for a few years before high school. This private school is the best school I've seen in my life. It was judged one of the 100 best schools in America. It was phenomenal. The tuition was $5,500 a year, which is a lot of money for most parents. But the teachers were paid less than public school teachers—so it's not about money at the teacher level. I asked the state treasurer that year what California pays on average to send kids to school, and I believe it was $4,400. While there are not many parents who could come up with $5,500 a year, there are many who could come up with $1,000 a year.
If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left. People would get out of college and say, "Let's start a school." You could have a track at Stanford within the MBA program on how to be the businessperson of a school. And that MBA would get together with somebody else, and they'd start schools. And you'd have these young, idealistic people starting schools, working for pennies."
> If we gave vouchers to parents for $4,400 a year, schools would be starting right and left.
But if the public spends $4,400, that's not what goes to the school, since the total includes state and district oversight that is outside of the school.
This money would not be available to alternative schools unless you are suggesting that they should receive public funds without equal accountability.
The i in iMac means internet.
Back in early 2000s, the prevailing silicon valley view is that the internet is and will forever be the greatest thing ever.
The iPod was already a success. Adding a phone to it is merely a formality, and an annoying one at that considering how much negotiations and concessions and leverage had to be applied to Verizon and Cingular before they settled.
But when writing trios, the best is always last.
An internet communications device, an iDevice, is really the evolution of the iMac.
The state of mind at Apple back then is that everyone absolutely knew the iPhone will be ubiquitous.
The iPhone was really mostly an iPod phone with internet thrown in like on the kindle.
This is obviously based 100% on gut feeling :-)
Is that a specific thing, or would you just plan to map it?
http://www.cultofmac.com/125180/steve-jobs-was-originally-de...
“partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth to figure out all the complexities that would be involved in policing third-party app developers.”
So the App Store model answered his objections. It's clear from the quotes in that article, he did want apps, but thought web development technologies would be sufficient. When that turned out not to be the case, looks like they turned to the App Store model so they could lock down the experience and keep the same degree of control as for web apps.
Apparently Mark and Steve discussed this concept very early on.
Just did a whois history search on the domain and it changed hands from SFDC -> Apple on 03/19/2009
The idea of apps emerged as an obvious next step and always felt like a demand by developers and users rather than something planned long ahead in Cupertino.
They started from a clean slate.
Jobs was only looking for 10% of the global mobile phone market in the 2007 keynote announcing the iPhone. The iPhone was so well received it demolished Nokia and RIM's dominance in the space of a few years.
BB was a two way pager (and later email) that they literally crammed audio in to (the first phone version REQUIRED a headset as it didn't have a speaker/mic).
They made the mistake everyone did. They made an X and so they tried to cram new things Y and Z into it because they were an X company. And it limited their vision of what they could do.
Would you not call a ChromeBook a general purpose computer?
I realize there is a contingent on HN who doesn't consider a browser to be a valid virtual machine, and doesn't consider anything a real computer unless they have access to a command prompt. But that's a religious conviction, I don't see any principled difference.
Let me put it this way: the original iPhone, with only mobile Safari, was a more powerful machine in every way than every computer I owned up to probably 1999 or so, with the exception of screen size.
What am I missing?
I can write a Javascript program, stick it on a web server, and load it in the phone's browser. Why can't I edit it on the phone and just run the program from disk? If I wanted to do so, how would I write a program to let me?
I think the core limitations for me are that I don't have direct access to the filesystem, I don't have access to the APIs required to program the device for things that I consider basic capabilities, and the vendor actively fights me being able to do those things. Any holes that they don't hit with OS and API limitations get caught during the app review when you're going to publish your code.
Compare to a Chromebook: There's a Google-provided dev mode that lets me install an OS of my choice, and a chroot environment developed by a Google engineer that gives me access to an unrestricted OS running simultaneously on the machine.
The command prompt's moot; one could theoretically write a GUI for anything and everything that it provides. The browser's "a valid virtual machine", but there are limitations of what I can do with JS, where I can host it to run the programs, and so on.
My 1st gen iPod Touch was cool after I jailbroke it (kind of a wifi-enabled single-board computer). I used to run sshd and rtorrent, and had Perl and a C compiler on it. I do similar things on my Android device running its stock OS.
Steve Jobs and Apple in the 200x years clearly were amazing and did wonderful things, but they did not read the future, they went step by step and built on top of what they had. Some things fell into place, some things went different than expected. I can't prove it, but the shift in how we use our phones nowadays was as visible to Steve Jobs as it was to almost anyone in that field. There were predecessors. Multiple. The goal of the iPhone was to sell things, millions if possible. Everything else was in the range of: "Let's see".
The article makes no such claim about the iPhone. The only evidence you cite is the app store. That does not refute that Apple intended on building, from the start, a "more personal computer" that "reduces the phone to an app" and "gains concessions from [carriers]". That's exactly what the original iPhone was and still is. It even launched with support for 3rd party (web) apps.
It might make for a good analysis true, but trying to mask it as "Let me tell you about everyone's intentions, and on the next slide I show you the future" just puts me off.
(Which wouldn't be an issue if you could install an alternative browser (edit: rendering engine) on it, but it's not open enough for that)
People complain about Safari but it was a REVOLUTION compared to what was available before.
Apple’s goal was not to build a phone but to build an even more personal computer; their strategy was not to add on functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app; and their tactics were not to duplicate the carriers but to leverage their connection with customers to gain concessions from them.
I disagree here, this is hindsight and speculative, and the provided link is from 2013. The initial iPhone did not come with a market (the 'iTunes App Store') and AFAIK we don't know for sure if it had been planned from the beginning to pan out the way it did.
I am not trying to play down the success of the iPhone and how it has changed the world. Yes, it was incredibly successful, yes it all panned out nicely. I am just questioning if it was all planned to come out exactly this way from the beginning, or maybe there were some decisions made after initial success and someone came up with even better ideas.