Re:Joe Hewitt: Android and Open Source
by thwarted on Thursday October 21, 2010 @05:10PM
(#1817457)
To be fair, its been tried a couple of times to build really customizable machines. It is just more expensive from a manufacturing point of view and the market is never really there.
Customizable machines are a billion dollar industry, chances are, you're sitting in front of one right now. It's not a matter of making a customizable machine, we know how to do that. It's a matter of actually allowing the user to customize things, which can be done by allowing core components to be swapped out for alternatives. In this context, the customization doesn't need to be complete/absolute, it just needs to recognize that different users have different needs and work differently. A consumer/home user may find the grid of icons on the iPhone screen to be easy to use, but the business user may want a calendar or email listing on their home screen (interestingly enough, we laugh at the members of both of these groups who end up with a massive grid of icons on their desktops, which is obviously bad for usability ("The link to the website was at the tip of the penis!" -- Sales Guy vs Web Dude). And Android offers the capability for apps to provide this functionality, but Android isn't considered to have Good Design(tm) (or is at least "less" than Apple's design) despite this capability.
Customizable machines are a billion dollar industry, chances are, you're sitting in front of one right now. It's not a matter of making a customizable machine, we know how to do that. It's a matter of actually allowing the user to customize things, which can be done by allowing core components to be swapped out for alternatives. In this context, the customization doesn't need to be complete/absolute, it just needs to recognize that different users have different needs and work differently. A consumer/home user may find the grid of icons on the iPhone screen to be easy to use, but the business user may want a calendar or email listing on their home screen (interestingly enough, we laugh at the members of both of these groups who end up with a massive grid of icons on their desktops, which is obviously bad for usability ("The link to the website was at the tip of the penis!" -- Sales Guy vs Web Dude). And Android offers the capability for apps to provide this functionality, but Android isn't considered to have Good Design(tm) (or is at least "less" than Apple's design) despite this capability.