Steve Jobs Wanted an iPhone-Only Wireless Network 263
jfruhlinger writes "One of the more profound ways that the iPhone changed the mobile industry was the fact that it upended the relationship between the handset maker and the wireless carrier: Apple sells many of its phones directly to customers, and in general has much more of an upper hand with carriers than most phone manufacturers. But venture capitalist John Stanton, who was friends with Steve Jobs in the years when the iPhone was in development, said the Apple CEO's initial vision was even more radical: he wanted Apple to build its own wireless network using unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum, thus bypassing the carriers altogether."
lack of understanding (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Apple's Future (Score:5, Informative)
"Every thing they do is so closed and exclusive. They never extended a hand to the open source community."
I'm sorry, you're terribly confused. Or a troll:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/ [apple.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) [wikipedia.org]
http://www.webkit.org/ [webkit.org]
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/12/apple-joins-openjdk-to-open-source-mac-os-x-java-technology/ [techcrunch.com]
http://alac.macosforge.org/ [macosforge.org]
Etc.
A.
Re:Apple's Future (Score:5, Informative)
OpenSource for other projects, but not in the development of any of their products. Not if they could help it anyway.
Let's see...
- Darwin Streaming Server
- mDNSResponder
- ALAC
- Calendar and Contacts Server
- libdispatch / Grand Central Dispatch
- etc.
http://www.macosforge.org/ [macosforge.org] is where the more generally useful items outside of OSX wind up. FreeBSD picked up the libdispatch items and ran with it.
Republic Wireless (Score:2, Informative)
Republic Wireless is an new carrier (Virtual Network actually) that relies on its customers using Wifi for calls, texts, and other services http://republicwireless.com
Re:It's The Standards, Stupid (Score:4, Informative)
How would that be proof of anything? You've cited a single data point (which only exists as an unsubstantiated rumor) as proof of a trend that's allegedly endemic within the company.
I won't deny that they do use some standards that are not interoperable (e.g. their iBooks format), but most of their devices are designed to play nice with the major formats, protocols, and devices out there already, and many of their biggest protocols or formats are either shared or are available to other companies or developers interested in making their devices play with Apple's network or devices. For instance, Bluetooth and wi-fi are the same as everyone else's, AirPlay is available for device manufacturers to license, the AAC files iTunes uses run on a variety of players, their work on h.264 went on to become the industry standard, and their devices sync with OSes other than their own and a plethora of online services besides their own. That covers wireless communication, audio, video, and the cloud, and it'd be trivial to list off dozens of other industry standard file formats that they open up or export, just the same as the other major OSes.
If you had said it was proof of a proprietary solution to a problem, I'd have gone for that, but to suggest they're not interested in interoperability is either a misuse of the term or a choice to ignore almost everything they did from when Steve Jobs returned through to the present. I make no claims of them having embraced interoperability prior to that point, but since 1997 or so, they've made a number of strides towards making things as painless for consumers as possible, and that meant making their devices work with devices they hadn't made.
When did we start talking about Wal-Mart? (Score:5, Informative)
Neither Microsoft nor Apple are even in the top 100 largest companies in the world.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2011/ [cnn.com]
Cats seem very large to mice, I suppose, so we technical types tend to overestimate the power of tech companies.