Larry Ellison Believes Apple Is Doomed 692
Nerval's Lobster writes "Oracle CEO Larry Ellison thinks that Apple will collapse without Steve Jobs at the helm. In a televised interview with CBS News, scheduled to air August 13, Ellison called the deceased Jobs 'brilliant' and compared him to iconic creators such as Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso. When asked about Apple's future now that Jobs is dead, Ellison didn't hold back: 'We already know, we saw — we conducted the experiment, it's been done.' Raising his hand above his head, presumably to indicate the rise of Apple's fortunes during Jobs' initial reign, Ellison said: 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs.' Then he lowered his hand: "We saw Apple without Steve Jobs." In other words, the period following Jobs' ouster, when the company's revenues declined and it launched whole portfolios of consumer products that failed. 'We saw Apple with Steve Jobs,' Ellison continued, raising his hand above his head again — this time, to suggest that incandescent period following Jobs' return to the company, when it released the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and a variety of bestselling PCs. 'And now, we're going to see Apple without Steve Jobs,' he finished, and his hand fell."
Larry on the NSA Spying (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, Larry thinks the NSA program of collecting everything is "excellent" and "necessary".
Larry also is whining about Google adhering to the Sun Java license as it was written and intended. Larry would prefer they send him large amounts of money instead.
Larry can go to his private Hawaiian island fuck himself.
Jobs "brilliant"!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Brilliant as a salesman, yes. As a tweaker, and idea thief, yes,
As an inventor - "like Edison", an innovator?? HECK NO!!!
Jobs invented NOTHING, as far as technology.
A shocking statement (Score:5, Insightful)
The Myth of the Irreplaceable CEO (Score:5, Insightful)
CEO's get paid obscene amounts of money. It's reasonable to expect them to justify such a lavish outlay by telling the public how "unique," "indispensable," and "valuable they are.
News at 11.
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, I'll bite. Without using brand names, please tell me what you can do (e.g., use cases) with an iOS device that you can't do with an Android device of equal or lessor price?
Re:Actually I wouldn't be surprised. (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, look at iOS 7: It's a mishmash of awkward design language, with inconsistencies and a flat, boring look that likely never would have been approved by Steve. All that lovely texture that iOS had is gone. People are already complaining about it and I'm sure there will be an even bigger uproar once it goes public.
People complaining loudly about how Apple's next version of iOS or OS X is going to suck is not exactly a new thing. I've been a Mac user since 2003, and I have been watching this theater since... 2003.
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm the opposite... almost every time I have to open "ES Explorer", I die a little inside. I'm too cheap to buy an iPhone, though. I bought two on eBay just to use for a while, but currently I have a cheap Android. Both OSes have their strengths - I'd say that iOS is a bit more pain-free and Android is more fun to geek out with. My kids use my old iPhones as iPods, and we have a Kindle tablet - the iPad Mini was not out at the time and the full-sized iPad is way to rich for my blood.
Re:Jobs "brilliant"!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, he invented the fictional Steve Jobs that hipsters thought was cool.
Re: Oracle is not a competitor. (Score:5, Insightful)
Clearly you don't work with databases. They are the 900 pound gorilla of that market.
Re:I really hate when Ellison is right (Score:4, Insightful)
He was also the reality check for the ideas.
Just look at how iTunes has spun out of control since his death. The versions released since then are disasters, with common tasks now obscured or seemingly not available anymore.
Steve would have torn the whole team new assholes and then fired them for the POS that is iTunes today.
When the marketing weenies take charge, the company is doomed. All they know is a stupid check list of what's supposed to be cool and competitor's features.
Sounds legit... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because Ellison is so credible.
Nobody believes Larry Ellison (Score:5, Insightful)
"...wealth isn't the same thing as intelligence." -Larry Ellison
I don't "do" Apple but hearing Larry Ellison postulate about the future is laughable. The guy got all his money through vendor lock-in and insane licensing models. If he was that bright, he'd be more innovative.
Re:Edison = Jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
The world needs dicks like Jobs and Edison. They get things done. Woz is definitely the more brilliant mind among the two, yet what grand mark did he leave us with after the Apple II? With Jobs you can point to the Mac (the first one and the reborn NeXT one), the iPod, the iPad, and the iPhone (not to mention some really nice animated movies). You have to give him some credit towards legal, affordable, mainstream music downloads - eventually DRM free, no less. Sure, he was a colossal dick, and by all accounts a weird, picky, self-centered dude. But the man knew what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. Things got done, and he changed several markets that he decided to enter into.
Edison is the same way. Yeah, he gambled and lost on DC power. Yeah, Tesla was by far the more brilliant man. But the world needs managers, too - and Edison was a master at managing large teams toward a goal... or at least he was far better at it than most other people at the time. The result? Tesla did a bunch of cool things, but his biggest contributions came when he was working for someone else. Edison, on the other hand, get's credited for a staggering number of inventions that his team cranked out - and which shaped the world of the time. Phonograph, carbon microphone, practical lightbulb, alkaline battery, and numerous electricity-related innovations...
I LIKE Woz better, and I think he's a better role model. Tesla is way cooler. But I'm glad Edison existed and I'm glad Jobs knew better than Xerox what the world would buy.
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
People keep saying Android is eating Apple's lunch, yet Apple had revenues of $35.6 Billion of which $6.9 Billion was profit... And that was during a down quarter when they had no new devices released and sales started to drop off as people wait for the next iDevice. $6.9 Billion... with a 'B'.... That's a lot of money. They're hardly in any financial pain over Android's growth.
Re:CEOs are overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Sculley, who bet the farm on the Newton, which bombed? Sculley, who fractured the Mac lineup into a large number of similar and confusing models? Sculley, who had Apple branch out into every random consumer electronic category he could think of, including digital cameras, videogame consoles, CD players, speakers, television STBs, and even television/computer hybrids, every single one of which flopped?
Things didn't necessarily get much better after he was fired, but his lack of vision and direction are part of the reason that Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy when Jobs took over and got the investment from Microsoft.
Say what you will about Jobs, he was very good at simplifying the product lineup and focusing on a vision. Still, I think that Apple ousting Steve jobs was the best thing that ever happened to both Jobs and Apple. For Jobs, particularly, the experience of the NeXT disaster was extremely educational.
Steve knew something everyone else never quite got - there are people who will spend a lot of money on an image product. His first Macs were nothing special, performance-wise, but set a new style benchmark. PC clones were ugly, beige, cumbersome and suddenly there was this Bang & Olufsen sort of style which looked great on a desktop. Every product since was about materials and style.
Re: Oracle is not a competitor. (Score:4, Insightful)
Doomed (Score:4, Insightful)
We are all doomed.
In a billion years or so the Andromeda galaxy will collide with our galaxy.
A few billion after that the sun will run out of Hydrogen and Helium and turn into a red giant.
Theres also a risk of a major meteor impact wiping out 90% of all life on this planet.
And global warming etc.
Re:CEOs are overrated (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve knew something everyone else never quite got - there are people who will spend a lot of money on an image product. His first Macs were nothing special, performance-wise, but set a new style benchmark. PC clones were ugly, beige, cumbersome and suddenly there was this Bang & Olufsen sort of style which looked great on a desktop. Every product since was about materials and style.
Performance benchmarks are for nerds to masturbate to, being able to get stuff done is what normal people care about. If you were to compare the speed at which you could take one of those colorful CRT iMacs out of the box and be on the internet compared with unboxing a PC and connecting to the internet, the iMac would win by hours.
You can talk about how you think image was the only reason why people bought them but in reality regular people just wanted a machine that worked and let them get on the internet without having to consult a nerd. The CRT iMac was that machine which is why it put Apple back into the black again.
Getting on the internet on those iMac
Step 1: remove iMac, keyboard, mouse and power cable from the box.
Step 2: plug in power cable into back of iMac and wall socket.
Step 3. plug in keyboard and mouse.
Step 4. plug phone cord into phone socket in back of iMac and wall.
Step 5. Turn on iMac
Step 6. Launch AOL.
curious, as Oracle has its challenges growing (Score:5, Insightful)
resentment over the sky-high support fees, snaky sales pitches, bait-and-switch product lineup, and failure to patch Java holes has never been (climbs on ladder, out window, up fire escape, stands on chimney, raises hand) higher...
Not like Thomas Edison (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Actually I wouldn't be surprised. (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve would have likely insisted that they find a way to build the iPhone out of its current materials but less expensively, and I'm sure the engineers would have lived up to the challenge.
He was a perfectionist, and while I didn't agree with all his decisions, his absolute refusal to compromise and insist that everything be exactly right is what led to Apple becoming what it is. I already see things going downhill and it's not going to be pretty moving forward.
I agree that Jobs has been responsible for a lot of good things, but he was accepting of imperfect products. If you thought otherwise, then you are an example of Steve's most valuable talent. His cult-like brainwashing of consumers has largely kept the demands of shareholders at bay. Going to follow that attack up with quick example other than Antennagate:
Remember when Macbook Airs lost their backlit keyboard? ... surely they didn't think this was something users wanted. Not even the most versatile touch typers are going to avoid looking at the keyboard SOMEtimes, at the very least to adjust their screen brightness. They put it back in a later model, but that decision just reeked of taking a beautiful product and trimming down the expenses, counting on reputation to facilitate user acceptance.
Back when Dell first came out, they were churning out beautiful products. When you opened up a Dell machine, you saw high-end. Let's talk keyboard again. Dell sold a $100 keyboard that was quiet, with keys firmly held in place. The letters were nicely printed on each key, beneath a smooth surface. It was getting old, so I looked forward to my next Dell, with a new keyboard. The new Dell arrived, and the keyboard was priced $50. The keys were shaky and slightly noisier. You could feel the printed letters on each key. It seemed so cheap that I frantically called Dell, asking if I could buy the previous model. They no longer sold it, thinking users were okay with a cheaper product, since they now just bought Dell based on its high-quality reputation. I think this strategy worked, but their reputation for quality is long gone. Michael Dell buying back Dell makes complete sense, because the company needs a major overhaul that shareholders are unlikely to be accepting of. I see Apple, without the brainwashing icon that is Steve Jobs, falling slowly but surely down the same path.
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:3, Insightful)
Everything about Android is so broken people are just waiting for another cheap alternative to come along. Google should count themselves lucky that Microsoft is incompetent.
Re:CEOs are overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
The
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:5, Insightful)
...and having to use that hideous iTunes app is an even greater agony.
and there you have it. iTunes is one of the most horrendous applications I've ever used. When I got my wife to switch to android she said "But how do I put music on it?!?!" so I clicked on the device and said "See that folder called music? Put it in there." all she said was "wow"
"See that folder music? Put it in there" is an absolutely horrible way to deal with music, unless all you have is one album. The overview and management of a tool like iTunes is indispensable when you have a large music library... I have 24 k items, mostly lossless audio, after all of my non-SACDs discs have been moved into the basement. Folders just don't cut it, and "put it in the music folder" don't scale at all.
The good thing about a folder interface is that someone else can recreate their vision of iTunes and use that to achieve the same thing. Not that you can do it yourself, that's masochism.
As a side note, spotify and others of that ilk are making this less and less necessary.
Credit to the current leadership (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A watch? (Score:4, Insightful)
...ok, I'll bite. I bought my android phone because it has a physical keyboard, a better processor, the same amount of RAM, and the same amount of storage as an iphone, while being cheaper and giving me more control over the software than Apple does. Does this make me a "fandroid"? Dunno, you tell me. All I care about is that my mobile device needs are met. Apple can't do that for me.
Comparing memory and CPU of an Android phone with an Apple phone makes little sense - from the reviews I read, phones with similar or equal specs to Apple's then top of the line often run sluggishly. Android needs more memory to run. Personally, I think being able to use Java and using more memory is a trade off well worth taking - but it means you don't compare oranges to oranges in this area.
Android's great strength is it's flexibility - you want a phone that's way too big to be practical? Check. Got a small, nice one that fits in your pocket? Check. Got a rugged, water tight phone? Check. Want a really cheap phone that's basically a feature phone? Check. Apple has decided on what is the best form factor - and I'm inclined to agree that it's the best single one. But Android has that, and every other base covered....
Jobs vision was Eberharts vision (Score:3, Insightful)
Sheesh, people try to measure apple in dollars or think of it as a bauhaus design center of shiny curved minimalist objects just don't understand what the vision always has been. Once you understand what Job's vision was, you can then decide if apple has it still or not. I'm undecided because on fiscal year of change is not the way to measure this.
When I think about the Jobs trajectory from apple through Next to the iphone I used to see it as a story about early adoption of technologies that let software replace hardware. e.g. the apple had refreshing of dynamic memory backsided on the video, and soft sectored disks, and replacing of parallel ports and UARTs with software system.
But when the iphone came out I finally realized that his vision was really fulfilling the Eberharts vision of the future in the mother of all demos. He was the translator of high concept computer science into consumer products. The iphone was the first truly practical ubiquitous reconfigurable hardware widget. It instantly transformed itself from one single purpose specialized appliance to another at the press of a single button. Each concrete form was single purpose and specialize not some do-it all device making it easy to on the user.
I think that is what jobs was shooting for all along. He always wanted to change the world and while we might have seen each brilliant little improvement as changing things (e.g early adoption of Postscript and WIMP interfaces) the real change that's never going to go away is this universal pocket device. He gave us something that even star trek didn't have. But when you watch Eberharts video you realize he was grasping in his crude way at simple universal interfaces to.
So I think Jobs actually completed the primary aspect of his journey.
Where would he have gone next with it? I think there's three things left to complete. First, Eberhart also enuniciated the cloud future of colloborative remote interaction on data sets that could be represent themselves in different ways depending on what viewing device each user was applying. (early model view controller, but for concrete devices). So number one is the iphone's becoming the physical manifestation that connects the clouds to points in the environment. It's going that way already as iphones control our cars and become networked games and video phones. Jobs just would have come up with some magical version of that which would delighted and surprised us with its simplicity. Perhaps that's where siri was going. The other thing that's not done more coupling between the cloud and the device. You shouldn't have to care where the computation is happening. And the third is enrichment of the devices ability to sense and interact.
All of those but the last one are obvious and thus incremental now. What does it mean for devices to interact? In the time of eberhart computer scientist thought that machines would learn to reason and thus learn to communicate on their own. So machines would be able to make requests to each other that exceeded some pre-defined "API". You would be able to communicate with them to, more along the lines of stating what you wanted and less along the lines of stating how to achieve it. That's the one thing there doesn't seem to be any progress in.
So where should apple go now? Well fulfilling the cloud dream of ubiquitous sensing and computing occuring transparently to enable handheld devices to become super powered tools has a long road ahead. Perhaps its a pre-requisite to the next step of interaction based on goals not defining process.
THe one thing I'm on the fence on is the current counter reaction against Jobs skewmorphic interfaces. I'm of the opinion that these contain powerful intuition and tap subconscious mental models we don't appreciate. I'd like to see machines adapt to our biases not try to make us like their natural interfaces.
Re:He's right - Android is eating iOS's lunch (Score:4, Insightful)
I like my iPhone well enough, but I find the way it stores data, sandboxed into each app, absolutely painful, and having to use that hideous iTunes app is an even greater agony. I love my Nexus 7. I have Dropbox, Google Docs or a USB cable and can move files back and forth with ease. So while there are aspects of iOS I like (I like the calendar/scheduling app in iOS, just feels more complete), when I give my old iPhone to my kid, I'm looking at getting an unlocked Android phone.
The lack of an accessible file system is mostly due to Apple's priorities and focus (I know this may not please the Slashdot crowd) on moving files to the cloud.
iCloud's premise is that your local files and your cloud files co-exist in one big bucket transparently, and iOS's implementation is the realization of this. Whatever iOS device you get on, your files are there. You don't have to copy them to a USB key or find them on the file system or manage different versions. Each file has a "truth" version in the cloud. Having access to the file system as a end user function breaks this illusion. You're back to worrying about what's on disk, what folder everything is in, etc etc... And while that's more of a design choice, it also wouldn't surprise me if Apple starts really messing with iOS's file system on a technical data to make it even less friendly to traditional file browsing. I could see them going for a totally metadata based file system in the future.
OS X is a legacy OS, so it is much more of a reflection of the mess of having two user facing buckets. The iCloud implementation on OS X is just hands down awful compared to iOS. Separate file browsers, bad user experience, ugh... OS X Mavericks moves towards fixing this a bit by adding file browsing based on metadata based instead of file paths. Because both local and iCloud files can have metadata they're all back to living in the same bucket, and the user experience is much better.
So Apple's lack of a file browser isn't necessarily because they are paranoid and want to lock down the device, or because Steve Jobs didn't like it, it's because they're likely considering at some point totally abandoning a traditional file system, and they don't want to get users attached to a function they're probably going to take away.
Re:Jobs vision was Eberharts vision (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's fair to say that when we look at eberharts mother of all demos now we see it's brilliance only because we can now appreciate it. In other words we see eberhart as brilliant mainly because steve jobs wrought the lens that lats us see it for what it was. Jobs reduction of computer science to consumer devices was his brilliance.
If you never saw the Mother of all Demos then you have missed the most important thing in your computer science education.
Re:Now I have TMBG stuck in my head (Score:4, Insightful)
That's nobody's business but the turks....
Re:Jobs vision was Eberharts vision (Score:3, Insightful)
This is overwrought, to put it mildly. What do Jobs' consumer products have to do w/ the technology demonstrated by Engelbart [wikipedia.org]? That is, "computer [mice] as well as of video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor."
I'll agree that the original Mac popularized the mouse, and possibly WYSIWYG word processing, but none of the other topics owe their popularity to (for example) the iPod, iPhone, etc.