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Apple Isn't the Next Microsoft (and That's a Good Thing) 269

Posted by Soulskill from the microsoft-also-not-the-next-apple dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "In a new Gizmodo column, Andreas Goeldi calls it the 'frosted glass' effect: when a prominent tech company's latest upgrade to its flagship operating system features frosted-glass highlights as its primary innovation, you know that company is facing a period of severe stagnation. That's what happened to Microsoft around the time of Windows Vista, Goeldi wrote, and Apple's going down the same road with iOS 7. In light of what he views as Apple's sclerosis, it wasn't difficult for him to abandon his iPhone in favor of a Google Android ecosystem. But is Apple really becoming the next Microsoft? In short: no. Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals. Rumors have persisted for quite some time that Apple is prepping big pushes into wearable electronics and televisions, both of which could prove lucrative strategies if executed correctly. Goeldi faults iOS 7 for its frosted-glass effects, which he compares to those of Vista; but similar graphical elements aside, it's unlikely that iOS 7 will run into the same complaints over hardware requirements, compatibility, security, and so much more that greeted Vista upon its release. In fact, iOS 7 isn't even finished."
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Apple Isn't the Next Microsoft (and That's a Good Thing) More

Apple Isn't the Next Microsoft (and That's a Good Thing)

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  • Gizmodo (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I take it this is all a suck-up smoke and mirrors after that iphone theft debacle?

    • Re:Gizmodo (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rudy_wayne ( 414635 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:52PM (#44490853)

      Considering the source (Gizmodo) it's not surprising that they think Vista's "frosted glass" effect was its main innovation. Vista had its problems, but many of them were the fault of third party developers who dragged their feet when it came to making their software run properly on Vista. Having used Vista every day for 18 months, it was better than XP. Not as good as Windows 7, but not as bad as most people tried to claim.

      • Re:Gizmodo (Score:4, Interesting)

        by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @05:00PM (#44491569) Homepage
        He's mistaking the superficial smoke and mirrors for what is/isn't going on under the hood.

        Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.
        OS X had fresh eye candy, and a somewhat revolutionary software framework behind it. It rocked.
        WinXP had fresh eye candy, and a more solid NT kernel underneath. It rocked gently.

        The bottom line is that everything new is going to be loaded with new eye candy, because it can be. If you want to determine whether that eye candy is trying to disguise problems with the underlying system software and company behind it ... you need to look at that underlying system software and the company behind it.

        • Re:Gizmodo (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Smauler ( 915644 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @09:18PM (#44493521)

          Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.

          No, it didn't. It sucked on crappy hardware of the time, and it had driver issues early on. Windows 7 could never have happened without Vista... it is basically Vista, but by the time it was released hardware had moved on.

          WinXP had fresh eye candy, and a more solid NT kernel underneath. It rocked gently.

          XP rocked because it was based on 2k. There wasn't much different between 2k and XP, in the overall scheme of things. 2k was very good as an OS... it's just a shame it wasn't marketed as a consumer OS.

          Vista's problems weren't caused by its eye-candy. They were it being a resource hog, and early driver issues. I'm still running Vista on a system I bought when it was first out (now upgraded RAM to 16gb, because it was going free,and gfx upgrade), and my uptime is basically measured in power cuts. Windows 7 is basically Vista with the hardware caught up.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Uberbah ( 647458 )

            No, it didn't. It sucked on crappy hardware of the time, and it had driver issues early on.

            Which...means it sucked. You've really screwed the pooch as a software company if reverting to your previous version is both a performance and usability upgrade.

            Vista was the ME of it's decade, and for the same reasons. Yeah, it got better after a stream of updates and a service pack, but then we have to give the same consideration for XP.

        • Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.

          Vista had /huge/ under the hood changes. The changes were extremely important in improving the security and stability of windows. I'm not a M$ fan, but can see that they did release some cool technology.

        • I think Vista is a very tiny piece of Microsoft's problems. The real problem is the user experience and ease-of-use, which Microsoft gets wrong a lot more than Apple. It's death by a thousand cuts.

          Sometimes the feature you want is in a control panel. Sometimes the feature you want is an administrator tool.
          It takes two lawyers, five tech support staff, a voodoo priestess, and a ouija board to figure out Terminal Services licensing.
          If you install a pre-SP2 version of Windows XP and go through the W

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gutnor ( 872759 )

        They got everybody hyped-up and then let Vista be installed on machine incapable of running it decently. Added to that, the whole Vista Ready vs Vista Capable.

        That is a major communication fuck up. Even Apple which would hype a dull steak knife into a samurai sword is very very clear what will not run on what machine when they announce an iOS upgrade.

        Vista was not a first for MS. They hyped, most of the time involuntarily, stuff they would never deliver or promises they would break. Nowadays, in market

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drsmithy ( 35869 )

      In the grandest /. tradition, I have of course not properly RTFA.

      However, if the author thinks the most interesting "innovation" in Vista was "frosted glass", then he has no credibility on the topic whatsoever. Vista was a massive overhaul of Windows, with most of the effort (and changes) spent under the hood.

      The irony here is that the author seems to be both criticising eye-candy UI effects, while simultaneously peddling the notion that the "innovation" that matters happens in the UI, rather than in the g

      • yes, and it's wrong for another reason. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mbkennel ( 97636 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @04:37PM (#44491319)

        "Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals."

        Microsoft was not unaware of that at all. They tried very hard for a long time, after all Windows Phone was worked on for many years before iPhone.

        Microsoft's problem was that they weren't good at it. Vista was another example. The common problem is internal corporate politics, and the key to that problem is at the top.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gl4ss ( 559668 )

        well that's what the users see.. who the fuck cares if win8 has better internals than 7, if the face of win8 is metro.

        however the author is stupid. there's obvious reason for apple to move to flat design and the obvious reason is that jonyyyyyyyyy got tired of approving 10 life imitating pictures for different screen sizes of a calendar background image. yes folks, that's the real reason for apple to go flat: they got so many different ios device resolutions that they got tired of the shit of photoshopping

        • While there are diminishing returns, that's obviously false. The UI's of Windows 95 and NT4 (after a service pack , I think) were essentially identical. However, one liked to crash early and often, and the other would work for months under the most grueling computational workout. It matters a lot. In fact, the internals are the only reason why Jobs was brought back to Apple. Classic Mac OS had more UI goodness than OSX's first couple of releases.

    • I take it this is all a suck-up smoke and mirrors after that iphone theft debacle?

      You give them way too much credit. No way that much forethought was put into this article.

  • Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schlachter ( 862210 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:39PM (#44490735)

    It was easy for Apple to innovate a few years ago because they had no momentum in the space. They were agile and free to create. It's much harder to do that when you have a huge codebase that's a decade old, with hundreds of millions of users who have expectations of your product.

    Nonetheless, I can't help but think if Jobs was still around, there would be more exciting stuff in the pipeline.

    • Jobs died almost two years ago (wow, that long already). Most likely, he at least gave some pipeline ideas to Cook and co. which are being worked on now. I figure that Apple still has maybe three more years of Jobs' 'ideas from the grave' left before we really get to see if they can keep doing interesting things. They've probably had to wrangle with this for a while now, and I can't help but think that the solution to their problems is just to find someone capable of projecting a new Reality Distortion Fie

    • Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Impy the Impiuos Imp ( 442658 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:56PM (#44490909) Journal

      Yes, but this is a corporate management problem, not a technical one. Go read the sad history of Xerox where, at one point, they needed the signatures of 47 managers to make a change to a copier, as hungrier companies cranked out modern innovations.

    • Please. Vista bumbled badly based on what MS did. Let's take compatibility: at the last minute, they reversed course on hardware requirement so that Vista Basic could be released and, of course, didn't take the effort clearly explain to consumers that Vista Basic was barely Vista. UAC needed many more refinements. But like all things MS they released it anyway and worried about SP1 later. They've done that with all their releases before but time the incompleteness was obvious to consumers. They didn'

    • Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CanHasDIY ( 1672858 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @04:09PM (#44491035) Homepage Journal

      Nonetheless, I can't help but think if Jobs was still around, there would be more exciting stuff in the pipeline.

      Perhaps... but equally likely, there would be some regular stuff in the pipeline that seemed exciting, because Jobs was hands-down one of the best marketers to ever walk the face of the Earth.

      I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that's a compliment or insult.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )
        There is NO WAY Apple doesn't have something much more innovative than the iPhone 5s in the pipeline. I say this not as a fan of Apple, but simply because Tim Cook has $145,000,000,000 (yes, billions) burning a hole in his pocket, with nothing more to do than prove to the world that he's just as wonderful as Steve was. Worst case, Apple bleeds cash throwing one desparate hail mary after another, but there is no way they will just fall on the ball.

        • Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum (Score:4, Insightful)

          by exomondo ( 1725132 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @06:15PM (#44492387)

          Frankly the new Mac Pro says to me that they are just about out of innovation (at least in that space). It's a desktop computer where the core components are virtually non-upgradeable, now maybe that's ok but what do you get in return for that compromise? Not much, sure it's smaller but when has that been a problem for desktops? It's basically a more powerful mac mini.

          It sacrifices front-facing ports in the name of aesthetics and deals with that compromise by giving you the ability to rotate it to get to the back, now that is assuming you actually enough slack sitting on your desk to pull the cables of all your peripherals around.

          That product really is an exercise in being different for the sake of it with virtually no measurable advantage.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Clsid ( 564627 )

            If you don't like the product that's fine, but to a lot of people, myself included the Mac Pro is one of the best desktop designs in years. The cooling solution alone was extremely creative, not to mention that both monster video cards can benefit from it as well.

            With a custom built PC if you try to pull the same stuff you end up with so many cables and will probably need a 700W psu.

            • If you don't like the product that's fine, but to a lot of people, myself included the Mac Pro is one of the best desktop designs in years.

              It's not that i don't like it, it's that compared to its predecessor the only real benefit is that it's smaller and it might be quieter, but at the cost of being less accessible, less convenient and less upgradeable. It's not that it's a bad product, it's just that in all but the superficial areas its design is worse than its predecessor, if the superficial things are all you're worried about and you don't care about its compromises then maybe it's fine for you. I was hoping to replace my ancient mac pro wi

          • The new mac pro is likely to be very quiet. I know, this isn't something we think about as much as the specs., but as someone who has their home/media/gaming rig humming behind them, quiet is good. Same goes for work, if I'm running all the cores 100% and can still have a conversation in my office or listen to classical music without headphone or annoying my neighbor, that's a good thing. I've considered buying an apple tv or mac mini for media, but I have enough computers around already (probably too ma

            • So the mac pro is innovative, despite your assertion, it just doesn't innovate in a way you would want.

              You've set the bar for 'innovation' pretty low, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any product that isn't innovative by your standard, I don't think the idea that 'new mac pro is likely to be very quiet' is particularly innovative, even if it is true. My new HP workstation is a lot quieter than my old one and my new macbook pro is a lot quieter than my old one, I don't consider that particularly innovative.

    • > It's much harder to do that when you have a huge codebase that's a decade old

      Very much agreed. But it's not just Apple, it's the entire category.

      The iPhone was the big bang of smartphones. Everything after that was, to a great degree, an iPhone.

      There has certainly been some innovation in this space since. Apple's introduced retina, siri, passbook. Google's got Now, which is really under-utilized so far I think, and will likely become dramatically more important in the future IMHO. We have always-on fro

    • You say that as if momentum were bad! Compare [businessinsider.com]. Microsoft has been raking in at least a billion in profit per year, year, for 15 years. Apple, meanwhile, for about last 5. Do you see any of Apple's current products that wedged so deep into every business process out there that they will almost surely still be profiting $1BN / year a decade from now, as Microsoft has ALREADY done? I don't. Apple is never more than about 2 bum product releases away from losing money. Microsoft has already done that many

      • Do you see any of Apple's current products that wedged so deep into every business process out there that they will almost surely still be profiting $1BN / year a decade from now, as Microsoft has ALREADY done?

        Yes, it's called the iPad. It has seen a huge uptake in enterprise use, in part because there are so many, but also because of third party support for things like rugged cases. Also there is a lot of good management support now and a lot of powerful frameworks to build enterprise apps on top of.

        Ent

  • Of course they aren't... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zalbik ( 308903 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:41PM (#44490745)

    Of course Apple isn't the next Microsoft

    Microsoft used shady business practices to destroy competitors and thereby screw the customer.

    Apple cuts out the middle-man, and just screws the customer directly.

  • Agree. Apple isn't the Next Microsoft... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by faragon ( 789704 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:41PM (#44490749) Homepage
    ... Apple is the Next Apple without Steve Jobs, again.

  • apple profits from every product, MS doesn't (Score:5, Informative)

    by alen ( 225700 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:42PM (#44490751)

    MS has lost billions of $$$ on bing, x-box and other experiments funded by Windows and Office license sales which are now slowing and decreasing. microsoft has been innovating for years but not profitably. they had commercial tablets before apple, mobile devices and cloud services long before cloud became a buzz word.

    apple on the other hand has a rule that every product must be profitable. even the apple tv turns a small profit.

    • Re:apple profits from every product, MS doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by asmkm22 ( 1902712 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:56PM (#44490907)

      This is a good point. People are quick to confuse Apple with a company that actually innovates and pushes boundaries and stuff, when in fact, they just release highly-polished (and sometimes very well-timed) products that are often 5 or 10 years old.

      • Spot on. Much of the research is open too. Have a look at http://research.microsoft.com/ [microsoft.com]
        Then point me the equivalent of Apple.

        • Webkit
          BSD Unix
          Grand Central Dispatch
          Darwin
          Clang/LLVM
          And many more.

          You can SEE what Microsoft is researching.

          You can USE what Apple is researching.

          How much of Microsoft's research makes it to the real world? Where is WinFS? Microsoft research is a golden tower into which Microsoft locks smart people so other companies cannot use them, and produces almost nothing of tangible benefit to the world.

      • Well, most people associate innovation==something brand new when innovation can be improving on something existing. Apple's strength has been to bring hard to use technology to consumers. Case in point: OS X is a Unix core with a consumer GUI on top.

        MP3 players existed before the iPod and they simply were hard to use for most consumers. I think the four things that Apple did right was:

        1. Treat media as media and not merely files. Media that has metadata like Title, date, album, genre, etc.
        2. Reduce syncing

      • This is a good point. People are quick to confuse Apple with a company that actually innovates and pushes boundaries and stuff, when in fact, they just release highly-polished (and sometimes very well-timed) products that are often 5 or 10 years old.

        Correct. But that discounts the importance of polish and timing.

        Polish is very important - a technical feature is completely pointless if people don't use it, can't use it, or are unable to figure it out.

        Timing is important in business because, as Apple will see this year, people get bored. Releasing product all at once in the fall seems like a great idea but damn the other 3 quarters where everyone bitches about "not innovating".

        The iPod is an example of both - polish in that it was a player with tons of storage, in a formfactor that was convenient for a lot of people. At a time when MP3 players were JUST taking off, Apple produces something that has a slick UI (the wheel makes navigating through huge lists quickly), slick syncing (firewire, when most computers sported USB1.1) and iTunes (making it stupidly easy to manipulate your music library and convert your CDs to MP3s). A couple of years later they tossed in the iTunes store, bringing the music industry into the 21st century, kicking and screaming.

        The iPhone brought polish to smartphones. In the name of Mobile Safari. Because until then, most mobile browsers were crap (I had one with Opera Mobile - the better ones, but it was slow and was showing its age).

        The iPad brought polish to tablets - because instead of crappy lets-run-Windows, it ran iOS which was more adapted to touchscreens than even OS X is. Sure you could run OS X on a tablet, but the experience was mediocre at best - GUI concepts and designs for mouse and keyboard just don't translate well to pen and touches.

        Hell, the iPhone wasn't considered revolutionary - Apple hoped it would maybe get 1% of the market, or 1 million phones. (It took 77 days to hit 1 million). Of course, the 3G sold 1 million opening weekend, despite well know problems.

        The iPad was universally panned - it was so bad, Jobs even said they'd cut the price if it didn't sell well.

        And the iPod, well. The millionth iPod sold in 2003, and by then it was the 3rd gen iPod with dock connector.

        Don't discount polish. When people say things look "inconsistent" or "work poorly", it doesn't matter how big the numbers are on the spec sheet - the user ends up forgoing those features. Open source is primarily bad at this (often because non-programmers are discounted - this includes technical writers, designers, and testers - yes, it's your itch, but when users complain something works badly and could be better, perhaps it could go from "your itch" to "everyone's itch" and not "try this alternative").

      • This is a good point. People are quick to confuse Apple with a company that actually innovates and pushes boundaries and stuff, when in fact, they just release highly-polished (and sometimes very well-timed) products that are often 5 or 10 years old.

        For example...?

    • Actually, the Apple TV turns a huge profit.

      On 5/28/13 there were 13 million Apple TVs sold, at about $100 each. That's $1.3 billion of revenue. I'm being conservative and assuming those numbers don't include the Apple TV 1.

      Given an ultra-low margin of 25%, that means Apple conservatively has made $325 million off of the ATV. And Apple's margins have historically been more than 25%.

    • Re:apple profits from every product, MS doesn't (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @04:10PM (#44491057)

      The problem Microsoft has is that they stopped being a company that has innovative products a long time ago - arguably they never started, because their 'traditional' linear products (OS, Office) had too much momentum.

      Look at Microsoft Research, for instance. The one notable product to come out of that is the Kinect and related technologies. We've seen MS ads now for years for something similar to SketchInsight, which looks incredible - but no working POC for anyone to ogle or demo. This would be a Killer App in a heartbeat for pretty much everyone I know - and the missing link that MS has so much needed for Windows 'tablets' for the past decade.

      Then you've got things like their AI and machine learning research, as well as OS research projects. Those show promise, but don't see much light in marketable products. Imagine what MS could've done with "Windows Mobile/Phone" had they not focused on changing UI paradigms against peoples' will?

      The biggest thing MS has going for them at this point is their vendor lock-in, and it's much worse than we feared it could be back in the 1990s. "Cloud services" were so far in the future they weren't really conceived. Today, we've got everything in the MS stack integrating tightly with Office 365 - and Exchange is most certainly the worst offender in this regard, with much of the traditional functionality available in 2003 and 2008, and fixed greatly in 2008, gone again for O365 integration. If you're a MS shop, you're more or less stuck, and options for migrating that data off their platforms diminishes as time goes on simply by the motion of the machine - regardless of any actual, needed features present in the upgraded products. (When was the last time you've heard of someone upgrading MS products for anything other than 'compatibility with everyone else, and bug/security fixes'?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Clsid ( 564627 )

        To be fair, the research that Microsoft have done in language translation is impressive. I would even say that Bing translator is a tad better than Google translation.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Smauler ( 915644 )

        Microsoft got OS lock in for a reason, and it wasn't just shoddy business practices. Win 95, 98, 2k, and XP were better than their competitors, for home users.

        Now, Windows is not better, and they're losing market share all the time. Office 365 is an attempt to keep their standards in one segment, but it may not succeed.

    • MS has lost billions of $$$ on bing, x-box and other experiments funded by Windows and Office license sales which are now slowing and decreasing. microsoft has been innovating for years but not profitably.

      Yet another search engine and yet another game console don't really count as major innovations. Also, consider this. [knowyourmeme.com]

      they had commercial tablets before apple

      Apple launched the Newton MessagePad in 1993.

    • Um, the Xbox has made fat wads of cash.

  • The cause is beret-wearing UX asshats. They never knew that the GUI was invented as a functional tool because it was discovered that command lines are a fucking mystery to most people.

    Because they don't know what a GUI is actually for, and because they grew up with ones that did the job competently even if they weren't works of art, they focus on making it pretty or kewl or whatever and forget to make it usable.

    • As a 3D Graphics, UI, and UX expert I 100% agree!

      The majority of UX (sic.) people don't understand BOTH the pros & cons to GUI compared to the Command Line. They both have DIFFERENT strengths and weaknesses that _complement_ one another.

      Voice is a crappy UI because it has the same problem as the command line: It is an *invisible* interface. You don't know what your choices are until AFTER you are familiar with the system. On the command line we have tools like tab-completion and 'man' to help the beg

      • The majority of UX (sic.) people don't understand BOTH the pros & cons to GUI compared to the Command Line. They both have DIFFERENT strengths and weaknesses that _complement_ one another.

        Why is that comment in a thread about mobile phone interfaces? CLI is not a reasonable interface on a phone with no hardware qwerty keyboard. Not even as a complement. As a niche legacy app for people that want to telnet onto some nix machine, UI. But it doesn't and shouldn't have any relevance to the UI of the phone itself.

        It does though tip me off that the nature of your UI taste is classic unix. And makes your opinion on phone UIs not particularly worthwhile.

        Desaturating the icons it makes it harder for someone to focus on the signal -- everything is one big noise. FAIL.

        Is about as useful as someone saying "3x3 pixe

  • Comes to show to trust NO ONE (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:44PM (#44490781) Journal

    There was a time back in 1999 in the good old days of slashdot and IT where I had a debate with someone over how evil MS and Bill Gates were.

    Back then MS was unstoppable! If investors found out MS was going to compete agaisnt you then your stock would be shorted as no one could stop the all powerful Microsoft!

    I mentioned if Steve Jobs won the world would be heaven. No more expensive crap. Free standards galore. No more DRM with .WMV and IE 5.5 dictating the future of computing. Apple was cheered as the good guys trying to stop the DRM madness of RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. Remember?Fastforward today and I think Steve Jobs is fucking a more greedy monster than Bill Gates ever was. True their products are better quality and more UI and consumer data is put into products before being released, but man they charge and lock you in.

    What Changed?
    Itunes gave Apple a financial incentive for DRM and lock in. Apple monopolized the mp3 market and almost the phone before Android did a quick rescue. Their Macs are falling behind as more effort is on consumer gadgets these days.

    Would I want a Google only world? Fuck no equally

    Chrome's webkit is not W3C compliant compared to IE and Firefox with its extensions and some sites that only work with Chrome when you turn on HTML 5. If they owned 93% of the market ala IE 6 from 2003, you can bet javascript would go bye bye for whateverthefuck script that they invented, sites would not render properly if you used advanced features, and Google would ignore W3C and put Google Store as the master of the e-commerce universe!

    I would not want just Android phones either streaming ads from Google servers 100% of the time, nor would shop owners want to pay 300% more for ad revenue as they would ahve a monopoly on this.

    Business and greed is evil. We are all greedy and evil ourselves with a shade of gray. It is our human nature sadly. Competition frees us, though I do have to say I am disappointed in all web browsers recently and kind of miss Firefox when is owned just 15% of the market but maybe that is because IE sucked so bad then it seemed like heaven?

    • Re:Comes to show to trust NO ONE (Score:5, Informative)

      by rolfwind ( 528248 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @03:54PM (#44490887)

      Itunes gave Apple a financial incentive for DRM and lock in.

      Um what, they pushed to get music publisher's to sell tracks without DRM. As for video, where can you get video without DRM? Netflix? Amazon? Huh?

    • To be fair, they sell non-DRM'ed music now.

    • Re:Comes to show to trust NO ONE (Score:5, Informative)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @04:49PM (#44491469) Journal

      I mentioned if Steve Jobs won the world would be heaven. No more expensive crap. Free standards galore. No more DRM with .WMV and IE 5.5 dictating the future of computing

      I have no idea why you thought that. Remember Steve Jobs was the same one who ripped off Woz back in the day. He sued for UI lookalike rights. He got in a fight with the FSF over gcc. If you thought Jobs would be all roses and heaven it's because you weren't paying attention.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Uberbah ( 647458 )

        Remember Steve Jobs was the same one who ripped off Woz back in the day

        Did he also run over your dog when you were five? "Back in day" is around the Ford and Carter Administrations. Got a horse that doesn't have 40 odd years of dust on it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Clsid ( 564627 )

      I arrived at the same conclusion you did, and that is why I believe something like the free software foundation and open source software is extremely important to keep corporate greed in check even if its impact is limited. Think about it, there would be no Android without Linux or Java. Without Linux on the server space people would still be using overpriced and vendor provided hardware and Unid software or worse yet, Windows Server all over.

  • It's not that Microsoft didn't break into new categories, it's just that they were bad at it or the categories they chose sucked.

    See Also: Microsoft Tablet PCs [wikipedia.org] AKA "Pen-based computing" circa 2001.

    They've had a bit more luck with their Xbox division, although one could argue that video game consoles wasn't exactly a new field when they joined it. They still managed to steal Sega's spot in the market and push their way to number two for a few years... and number one in the North America and European markets

    • I think one of MS problems was everything had to be "Windows". For tablets, all they did was put a touchscreen on a laptop and called it done. They never really thought that touch technology might need a different approach. Same thing with WinMobile which they made the UI just like Windows even though it didn't need to be. Now everything has to Windows but everything has to be touch oriented instead of desktop UI for desktops etc.

  • iOS has become too mainstream. The masses like it. This can't be tolerated! So, how can this be rectified?

    Make it look more like windows phone metro crud. Then, only the fanboys will like it.

  • Cable card does work for some others it's an big mess to get the cable to make it work and it's people who know what they are doing run into the people at the cable co who have little to no clue at times on cable card that need to do there part to make it work. The cable card mess is very un apple.

    As well the new Xbox idea use there box likely with IR blasters and you still have deal with cable CO UI.

  • When someone puts a phrase like that into their article without substantiating it or addressing it other than to simply state it then they're just trolling. A pencil is easy to use, but it doesn't mean it's better than iOS or Android. The whole 'so easy a three-year-old' can do it thing has passed. I'm not three. I can handle something that takes some thought, that I may not know all the ins and outs of perfectly on my first day, because the only way to do that is to simplify stuff to the point of not being

  • Apple became the next Microsoft the moment my mom bought an iPhone.

  • If you think that the main innovation in Windows Vista was the frosted glass, or any other UI feature, you are retarded.

    While I think Windows Vista was far from perfect (so far that I didn't buy it), Windows XP was 5 years old and showing it. It was not designed for 64 bit architecture, and could not address more than 4GB of memory. Yes I know there was 64-bit windows XP, but that opens up a whole new can of worms. All windows OSes up through windows XP had horrible security models that lead to rampant infections by viruses.

    Windows XP was based on 1990's NT technology. Windows vista was a near complete rewrite of the OS to bring windows into the 21st century. It had lots of problems, but I'd sure as hell use it over XP if given a choice.

    I am not a M$ fanboy either. I use both windows and linux both at work and at home. I'd probably own a mac too if I had more disposable income.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Uberbah ( 647458 )

      Windows vista was a near complete rewrite of the OS to bring windows into the 21st century.

      That was supposed to be Longhorn, which was supposed to have real improvements over it's predecessors. Vista, however, was just a gob of shite until a number of bug fixes and a service pack made it usable. If reverting to the prior version means an upgrade in both performance and usability, you've done something wrong. Windows 8 is a usability fail but at least it's fast.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Sad no-one realizes how different iOS7 really is (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday August 06, 2013 @05:08PM (#44491677)

    What's really bad about all these iOS7 articles is how off they are about what has changing.

    If the person writing claims iOS7 is "flat", they have totally missed the point.

    iOS7 has gone DEEP, not flat. It's many layers where before there was just a flat tree. It's added a literal new dimension to UI and UIX design.

    When you actually have it in hand you may understand better, but just know until then anyone who says iOS7 is "flat" has no idea what the heck they are talking about.

  • While Microsoft had a good run when they made products people wanted, overtime they seem to have become comfortable thinking of their products as something that users had to use whether they wanted to or not - and that is where they ran into problems. Lots of other companies do the same thing (cable tv/Facebook...)

    "Frosted Glass" is a silly thing to use as a focus - just a superficial implementation detail that has nothing to do with the differences between why any of these companies do what they do. Hope

  • Anyone who thinks that iOS 7 is nothing more than a graphical change is an idiot who isn't keeping up with the technical changes going on. This is a classic case of ignoring the facts when they don't fit the narrative you want to use as an argument. What a moron.

  • Ok, there's no way this could have been written by anyone who didn't have a terminal case of reality distortion field withdrawal symptom:

    Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals.

    There may be reasons why Apple isn't going to be "the next Microsoft" (whatever that is), but this is most assuredly not one of them. Apple is one of the most narrowly-focussed companies for its size around. It sells, what, a handful of different lines of devices that vary mostly based on screen resolution?

    Microsoft has realised that diversifying is necessary, whereas Appl

  • Basing a company analysis on frosted glass? Just..... wow. Haven't had much to do with gizmodo in the past, but it looks hilariously ignorant based on this article.

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