The golden gigaflop: Apple’s shrinking performance sweet spot

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-useful-is-the-theory-...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...

'In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars.'

and later in the same article:

'As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties, more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions that led the market in the nineteen-eighties.'

and, finally, this gem:

'On March 10, 2000, Christensen launched a $3.8-million Disruptive Growth Fund, which he managed with Neil Eisner, a broker in St. Louis. Christensen drew on his theory to select stocks. Less than a year later, the fund was quietly liquidated: during a stretch of time when the Nasdaq lost fifty per cent of its value, the Disruptive Growth Fund lost sixty-four per cent.'

So he wrote a book on disruptive innovation, where his main exemplar was how Seagate et al were felled by small, agile innovators, and published it the year Seagate crushed the small, agile innovators.

The book is full of wrong (it's basically fairly accurate about how innovation gets stifled in companies that fundamentally aren't innovative -- companies driven by sales commissions for example -- but those aren't the interesting cases; Apple, Kodak, Polaroid, AT&T, Xerox -- the companies which ought to be the best examples of his case -- don't follow his storyline at all).

Yes, you can. The quantity of "1" is easily referred to be specifying the number of units as "1", e.g., 1 gigaflops.

Its prone to incorrect intuition about the singular form being different from the plural, but even among English nouns, "units of measurement ending in 's'" aren't the only case where the plural and singular are the same.

> "gigaflop" makes it that much easier to discuss.

It doesn't make it any easier to discuss; if someone knows what the acronym stands for, its obviously clear in its original and correct form, and if someone doesn't, you need to explain what it means anyway, at which point the incorrect form becomes disconnected from the expansion and less mnemonic, whereas the correct form is (as acronyms tend to be) a mnemonic device for the expansion.

The incorrect form may make it more convenient as completely opaque jargon, but I'm not sure making that more convenient is in anyone's interest.

One flops

Two giga- floating point operations per second

Two gigaflops

Fairly recently, someone near me was talking about "megaflops per second". I made a joke about computing while falling into informational singularities. It did give me a fun mental diversion, trying to imagine a physics where computational speed was tied to some sort of data density, and then I realized that Vernor Vinge sort of got there first, with _Fire Upon the Deep_.

Before Steve Jobs returned, Apple was working on MkLinux[2], but that effort seemed to fizzle out, and it seemed like in later years, the idea of using Linux as a starting point was a non-starter[3]. Even Airport devices typically have run either VxWorks or - more recently - NetBSD.

0 - http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fap... 1 - http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Pixar_Big_on_Linux_Cl... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux 3 - http://www.wired.com/2008/11/the-iphone-coul/

Now fast forward 2015, Apple is focused on its mobile cash cows. Pink gold iPhone 6S. Gold Apple watch worth $10k. But they seem to forget what made them successful in professional environments initially.

I need XCode (for iOS development), but I see more and more librairies developed for Ubuntu. So you are right, maybe it's the time to think about Linux.