Hacker News Reader

Comment by asmithmd1 | Hacker News Reader

Woz is a great engineer but I don't know about his market prediction skills. Anyone remember his last company, Wheels of Zues? I didn't think so. It was some kind of low power wireless, mesh network, GPS something. I am sure it was fun to play with but not really a product.

View on HN

At this point I think pretty much everyone agrees that Android is well on the way to gaining the lagest market share, at least over the next few years. Windows Phone 7 is the only competition and it's pretty green. iOS and webOS are tied to specific devices so they're different beasts.

Wheels Of Zeus did wireless location tracking of personal possessions. Not a bad idea, but unfortunately way too early.

Anyway, I trust Woz's guess more than any "market prediction expert".

I agree as well. While he has had a big impact on technology I don't see the domain expertise to justify his assertions. He is just another person trying to make a guess about something that no one can accurately predict.

I like Alan Kay's quote the best: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

I think I will get back to that

Maybe he just did it for fun + love rather than profit.

That doesn't make his prediction on the iPhone any less valuable.

You don't have to be a fantastic movie maker to be a good movie critic.

The thing that's going to kill iPhone/iPad at the moment IMHO is lack of flash support more than anything else.

Flash support will "kill" the iPhone why exactly?

I switched from iPhone to android in May. One of the reasons was just that it's open. If I want to do something on it, I probably can. Without voiding the warranty etc.

It's up to me if I want to run flash. Also there's no idiotic tie in to iTunes, it has over the air updates, hotspot tethering and you can even set your ringtone to any mp3. There's a ton of other reasons Android will beat the iPhone IMHO.

I don't think I'd have an iPhone again. It was great when there wasn't any competition, but now it's sorely lacking.

Don't make the mistake of assuming that everyone wants the same things in a mobile phone that you do.

I'm not. The fact is, here at any rate (UK), Android is really making massive inroads. The lines are blurring a lot though. Blackberry is suddenly a viable option for teens.

I wouldn't be surprised if Android phones were outselling iPhone by a large margin in the UK.

Isn't that the basic design philosophy of the iPhone? They seem to have done well.

It's not going to "kill" the iPhone, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has contributed to preventing mass-adoption. A few weeks back I directly measured justin.tv's Flash stats - a staggering 98.9% of our visitors have Flash 10.0 or greater installed. I think that's going to influence what people expect on a really widely adopted mobile web browsing platform.

>It's not going to "kill" the iPhone, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has contributed to preventing mass-adoption

You are too technical to understand that consumers don't really care about flash at all. They don't understand the argument whatsoever. It is two sides of geeks yelling nonsense back and fourth.

Take your argument: Justin.tv. According to Alexa, it's barely in the top 400 highest traffic sites on the net. I doubt anyone in the mainstream has even heard of it. YouTube, on the other hand, is the #3. And there is an app for that. Hulu.com is 196, and Vimeo is 169.

If you have YouTube playback, you have all the video 95% of your customers wants or needs. For the rest, there are apps.

Nobody is buying smartphones on technical features, just like nobody is buying an iPad because of how much RAM it has. People are buying smartphone because of its Use Cases. Because it has free turn-by-turn navigation. Because it can play games online. Because it can SMS. Browse the web. Recognize the song playing overhead at lunch and buy it online. Take pictures (that's really the only flash consumers care about).

Not to mention the fact that 'the masses' spend days on end playing farmville, mobster games, etc etc which are all flash. That doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

Farmville and its Mobster equivalent have been on iOS for months.

There has been almost no major technology to emerge since the debut of iOS that is really dependent on Flash. Zynga and Hulu were the last major players to emerge with prominent Flash utilization, and they've heavily invested in iOS since. To the contrary, iOS exclusive (at least to begin) apps like Angry Birds and Instagram have captivated the tech press and public imagination.

Really, as an iOS user since the first gen, I don't feel left out of anything. To the contrary, iOS continues to get the best stuff first - Kindle, Netflix, the latest iD and Epic games, the best social networking clients, the best new games that people on other platforms clamor for (Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, etc.).

farmville, mobster games, etc etc which are all flash.

Both Farmville (60+ million users) and Mafia Wars (45+ million users) have been ported to iOS.

Ported as in "You go to facebook and it just works"?

Or ported as in "You have to do X,Y,Z"?

If it's the later, I don't think it particularly matters. Most people just want it to work. They consider a browser should function as a browser.

As in 'a native app.'

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/farmville-by-zynga/id37556266...

Right. Which is my point (Thanks for the downmods guys).

Most people are going to want to go to a website, and have it work. A native app doesn't cut it.

Not if they use the facebook app, which is what they would use to get to facebook.

Too bad it's impossible to port something. Absolutely, completely impossible. In fact, once something is coded onto a platform, the cosmic censor prevents one from even using that brand in a different way on a different platform. See: Diablo, and it's PlayStation port: Devil Guy Visits Ratchet and Clank.

Flash is actually coded by chipping if-thens and loops into stone tablets for all of time.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/farmville-by-zynga/id37556266...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com