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Comment by hnlmorg | Hacker News Reader

You say that as if Nokia didn't produce some world class products but they did. There was a era when Nokia handsets were the one everyone wanted. And they were instrumental in building GSM, of which without no mobile phones would exist, let alone iPhones. I'm not going to deny that Nokia lost their way with Symbian handsets but my point is I don't see Apple as being uniquely brilliant. You often see this tide where one decade company X will be on top and the follow decade another trend will follow. This is also true of Apple: they haven't always enjoyed the success they have now. They've been close to failing a few times. Microsoft even bailed them out once just to avoid ending up in a highly regulated monopoly.

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I don't say anything of that sort. Nokia made the best cellphones in the world and was never surpassed - it's just that people stopped using cellphones.

In fact, my argument is that Steve Jobs never competed with Nokia. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a new type of device that no one else was making. Sure, they had some functionality overlap with some devices but it was completely new thing and everyone rushed to abandone whatever they are doing and started competing with Apple a few years later.

I have a hard time deciding if the nokia 61xx era phone were the pinnacle at the time or the motorola star-tac flips.

Symbian was good though. As was Maemo, imo even more so.

Nokia was in this disorganized place where symbian was still making them money being "good enough" but increasingly clearly not the future, they didn't want to fully commit to Maemo, and meanwhile they were still doing well in the feature phone business. That's 3 platforms and no clear winner for the flagship.

I get the impression that internal competition combined with not enough coherent vision was what did them in.

That and hiring Elop, but so much was already in bad shape before that.

Except they are uniquely brilliant. Several world changing products to their name even before becoming the worlds most profitable company in the history of humanity.

That’s not overstating things either.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, apple has knocked a few out of the park in ways nobody else has been able to. With style, with panache.

You could have said the same about Microsoft, word for word, in the 90s. Similar arguments for Amazon, IBM, Oracle and others too. I even listed several world changing achievements for Nokia in the post you're refuting (if it wasn't for GSM there wouldn't even be an iPhone)

what's more, Microsoft still dominate Apple for desktop OSs and Google still dominate Apple for mobile OSs too.

Apple have made some quality products but they're not uniquely brilliant.

Not to belittle Nokia or anything, they took already available eg. smart calculators' digital displays adopted to GSM phones.

Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time (Steve Ballmer reaction*)

Although they make great objects of desire, Toyota is no Tesla, Nokia is no Apple.

Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an identity that he enjoys but perhaps coming from an ex he never liked, maybe he's seeking catharsis.

Perhaps feeling indebted to a bully who he never recovered from, not being able to reach that peak again on his own, is the reason why we get these interviews from him where he says these things about Jobs. Who knows.

You can trace the iphone back to, concretely, the newton but even further back if you check out the concepts that got them to the newton. There is a 1997 book called 'Apple Design 1997 The Work of the Apple Industrial Design Group' that shows a ton of concepts and a few 'communication device' concepts (video and audio phone integrated computers). Sadly out of print, and quite expensive for a paperback 'coffee table' style book https://www.amazon.com/Appledesign-Apple-Industrial-Design-G...

Some pictures from inside, including one concept integrated with a telephone handset: https://twitter.com/jamesthomson/status/798542140435480576

There is a cheesy movie from Tom Cruise, Minority Report, whomever takes those displays to market, finds a scalable profitable way to produce them, finds enough courage to resist status quo and find massive product market fit, will be the next Jobs or Musk. Idea wise, everything literally was on either Star Trek or on Star Wars previously. I know these personalities are not exactly likeable but we'll keep this conversation for the next simulation of the universe with different parameters...

gorilla arms are a thing you cannot dream your way out of. While a display projected 'in air' is cool a standing gesture based ui is very much not.

Brain-computer link bypasses the gorilla arm problem entirely.

What if we think those displays as VR headset alternative? I feel it could be hugely helpful doing surgeries/repairs don't you think? Direct brain connection means too many cmd-z's for me.

> Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time

Folks have a tendency to overlook the inevitability of certain technologies. The light bulb, for example, was going to happen regardless of whether or not Edison's lab came up with it. There were tons of people pursuing it. You could say the same thing about the airplane, the telephone, phonograph etc. Tons of competition and prior art for each thing existed at the time of the thing we identify in retrospect as "the invention". The singular-genius model of invention is essentially never correct.

As smartphones go, the iPhone's specific instantiation was remarkable, but the idea was in the gestalt. Apple had shipped the ROKR already, and lots of people (myself included) looked at the then-current color iPod and said "boy, it would be great if this were my phone, too". So there was lots of speculation about the idea, years before it became real. It wasn't at all surprising that a smartphone would emerge. Jobs even made a joke about it during the original iPhone launch presentation (there was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial on it).

That's not to say that there weren't lots of innovative things about the iPhone, just that the claim that "no one ever expected" it isn't really true.

I think about this a lot from the point of view of economic fairness and wealth inequality.

You have a higher probability of being rich if your ancestors "owned the land" first. Similarly, you have a higher probability of being rich if you "created" the market.

Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.

But the land was always there, and we were always going to continue miniaturizing computers. How big a slice of the pie is fair?

You'd be interested in Progress and Poverty, a seminal work by late 19th century economist Henry George that tackles these issues of monopoly (of land, ideas, network effects) and their economic consequences.

Full text here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/george-progress-and-povert...

Blurbs from famous people who enjoyed it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty#Notable_r...

edit to add because a link to a book is not a discussion:

> Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.

Landowners "deserve" all the value that comes out of their "stewardship" (i.e. improvements, developments, labor), and none of the value that is inherent to the land or location (i.e. the value of being located in a city center, or the value of natural resources). In practical terms, this would mean a just policy is one that levies zero taxation on anything the owner does on the land, and levies a full tax on the value of natural resources and locational advantage inherent to a plot (calculable as the market clearing rental value of the land minus any developments).

The same holds for having ideas first. Inventions are insightful combinations of natural facts, but they are closer to discovery than true creation (we don't create the laws of physics that underlie every patentable mechanism). To lay exclusive claim to a discovery and wield it as a tool to fight competitors is anti-progress. All inventors have the claim to the fruits of their labor, but not at the exclusion of any other independent human to have and utilize ideas of their own.

I am absilutely fascinated by these questions and will dive into your book recommentation.

One can think of an organisation as 'development' on top of land (the market). So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me.

That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land' (laws of physics, existence of GSM networks?). There is certainly nothing 'natural' about the capital structure of companies in the USA that ensures some people become billionaires, nor even that for profit companies are the right way to organise. Although I might be a fish trying to explain away water there.

I get the feeling that if Swardley maps might be useful in laying out a taxation policy we are going down the wrong route however, as I seem to be arguing that each 'layer' from land to transport netowrks to digital networks needs to be accounted for to get the fair level of taxation.

I'm glad you're interested.

> So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me. [...] That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land'

Exactly right. Which is why none of those improvements should be taxed. They are the product of human labor, to which the laborer has full rights. It is only the common natural resources which an organization monopolizes at the exclusion of others that should be taxed. A tax on such limited resources is in effect a fee that they pay for the private utilization of a public good. Ownership of high value locations is one example, intellectual patents are another. If you squint, a carbon tax is another example.

It doesn't have to get as complicated as Wardley maps. You don't need to account for every layer of improvement in the network of modern business, because no improvement should be taxed. You only need to answer "is this the product of human ingenuity and labor, or is this a natural common good that is owned to the exclusion of anyone else?"

This is the polar opposite of a VAT. You don't want to tax "value add", you want to tax "natural resource use"!

So is Amazon's shop owned to the exclusion of everyone else? It's not a natural common good. But it is (if you squint) a utility.

Google's search is a utility with far less squinting

Is an Aqueduct natural common good? Is the water flowing through it? what happens with open source software?

I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"

> is Amazon's shop owned to the exclusion of everyone else?

Not the online store. The land taken up by their supply chain, offices, and datacenters is all they are excluding others from using.

> Google's search is a utility with far less squinting

It's a valuable service, but because the service was built by humans, it should belong fully to those who built it. I don't see a justification for taxing the output of someone's labor just because it is popular. What they should give back to society is what they have taken from society, again the land that their office buildings and datacenters take up.

There is a more nuanced point about the natural monopolies of certain businesses due to network effects and economies of scale, but it's better to read the book for a full treatment, I can't do it justice.

> Is an Aqueduct natural common good?

I don't see why. It's built by human hands, designed by human engineers. The land the aqueduct takes up, and the reservoir of water it draws from are natural common goods, of course.

> what happens with open source software?

Software is very interesting. It is the output of labor clearly, but ideas are part of the public domain (ideas are there in nature to be discovered, anyone can discover an idea). If you package a set of open ideas into a service, I don't think anyone else has a claim on that service than you.

> I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"

Land is not just land. "The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities". Land is one of the three unique factors of production, along with labor and capital, it is everything that is not the product of human labor. (Labor is labor, and capital is the stored product of labor put to use to create more wealth)

> Not to belittle Nokia or anything, they took already available eg. smart calculators' digital displays adopted to GSM phones.

They co-created GSM! Both the specification and then deploying the first GSM network too. Nokia basically invented how cell phones work. I'd say that was little more involved than taking something that was already available.

Which is ironic because the iPhone was exactly what you described about Nokia: existing technology. Apple did a fantastic job putting it together. The form, feel and entire UX is top notch. But Apple didn't invent new technology to create the iPhone - they very much stood on the shoulders of giants.

> Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time

The iPhone was far more evolutionary than the first ever cell phone. By the time the iPhone was in development there was already smart phones, feature phones, PDAs and tablets on the market that lead some weight about what worked and what didn't. There were design documents published about UX too. And thus there were a few similar devices in R&D from different companies at the time, all converging on a similar UX as the iPhone. So I'd argue the iPhone was only unexpected if you weren't already paying attention to the way the market was heading.

> *Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an identity that he enjoys but perhaps coming from an ex he never liked, maybe he's seeking catharsis. Perhaps feeling indebted to a bully who he never recovered from, not being able to reach that peak again on his own, is the reason why we get these interviews from him where he says these things about Jobs. Who knows.*

That's a grossly unfair comment. In fact, at risk of being blunt: it's ridiculous and petty.

If you want to understand Woz a little more then I'd suggest you read into what Woz is doing with his time now and why he left Apple.

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