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Comment by axg11 | Hacker News Reader

Apple has a history of surprises and engaging keynotes. Google, for all its success, has never launched a category creating product. Every Google success I can think of is a follow-on product, even search.

Apple’s category creation resume:

- iPod

- iPhone

- iPad

- Apple Watch

- AirPods

- ARM Mac/Apple Silicon (still early but looks like an industry shift)

Apple’s successes above weren’t necessarily the first in the category, but they were the first to make the category significant. Watching the corresponding Apple keynotes for each of these launches was a window into the future. What’s the advantage of watching Google IO when they’ve rarely if ever dictated the future?

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You forgot:

- The original Macintosh (first viable mouse/window based user interface for consumers)

- The first iMac (the end of the "beige box" era of computers)

- OS X in general (several new user interface paradigms never seen before like the dock, Exposé, GPU accelerated desktop rendering)

Umm, the Apple ][? Apple's been around a LOT longer than Google.

It was never "announced" at a major apple event though.

google maps? If you're going to claim mapquest existed before that then you'd need to remove ipod, iphone, ipad from the list above. All of those had products that came before but weren't hits.

Well technically OpenStreetMap seems to predate Google Maps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

Do you have some evidence that OpenStreetMaps had a user experience similar to Google Maps in 2004? My recollection is it did not. It was like at best like mapquest. Click an arrow on the edge of the map, wait for the page to reload.

There were several maps before Google Maps but they didn't provide the smooth experience that Google Maps provides. Just like there were 100s of PDAs before iPhone but they didn't provide the smooth experience of iPhone.

In addition to maps Gmail, and Google Search were category defining implementations. They bought YouTube and have steadily increased it’s capabilities and have made it into a category defining implementation.

Google Search wasn’t fundamentally different than Altavista, just marginally better. Had Yahoo! not bought Altavista, there’s a chance it might’ve stayed competitive with Google.

I strongly disagree with this. Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist and just a search field and the results made it category defining. And the results were way better as far as my memory goes.

> Just the fact that the homepage was minimalist

Sure, the homepage of Altavista was a relic of the 90s. The SERP however wasn’t as radically different. If a minimal homepage is enough to be “category defining” to you, we can just agree to disagree and move on.

Having used excite, Infoseek, Lycos, yahoo, askjeeves, Altavista, and even astalavista, my recollection is that they all (bar yahoo’s manually curated index) sucked for any high quality content. Then google came around, yahoo initially integrated them for non-catalogued content, and they took off, absolutely dominating the competition.

There’s a reason we “Google it” and don’t “altavista it”. ISTR altavista’s pitch over yahoo was that they indexed the entire web, they just couldn’t return meaningful results. Google could.

AltaVista was absolutely great! I got way more interesting content through them! Their death was a real loss that finally forced me to use Google, and not for the better.

From my recollection, the unique thing about google search wasn't that it was good. All of those search engines (and more) were good at some point. The unique thing is that Google remained good for 10+ years. The others tended to get significantly less good pretty quickly.

We probably verbed google rather than other products, because of that consistency. But at least my kid's peer group seems to have taken to using 'search up' as their verb... Kind of like look up.

No, it was fundamentally different. Altavista was all about returning you as many results as it could. Google was all about returning the best results first, so it didn’t matter how many results came back.

It's also important to note that Google Analytics, while dated now, and technically an acquisition, was category-defining in how it anchored the concept that analytics should be something every company gets for free. The competition at the time was IBM! And of course, it allowed Google to gain a foothold on every page and set cookies wherever it desired.

https://digitalstateconsulting.com/knowledge-is-power/brief-...

> Phil Mui, the former Group Project Manager of Google Analytics, explains how Google’s initial version sought to democratise advanced web analytics to the masses. “The primary focus was to make sure that not only people who are willing to pay a million dollars or more on analytics products are able to get access to a very decent set of tools to understand the behaviours of online browsers”, he said at a conference in New York 2011.

> Google realised the infinite potential of data to create a better experience for web users. “By liberating this tool we could empower companies of all sizes to become smarter and more effective online”, remarked Muret. “We assigned considerable resources to our online solution and released it to the public for free [and]…has since grown beyond anything that we could have expected”.

Google Maps was the first good “AJAX” like map (god it’s been a long time since I used that term), so yeah, I’ll give you that one. Google Earth however was a rebrand of Keyhole which they acquired.

FWIW, a lot of Google Maps came through acquisitions, too. But I think Google gets credit in this context for AJAXifying it and integrating tech/data with it in category-defining ways.

"Google Maps began as a C++ desktop program developed by brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen at Where 2 Technologies. In October 2004, the company was acquired by Google, which converted it into a web application. After additional acquisitions of a geospatial data visualization company and a real time traffic analyzer, Google Maps was launched in February 2005.[2] The service's front end utilizes JavaScript, XML, and Ajax. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites,[3] and offers a locator for businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world. Google Map Maker allowed users to collaboratively expand and update the service's mapping worldwide but was discontinued from March 2017. However, crowdsourced contributions to Google Maps were not discontinued as the company announced those features would be transferred to the Google Local Guides program."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps

Yep, I was aware of the acquisition. The work to make what we think of as Google Maps today happened after the acquisition. That’s why I mentioned Google Earth as a counter example, as it fundamentally didn’t change (obviously got better, but didn’t change in a foundational way) post acquisition unlike Maps did.

You’re correct - Maps is a good example. I think the relative point still stands though. On the whole, Apple releases fewer higher-signal products and a better track record of industry wide impact.

> What’s the advantage of watching Google IO when they’ve rarely if ever dictated the future?

The difference here is hardware vs. software. Android and ChromeOS devices are mostly not marketed as Google products (aside the Pixel stuff), so there's really not a need for big launch events. Apple's entire year can be made by a great launch, and no one does it better than Apple.

Portable music players existed before the iPod, and were quite popular. Unless you're too young to have heard of the Walkman? (Here's a hint at to how long portable music players have been around: they're an important part of the plot for the current season of Stranger Things...set in the 1980s.)

People used to call the iPhone the Apple Blackberry when it first came out.

Fitness watches were big before the Apple Watch (remember FitBit?).

ARM Mac is not the revelation that Apple fans think it is. It has literally zero impact outside of the Apple echo chamber, and the products based on the Apple chips are underwhelming, considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software.

I guess if you're doing that weird Apple revisionist thing where you just ignore history, yes, Apple has "created" product categories that existed before Apple got into them, s the same way that Elon Musk "founded" Tesla and Al Gore "invented" the internet.

I have a few qualms with this app:

1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

We live different lives. No one I know carries a usb drive. Way too dangerous.

It's a famous quote in response to the introduction of Dropbox.

I'm always confused by fanboys. Yes, there are things that Apple did first, but it is never the list they write. There are also many things that Apple simply popularized or used their weight to push on people (Bluetooth headphones wouldn't be as popular if Apple didn't remove the headphone jack, but I'm still salty about it). You can, in fact, be ahead of your time as well as just not have the userbase to make a revolutionary product... revolutionary. There are also plenty of things that Apple introduces that people go "wait, you didn't have that?" There's at least one every WWDC. People (including Android users) are so locked into their frameworks (less so than Apple users) that they typically aren't aware of the other things out there.

There's a lot to be excited about with Apple. There's a lot to be excited about with Google. There's lots to criticize about both. We should be encouraging competition and that requires being critical of whichever side you land on. Not inventing some fake metrics.

Aren’t you just proving my point? For each of these categories, Apple’s entry massively expanded the entire category and redefined the form of all future post-Apple products.

No, you're missing the point entirely.

Portable music players were huge before Apple got into the category. (And note that Apple copied the Creative Zen player form; Apple's "innovation" was the annoying scroll wheel it has long since abandoned.)

Smartphones were big before Apple got into the category. (Apple's innovation was marketing. Literally every other feature was copied from existing Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile dvices.)

Fitness watches were popular before Apple got into the category. Apple's innovation was making them cool again, in the same way that Timex made calculator watches and G-Force watches cool for a few years in the 1990s.

Low-power ARM chips were heavily used and gaining traction before Apple got into the category. Microsoft has supported ARM for almost half a decade now.

The only category that Apple actually made popular was the standalone tablet, which didn't meaningful exist because it was considered useless for creation/productivity and only good for consumption. (But on that note apparently Apple users excel at mindless consumption and don't care much for creation.)

It's only within the Apple echo chamber that these categories didn't exist, or weren't popular, before Apple entered the category.

> literally zero impact outside of the Apple echo chamber

I expected this to be the case 2 years ago, but since then it seems like Apple Silicon is legitimate competition. I don't think it's irrelevant. If they continue to pull forward, it will have an effect on the market outside of where Apple currently does business.

> products based on the Apple chips are underwhelming, considering that Apple has full control of the hardware and software

I can't speak for anyone else. I find them to be very impressive though, and it looks like they've started on an impressive trajectory. The hardware is exceeding my expectations by a wide margin.

I agree that the software could be better, but it could have been with or without their move to their own silicon. It's been in gradual decline for a while, I think.

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