Original story here, from the ones that actually interviewed Wozniak: http://anewdomain.net/2012/04/26/apple-founder-inventor-stev...
(Blogspam originally implied a blog post that copy-pastes the entire original article, possibly adding one or two sentences of "commentary". This article clearly has more meat than that -- it's at least a good faith effort to provide some context.)
Increasingly, smaller articles about other articles get much more traffic than the original source. One such example is the well-researched NYT article about how companies learn your secrets, and then the Forbes article that cut the crap and got to the real shocker of the story and got more pageviews (possibly $$$) http://nickoneill.com/how-fortune-stole-a-new-york-times-art...
The occasions they let the Woz out are rare enough.
Or as they say - listen and learn ;-) (and thanks for all the links)
This whole talk about low attention spans, is it backed by any real research? I'd have thought folks on Hacker News would have longer attention spans. After all, most are developers who need to get into the zone when coding, and often read copious amounts of documentation. This sort of thing requires concentration!
If so, that is actually encouraging!
This may be a good lesson for writers to learn (imagine how a pageview-whore would summarize your article, then summarize it yourself), but in the meantime we shouldn't encourage it IMO.
1) the untapped market potential is still huge (I myself don't own an Android or an iPhone - although I'll be buying an Android phone soon)
2) The customers gained by Android and iOS are not as loyal or as committed to each platform as the early adopters of the home PC were. When you bought your first PC, you usually spent a lot of money on it, invested in software...etc. By contrast, most smartphone buyers just need a phone with an internet connection, decent browser and a Facebook app. Other apps and games are just a short-term bonus that quickly become a bore. Also phones are cheap or free with a contract (in North America at least) so switching after your 2-3 year prison sentence with one of the carriers is not a huge leap of faith.
Having said all this I personally hope Apple and Microsoft lose badly and Android wins. Purely based on principle and to a lesser degree my own mild case of fanboyism.
Yeah most music is DRM-free these days but as far as most users know, their iPhone knows how to talk to iTunes and their other phone doesn't, end of story.
I doubt Windows Phone users are any more loyal. I'm a current Windows user and I intend to go back to Android. The app market is weak and multi-tasking doesn't work particularly well. I do love the Zune software though.
The tablet market has the potential to be the thin end of the wedge toward fixing that though. Suppose several of the existing PC makers like Dell get into the tablet market and start offering WiFi-only devices available with stock Android and unlocked boot loaders. I have to assume that those companies would be happy to see some real competition for Microsoft for once.
The trouble is going to be that Microsoft may be back to its old tricks with regard to not allowing PC OEMs to preinstall "Linux" on their hardware. We've already heard ruminations about Win8-on-ARM requiring a locked boot loader. It remains to be seen whether the PC makers will be willing to throw their users under the bus in order to appease Microsoft.
In regard to secure boot and Windows 8, the restrictions are a part of the Windows 8 certification system. Personally I don't think many manufacturers will want to skip windows certification, even if they have to implement the restrictions. The more I think about it, the more I see this could bring up another anti-trust case. It would probably also bring the 'do you own your device' issue to the forefront.
I personally like both and wouldn't mind either, or both, being top market share leaders. Tho Boot2Gecko is certainly years away from stability.
If high-end smartphones are able to replace desktop PCs for light/casual users, Microsoft can take advantage of their desktop dominance. Apple of course could offer an OSX desktop, but Android would have to rely on gnome or kde, and although both of these are fine products, they haven't exactly proven themselves commercially.
Interesting times ahead, methinks.
And during this past year, both microsoft and nokia's market share actually decreased [1]. That's with both the points you mentioned, over one year.
Don't you agree that's enough empirical evidence that those 2 points, alone, are not enough?
[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/03/brutal-...
The navigation paradigma Microsoft uses is not for me, I prefer Apple's more natural approach. Also, most apps in the store look the same (establishing context by design, anyone?) because there are only so many possibilities of laying out monochrome elements (mostly HUGE text) on a black or photo background. But I'm clearly not part of the intended audience, Woz demonstrates that there are people who like that.
I'm fascinated to know what is "natural" about Apple's approach. I think it is "natural" because you are used to it. To me, it feels overly (/incredibly) app-centric. Both Android and Windows Phone (to differing degrees) feel far more task based: "You have a photo. What would you like to do with it?", as opposed to "You opened Instagram? I assume you want to do stuff with photos".
By example, when I look up a contact in my address book in Windows Phone, it allows me to look up my history with that person. Emails, texts, IMs, tweets, everything- all in one place, because who thinks "Dave tweeted that at me" over "Dave sent that to me"? By contrast, iOS keeps every interaction siloed in-app.
Apple's most "natural" interactions result in making the address book look like a leather bound book.
that's a very good point. And that sounds like a FANTASTIC feature I'd love to have on my phone. your right, if the windows phone is more "people centric", as opposed to "app centric" And now that you mention it, I'd love to try out the windows phone, because it really sounds like they have it together. I think Android could go this way too, there's a lot they can do. But as fass as buggieness, and overall satisfaction, I've had a rather disappointing time with android (only smartphone I've owed.)
I was really surprised when I got my iPad that I couldn't open a photo and just upload it to facebook or send it to somebody in an e-mail. I had to go find an app to do that.
Oh, and let me get the obligatory, "BlackBerry? They still exist?" out of the way.
http://mashable.com/2012/04/25/microsoft-pegatron-patent-dea...
The other thing is that, on iOS, there is a context (app) for everything, with a dedicated meaning to every screen. I agree that Microsoft's approach to navigation is not bad, and it surely fares better in some aspects. But dedicated context is often lost when apps act as a "hub". I think that this kind of information presentation leads to information overburden, the kind of which prevents people from opening an app more often than once a week.
But I am curious, a lot of praise comes to windows mobile from iphone fans (I am not talking about Woz but many others). Would there be a lot of Apple fans really switching to Lumias or are they simply telling it just to criticize Android?
They would never use it, but it's necessary to praise it in order to validate their indignation that Android is more successful and widespread (which feeds into their sense of superiority as being among the select few who see the light).
I'm seriously not an Apple hater. I have a MBP and a 3gs. I'll probably get a 5 when it comes out. I love the industrial design of Apple's products. But a good half the people I know who use them have a near-religious attachment to them, and fully buy into the Jobsian reality distortion field. It's kind of like how, as a Canucks fan, I love my team but hate half the fans.
Apple made the first usable and popular touchscreen smartphone, and Androids success is largely due to the fact that Google recognized this and quickly repositioned Android, and I think that's pretty evident by looking at the evolution of the Android OS. The original Android prototypes didn't look very innovative, they looked like imitations of Symbian or WM6.
With iOS-style scrolling, there is nothing to learn. That's one of the biggest issues with Android (and, conversely, one of the advantages of Windows Phone and iOS): because Android has not been able to match the fluid scrolling and realistic physics, it breaks the illusion of physicality that the original iPhone managed to first create in 2007.
So what? At the end of the day I care that my phone works well and in a way that makes sense to me. I don't care whether or not it's a "copy" of another user interface.
I should note that Silverlight is equally pleasant to work with, can't say the same for Android's SDK.
The Lumia is a good phone, but it's still not as good as my iPhone 4. The screen and camera are what really ruin it for me.
Software wise, I miss a lot of apps, and while some of the stuff windows does with merging contacts between twitter, Facebook, etc. is cool, it falls down when it isn't done perfectly (which is rare)
I will say using a Windows Phone is MUCH "nicer" than an Android phone, but it still has a ways to go feature wise.
He does just seem to be a genuinely guileless person (in the original, positive sense of that word -- ie, completely honest and without trickery). I love that the guy just says what he thinks.
Have you used it?
Also they need good apps, apps in WP style. WP is good at showing infomations, but not good to me.
It just works which is an utter shock these days.
(yes I've had a 4s and a number of HTCs)
It also cost literally bugger all - so much so I don't need insurance or a contract to cover the costs.
That being said all of Google's products cater to, and now operate consistently for, a certain mindset. Reluctantly I'll admit that it's possible for a platform to successfully operate using parameters other than intuition-based UX/UI. It just feeeels weird ;-)
Even if you are targeting API levels lower than in 3.x, using the Support Package is a substantial benefit in organizing your UI code and improved concurrency support.
As ever, you can set your minimum API level below the API level to which you build, and test for API availability at runtime, for any API in Android.
Your point about C# vs. Objective-C is an important one that may have been glossed over somewhat. I can't bear Objective-C, I find it's syntax highly confusing and difficult to parse (my own subjective opinion). C# is much more pleasant. Microsoft could win over developers because of this if they are smart about it.
Now only if I could write apps in Python...!
You can currently write iOS apps in C# with Mono but my initial experiments in that direction suggested to me that it was too far out on the limb for comfort.
Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time dealing with the screen. Text looks like shit, and since most of what I do with my phone involves reading text, this is annoying. I hate that I have to zoom almost every email I get just to get something legible. (That could be more to do with all the wasted space in the email app though)
The camera is shit. It's ok in good lighting and completely worthless in low light. I loved that my iPhone camera was good enough that I could capture a moment wherever I was and it would look fine on a computer screen. That's really all I need from the camera. I can't do that with my Lumia because it just won't work in most situations.
This could be just my problem, but I don't like the big form factor. My thumb just can't reach the whole screen without uncomfortably stretching. Since Windows Phone navigation relies heavily on the back button, if I'm ever holding it with my right hand, I can barely use it. The big screen is great, but since Windows Phone uses empty space as such a big design element, it cuts down the usable space to be even less than what it was on my iPhone in lots of apps.
I really like the flow of most Windows Phone apps, but right now I haven't seen any developers do a good job of making their app stand out. Every app looks exactly the same, with different words in the lists. I don't know if it's just because the platform is still new, or if the APIs are too limiting.
But for 100 bucks on contract, it's a good phone, despite all my problems with it.
Edit: Downvote? so android is a smartphone? The parent was complaining about different smartphones, not different OSes. I think thats a subtle difference.
The big difference is Android uses a standard back button for all applications. This leads Android users to end up mashing a lot of buttons at random, to try and get what they want - it's actually quite a bad UI, and it was just translated from the web clumsily.
On iPhone, each app has its own navigation method, based on the requirements of the app. The main nav options for an iPhone app are:
* a navigation bar that stacks a series of views, with a back button.
* a tab bar which gives a 4-5 ever-present options on bottom
* a single view with buttons for menus
Even when you implement a nav bar for an app, which is similar to Android, it's much better, because the stack of views is deterministic. You can never tell what the Back button will do on an Android app.
Pushing the back button on an android phone, by default ALWAYS goes to the previous activity, or cancels context menus. Of course, it's possible to make the android back button do something else with the onPause method, just as it's possible to make that happen in the viewDidUnload method in iOS.
The dropbox and imdb android apps use tabs perfectly well.
Countless android apps use listviews to navigate.
* The iPhone back button always takes you to one, and exactly one, screen.
* The Android back button can take you to many different screens, based on where you last were.
That's a gigantic difference, and leads to the button-mashing I describe.
Good if it is the only apps you are using. But what if you switch to use others app for a while and switch back to this app. Can you remember the activity stack as of all the apps good as the OS does? Can you predict where back button is going to take you after not using the phone for half an hours?
Also, if you know where the button is but you don't know what exactly it is going to do, do you really know where the button is?
And this is the first thing I mention about why I like Android better.
The new navigation guidelines have back behaving as previously, but call for an "Up" button that navigates the app's hierarchy.
http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html
-wrong below!-
I think the updated design guide for ICS Android calls for the back button to ascend up the hierarchy of the app, rather than taking you to whatever screen you were last on. (So it is now supposed to be deterministic.) There are also better guidelines for how to provide in app navigation.
It'll probably take quite a while to catch on.
This is seriously one of the most W.T.F. comments I've ever read on HN. No exaggerating.
The Android back button is incredibly consistent, and the only people it causes in any confusion in are people too accustomed to the iPhone, mentally configured to always look to go to the top of the stack. There are a few apps that break the model, but by and large they work perfectly.
On iOS -- and yes, I use both daily with an iPad 3rd gen and an GS II running ICS -- it is essentially mystery meat in most apps. There is no universal model beyond some basic behaviors. As one aside, it is a PITA when you're lounging with the iPad and you have to go to the top to do every navigation.
There is no universe where the iOS model is better, but through completely acclimation.
Still, both Android and iOS are more similar to each other and this than anything else:
http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI...
Meanwhile Metro is completely new take on UI and much more different than the "gigantic" difference that you speak about.
Microsoft's legendary persistence -- fast following rival products and iterating them until they didn't suck and eventually drove competitors out of business -- would have been fruitless without the dominant position IBM simply handed to Microsoft with the original DOS deal.
And none of this stuff has taken place since Bill Gates left. Microsoft's record for the last ten years has been of failed initiatives (Zune, WinCE) and barely-successful subsidized persistence (MSN, XBox).
There's one significant case where Microsoft managed to do well without directly benefiting from the original DOS deal and that's XBox. (This indirectly benefited from the DOS deal in that it leveraged Microsoft's dominance of gaming, and subsidized by profits from that dominance, but compared to everything else it qualifies as an independent success.) Of course, XBox has hardly made Microsoft any money.
Of course, somebody seems to be creating a post-PC world based on phones and tablets, but that doesn’t negate the fact that this could have happened earlier if someone like SOny had sewn up 99% of the gaming console market and then integrated it with the web and content.
Windows CE has done just fine. It's not as huge a profit maker as Office or Windows, but it's still used on millions of devices worldwide. It ships in millions of Ford cars, ATMs, billboards, etc.
I think bigger and gutsy move was licensing DOS/Windows to Compaq inspite of IBM not being happy with it. Microsoft could've had an Apple like vertical integration(and immense profits) by making hardware too, but never made PCs. Licensing to PC clones drove the prices of PCs down and made them affordable to a wide swath of the world and helping the Internet come about. If computers cost $3000 like back in the day, adoption would have been quite low.
>Microsoft's legendary persistence -- fast following rival products and iterating them until they didn't suck and eventually drove competitors out of business -- would have been fruitless without the dominant position IBM simply handed to Microsoft with the original DOS deal.
Sure, but lots of companies have a lot of money to throw around but the difference with Microsoft was they kept at it and waited for missteps from competition while continuously making improvements. Eg. Netscape with the big rewrite http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html or more recently, Sony with the PS3 security issues and Move.
Microsoft's "arrive late" model didn't always work in the past (see: Money vs Quicken, et al) and while Microsoft has been struggling to reach traction with totally new (to them) products lately, there is no reason to believe this is due to any sort of sea change in the importance of being a first mover, because there are still plenty of cases in which the first mover is stomped by someone else these days, the someone else just generally isn't Microsoft.
The XBox did all right, but the 360 has done quite well. I loved my PS2, the XBox wasn't bad. But Sony released a year later and at an insane price point. Combined with the difficulty of developing for the cell relative (relative to 3 identical cores) and MS was able to gain a big chunk of the market.
Apple never made a big mistake with the iPod. Even the 2nd or 3rd gen (which the capacitive buttons) was still a nice player. The "fat" nano was still a nice player. One of the shuffles was a bit of a dud, but that was never a big chunk of their sales anyway. Any downsides were more than made up for by the availability of accessories and the iTunes Music Store.
With the iPhone, I don't think Apple has made any big mistakes either. Maybe the price on the original (which they fixed relatively quickly), and I know many people were unhappy with the AT&T choice, but it seems to have worked out fine. Apple was able to control the experience to keep it from being ruined by the carriers (mostly), and again the accessor market and the App Store have more than made up for that with most consumers. The two biggest complaints I've heard are lock-in/freedom (most people don't seem to care) and the lack of a physical keyboard (preference, and Apple clearly is willing to let keyboard enthusiasts go somewhere else).
I'd say there have been Android missteps. Some carriers ruin the phones, and the updates thing is a big negative in my mind. But Android phones cater to just about everyone (touch screen only or keyboard lover), and come in at all price points. It's clearly good enough for a great many people.
At this point, I don't think there is an opening in the smartphone market. If MS wants to succeed, they're going to have to make an opening... and they haven't done that yet. Combine that with the Window Phone's downsides (update questions, smaller app market due to small market share) and it's not an easy sell.
I'd like to see them succeed here, if only because I like that they're pushing a totally different UI and they provide additional pressure on Apple and Google to keep improving. But the iPhone came out five years ago. Two or three years ago I think they could have had a good chance against Android. They may have waited too long.
Ironically I've had a Lumia 710 for about 3 months now and I have literally zero things to complain about.
What I find lacking, coming from the Apple world, is the severe lack of accessories for my phone. Finding even a simple dock or a decent case is a pain.
I'm used to it now, but it can probably be improved by installing an aftermarket firmware like CyanogenMod. I haven't looked into it.