BoatBanter.com - View Single Post

X ` Man

On 10/8/11 2:48 AM, wrote:
On Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:58:04 -0700, wrote:

On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 01:19:00 -0400, wrote:

On Thu, 6 Oct 2011 21:15:53 -0700, "Califbill"
wrote:

The good part was he recognized brilliance, which Xerox never did. But he
stole the design, he did not borrow it. Xerox should have owned about 1/2
of Apple for that breach of etiquette. He even tried to sue Microsoft for
stealing "his" idea.

There was a lot of "idea stealing" going on in the early PC business.
If you saw a neat idea, you stole it.
Gates perfected the art of simply buying out any serious competition
he had once he was rich enough to sue.
Jobs was successful because he was too small to be sued for anti-trust
when Apple was young and too big to screw with when it became
successful He is probably the most successful "closed architecture"
company since Ma Bell.
He got away with it because his reach was spread across so many
different platforms that he did not have a monopolistic market share
of any of them.
Of course there is no such thing as anti trust legislation these days
anyway.

Personally I think Apple is a little too "culty" for me. I prefer open
architecture and I will live with the quirks.
Dell is too "closed" for my taste.

And so the game continues with the iPhone and iPad, neither allowing
flash (and thereby opening the platform) to run.

But, unlike the closed architcture of the Mac, iPads (for now) and
iPods dominate the market. Apple will never dominate the computer
business. They may sell more laptops than any other laptop
manufacturer but there are 10 laptop manufacturers, mostly producing
product for the Windows environment. Even with the iPad's popularity,
competitors running Android (Galaxy Tab) are quickly gaining momentum.

The iPod and iPhone will continue to have a large market share but the
computing market, including the iPad, is another thing.

The Ipod is the one that confuses me. What is so special about a music
player that is aimed at a proprietary music format?
I have a $20 Sansa that holds over 50 hours of music and a third of
that is on an SD card that I can swap out.
It is smaller than an Ipod, basically about the size of a thick
"credit card" calculator.

The iPod may be "aimed" at a proprietary music format (to sell the stuff
in the Apple music store, of course), but it also plays MP3's without
choking. And videos and podcasts and you can use it as a hard drive.
I've got an older iPod...from 2003 maybe, and its little disk drive
inside holds 50 or 60 gigs. It's not as small as your Sansa, but I like
its ergonomics and size. The iPod is "special" because it was the first
with a really elegant design.

Design counts.

--
I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.