|
ToxicSlurpee posted:That's true of business in general and has been for centuries. Arguably that's a major reason why it functions. Easier to do business with someone you interact with a bunch.
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2016 23:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 19:26 |
|
|
Mirthless posted:Steve Jobs had as much to do with inventing the smartphone as Thomas Edison did the lightbulb. Microsoft developed and had a smartphone OS for years before the iPhone came out. Jobs just refined the concept and marketed it better than anyone else did. The iPhone was the first phone i'm aware of to have a capacitive touchscreen which made a huge difference compared to the garbage resistive touchscreens popular on mobile phones at the time. What's more, software design revolved around requiring a stylus with small touch targets.
|
|
#
?
Feb 29, 2016 23:39
|
|
|
on the left posted:The iPhone was the first phone i'm aware of to have a capacitive touchscreen which made a huge difference compared to the garbage resistive touchscreens popular on mobile phones at the time. What's more, software design revolved around requiring a stylus with small touch targets. The LG Prada was actually the first phone with a capacitive touch screen (released one month before the iPhone). That said, what really set the iPhone apart from every other device on the market at the time was the combination of a touchscreen that could be used without a fiddly stylus and iOS actually having well-designed mobile apps that weren't horribly crippled. Take a look at the original unveiling of the iPhone where Steve Jobs shows off how Safari could render and interact with the desktop version of the New York Times and Amazon web sites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3gw1XddJuc&t=3687s No other phone could do that at the time, even ones with better CPU/memory specs. That entire presentation is full of Steve Jobs asserting that the experience of using an iPhone is "desktop-class" and compared to every other phone at the time it absolutely was.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 00:16
|
|
|
Mr.Radar posted:Take a look at the original unveiling of the iPhone where Steve Jobs shows off how Safari could render and interact with the desktop version of the New York Times and Amazon web sites: Mirthless posted:Jobs just refined the concept and marketed it better than anyone else did. quote:The hardware was poo poo, it's true, though at the time the iphone came out the top windows mobile phones were also far better - they had 3g support and could take SD cards, and also had bigger screens, pull-out keyboards, etc. That's been the prototypical PC/Windows problem though: You can get a Ti-Infinity graphics card and plug it into your 258GB RAM monsterboard, but the drivers suck and hardware compatibility is a black hole of suck so you spend 4 hours tracking down a fix. quote:I'm going to guess you had a pre-6700 windows mobile phone, and data loss on those devices all comes down to the battery technology, not any actual design flaws in the hardware itself. quote:I worked with smartphones on a helpdesk for a major cell carrier in 2007. It was a very, very weird time to be in the industry.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 00:40
|
|
|
Say what you want but I must have played 20,000 games of Bubble Breaker on my 8125/8925 and the stylus rocked for that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 00:54
|
|
|
Stylus was pretty handy for taken handwritten notes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 01:11
|
|
|
computer parts posted:Arguably that's a major reason why it functions. Easier to do business with someone you interact with a bunch. It's also easier to price fix, hand around preferential treatment, collude to keep prices high and wages low, and gently caress over everybody else. The 19th century was god awful for this stuff and was part of why it sucked for pretty much anybody that wasn't rich going into it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 01:18
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:Actually yeah, that itself was huge. Not having to WAP your way through poo poo on your pocket PC was pretty cool. I'm not saying that what Apple did wasn't worth being the industry leader for. But the technology to do this existed before Apple did it and was already showing up in a number of "feature phones" in east asia, Jobs did what Jobs did best, which was take someone else's idea and capitalize on it in ways they didn't think to. Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry were all fighting for a slice of commercial business and ignoring the consumer market because previous attempts to penetrate it had failed. Consumers weren't interested in using bulky, expensive phones with expensive productivity features they didn't need, and mobile browsing was something you did to pass time on the shitter, it was a quality of life feature that the overwhelming majority of mobile users never even purchased or turned on. So the only players in the market were spending all of their money on fighting each other on things like bulk pricing or how well it could interface with office or how full featured it's enterprise services were rather than how usable any of the devices were. I mean, some of the last Palm Treo devices that came out didn't support wi-fi, I guess on the logic that their users were all bringing laptops with them everywhere anyway? They reduced cost by not including the wi-fi radio, since the 3g data on the device was more than adequate to download email headers. Big file attachments? Well, that's what HotSync is for! Usability has not traditionally been important in the corporate world. The way these phones behaved at the time was par for the course. Jobs was a genius because he took all of these cutting-edge usability refinements that were showing up on consumer electronics at the same time and then slapped them into a stylish little candybar, right as broadband was starting to show up in every home in America and wi-fi was starting to become available at nearly every business. He got in at exactly the right time and exploited a huge, glaring weakness in the business model of his competitors by targeting a market they never knew existed, which then served as a direct line into the market they had been shut out of the first time around. Enterprise users were happy with their Treos and Blackberrys and 6700s because they had full keyboards and could get the job done in a pinch. They didn't know they needed the features that Jobs was offering until they tried them as consumers, and now you'll find at least one iphone in the board room of every company in America (I would bet even Samsung) quote:Ah! I had the 6600! It was a hand-me-down and it was amazing that I could play NES games on it. I know it's crazy to think about this, but at the time that was a thing nearly every phone in the country did that. I think nicad batteries lasted with smartphones a little longer. Probably saved on per-unit cost or gave them an extra hour and a half of battery life a day or whatever. They used to sell PDAs like they sold computer equipment, people bought them based on their specs, not their overall usability. They could have sealed the batteries in permanently but enterprise users wanted extended batteries so they had to be swappable.  edit: Sorry for this tangent, I just feel the need to point out that the iPhone wasn't really an original invention and that we shouldn't overcredit Apple for the smartphone. They deserve a lot, and the iPhone is an incredibly good product (even if I don't particularly like it) but the perception that the smartphone was Apple's idea is, just as an example, why I lost the ability to call a business by clicking on their phone number for more than a year. edit 2: some corrections Mirthless fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Mar 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 01:51
|
|
|
Features don't matter if people don't use them because they suck. If the iPhone wasn't innovation nothing is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 02:46
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:Features don't matter if people don't use them because they suck. If the iPhone wasn't innovation nothing is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 03:02
|
|
|
Don't forget the part where Apple aggressively overstated and litigated a variety of IP claims to keep their "innovation" "unique".
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 03:02
|
|
|
sbaldrick posted:Paypal is pretty stupid but when it was created it was a massive leap forward in tech for buying poo poo on the internet. I am in complete agreement but would like to add paypal continues to make brain-breaking amounts of money. ToxicSlurpee posted:It's also easier to price fix, hand around preferential treatment, collude to keep prices high and wages low, and gently caress over everybody else. The 19th century was god awful for this stuff and was part of why it sucked for pretty much anybody that wasn't rich going into it. "This is literally exactly like the Gilded Age" is the free square in tech bubble bingo.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 03:08
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Don't forget the part where Apple aggressively overstated and litigated a variety of IP claims to keep their "innovation" "unique". Like what? I honestly wasn't paying attention then.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 03:58
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:Like what? I honestly wasn't paying attention then. rounded corners
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 04:12
|
|
|
ayn rand hand job posted:rounded corners Circular interface buttons in the lower center of the face. Slide to unlock. The layout of the icons on the menus, and all of the actual icons. Basically every element of the design, including a number of items that definitely predated Apple's use. I'm not in IP, but the cases involving the initial grant of those design patents are only starting to really be resolved- and I believe that in the interval Apple's had control of them. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Mar 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 04:34
|
|
|
Hughlander posted:Like what? I honestly wasn't paying attention then. vvvv Discendo Vox posted:Circular interface buttons in the lower center of the face. Slide to unlock. The layout of the icons on the menus, and all of the actual icons. Basically every element of the design, including a number of items that definitely predated Apple's use. I'm not in IP, but the cases involving the initial grant of those design patents are only starting to really be resolved- and I believe that in the interval Apple's had control of them. Yeah, basically while Apple and Samsung / Google spent the last ten years waving their dicks at each other the legal battle has tied up a number of useful features that were present in Android at launch but basically got litigated out until Google could work out how to do things without infringing on Apple's stupidly broad patents. What Apple was trying to do was patent a market, rather than a device, as all the features they attempted to patent weren't original, just the particular combination and usability level they were presented in. Old Spice figured out how to sell perfume to men by putting a ship on the bottle. They didn't try to shut out the competition by patenting all ships or the idea of scents aimed at men. By far the worst was clickable links, btw, Apple at one point was arguing that they had the sole right to touch-screen clickable links, like the hyperlink was a thing they loving invented themselves. They eventually pared it down to just being able to link from phone numbers to the dial screen but even that turned out to be something somebody else had thought of first. Mirthless fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Mar 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 05:14
|
|
|
Mirthless posted:Old Spice figured out how to sell perfume to men by putting a ship on the bottle. They didn't try to shut out the competition by patenting all ships or the idea of scents aimed at men. that would be trade dress and something completely unpatentable, which really aren't germane to design patents
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 05:20
|
|
|
ayn rand hand job posted:that would be trade dress and something completely unpatentable, which really aren't germane to design patents I'm not a legal expert. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 05:23
|
|
|
FilthyImp posted:Actually yeah, that itself was huge. Not having to WAP your way through poo poo on your pocket PC was pretty cool. Driver support and compatibility is not exactly the strongest argument against Windows, given that they do it a hell of a lot better for a hell of a lot more hardware than anything else on the market. There are a lot of reasons Windows boxes ended up on top of not only the PC gaming pile, but the home econo-box-PC pile and the Enterprise business box pile. Driver support and an effort to support widespread hardware compatibility rather than the proprietary-everything approach is one of the big ones. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 05:37 on Mar 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 05:32
|
|
|
Mirthless posted:I'm not a legal expert. Surprised three isn't a thread in BFC called "I Pee Law" about exactly these topics.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 05:33
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:From the looks of things they were in the right place at the right time and now pay people smarter than they are to make more things. I've only worked with one of them, but he at least is pretty smart.
|
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 14:09
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Circular interface buttons in the lower center of the face. Slide to unlock. The layout of the icons on the menus, and all of the actual icons. Basically every element of the design, including a number of items that definitely predated Apple's use. I'm not in IP, but the cases involving the initial grant of those design patents are only starting to really be resolved- and I believe that in the interval Apple's had control of them. Speaking of which: A lot of those features and design concepts werent internally developed by Jobs and co. But acquired through company takeovers. Theres a lot more easy money to be made sniffing out investment/acquisition oppurtunities than in actual R&D and production. And that really is part and parcel of capitalism. Capital breeds Capital, You have to have some first, and the buy-in increases as time goes on and wealth concentrates. Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Mar 1, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 1, 2016 14:58
|
|
|
SurveyMonkey is doing great - which is why the new CEO is firing 100 employees? 
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 05:13
|
|
|
They're mostly sales staff, and if you're redeveloping a product you might well not need the same kind of sales capabilities for it -- you certainly don't need them sitting around not earning commissions while you figure it out. AIUI, SurveyMonkey's financials are fine, so I don't think it's really a sign of structural issues.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 05:34
|
|
|
Mr.Radar posted:The LG Prada was actually the first phone with a capacitive touch screen (released one month before the iPhone). That said, what really set the iPhone apart from every other device on the market at the time was the combination of a touchscreen that could be used without a fiddly stylus and iOS actually having well-designed mobile apps that weren't horribly crippled. Take a look at the original unveiling of the iPhone where Steve Jobs shows off how Safari could render and interact with the desktop version of the New York Times and Amazon web sites: Opera on WinMo was a faster, more capable browser before the iPhone came out, but you had to know to seek it out and install it.
|
|
#
?
Mar 2, 2016 18:51
|
|
|
Munkeymon posted:Opera on WinMo was a faster, more capable browser before the iPhone came out, but you had to know to seek it out and install it. Exactly this I had a samsung windows phone back in the day that was great. Ran age of empires and with Opera mobile you had a legitimate desktop browsing experience that was good on the mobile device. Of course the downside there was thst you had to pay for Opera after a certain point and buying a browser always felt wrong for some reason.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 02:41
|
|
|
Raldikuk posted:Exactly this I had a samsung windows phone back in the day that was great. Ran age of empires and with Opera mobile you had a legitimate desktop browsing experience that was good on the mobile device. Of course the downside there was thst you had to pay for Opera after a certain point and buying a browser always felt wrong for some reason. Because back then the home internet experience was entirely browser-based for most people so paying for the internet and the browser seemed like an egregious double dip.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 02:55
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:They're mostly sales staff, and if you're redeveloping a product you might well not need the same kind of sales capabilities for it -- you certainly don't need them sitting around not earning commissions while you figure it out. AIUI, SurveyMonkey's financials are fine, so I don't think it's really a sign of structural issues. Lots of companies wildly profitable and lay off a ton of people, that's very common, and in many cases those companies can be wildly overstaffed.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 02:59
|
|
|
Adlai Stevenson posted:Because back then the home internet experience was entirely browser-based for most people so paying for the internet and the browser seemed like an egregious double dip. I paid for opera back in the day because it's features were fantastic and back when websites were primarily plain text browser features actually helped. As websites morphed more towards applications huge browser toolbars made less sense, and needed to get out of the way (which chrome made happen). Though the early 2000's web was crippled by IE6 so no browser except IE6 could render reliably. Opera always had problems with comparability.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 04:16
|
|
|
The Military-Unicornial complex just got tighter: Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 04:44
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:The Military-Unicornial complex just got tighter: Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board. Ah yes. They are finally going to address the biggest issue of our times: Can the US Military come up with an idea so expensive that the Federal Government won't fund it?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 05:04
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:The Military-Unicornial complex just got tighter: Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board. Google one step closer to umbrella Corp?
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 05:50
|
|
|
Holyshoot posted:Google one step closer to umbrella Corp? To be fair, "Alphabet Inc" is ominous enough in itself.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 05:58
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:The Military-Unicornial complex just got tighter: Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board. They finally figured out where the real money is.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 09:34
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:The Military-Unicornial complex just got tighter: Former Google CEO Schmidt to head new Pentagon innovation board. Hrm, I wonder how PetMan is coming along. Oh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY Oh. Absurd Alhazred posted:To be fair, "Alphabet Inc" is ominous enough in itself. Great, I just learned that the subsidiary of Alphabet Inc that owns Boston Dynamics is called X. moller fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Mar 3, 2016 |
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 11:11
|
|
|
moller posted:Great, I just learned that the subsidiary of Alphabet Inc that owns Boston Dynamics is called X. Aw, they don't have their holdings split up between twenty-six subsidiaries. That sucks.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 11:18
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:Aw, they don't have their holdings split up between twenty-six subsidiaries. That sucks. Just wait? Edit: Like, you start with secret military robot X and then you generalize.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 11:38
|
|
|
moller posted:Hrm, I wonder how PetMan is coming along. I was going to suggest an f-35 variable fighter retrofit, but now that we have functioning mechanical legs, the military might just be curious enough to burn an extra few billion for some additional testing.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 11:42
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:I was going to suggest an f-35 variable fighter retrofit, but now that we have functioning mechanical legs, the military might just be curious enough to burn an extra few billion for some additional testing. And a few billion more ignoring the testing because it found flaws they'd rather not fix.
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 15:22
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 15, 2024 19:26 |
|
|
Lote posted:Ah yes. They are finally going to address the biggest issue of our times: Can the US Military come up with an idea so expensive that the Federal Government won't fund it? The answer to this question may surprise you!
|
|
#
?
Mar 3, 2016 19:37
|
|
