
Only Apple - dannynemer
http://daringfireball.net/2014/06/only_apple
======
Todd
Sorry to disagree with Gruber, but I don't think a set of devices made by one
company is the future. It's always been Apple's play, in part because of the
consistency of experience that it affords them, but it also let's them off the
hook on the hard problems--device interop, working with varied OEMs, etc.

Whether open (Google) or closed (Microsoft), platforms that run on multiple
OEM devices are the right way forward. I don't know about others, but I don't
want to live in a world where my only option to control my house, car, and
life is to go to an Apple store. At least Google and Microsoft give us some
choices.

So far, there's been no mention here of the developer experience. Gruber only
mentioned developers, but not the 'developer experience.' It's like it doesn't
matter anymore. Apple is finally doing interesting things in the developer
area with Swift. However, here, they're playing catch up with Microsoft and,
to a lesser degree, Google. Their language at 1.0 is similar to Windows Phone
7--very late to the game. In addition, you're still left with much of the less
than desirable developer toolset. Microsoft developed C# and Visual Studio
more than 10 years ago now. They're way ahead here. They also open source much
of their developer stack now (the new C# compiler, TypeScript, web stack,
etc.). Gruber doesn't even mention this aspect. I guess it's not important to
end users, but it does make a difference with the people building for their
platforms, devices, and services.

I feel like we're living in a constant world of incompatible systems whose
(nearly) sole purpose is to "own the market": VHS vs. Beta, GSM vs. CDMA,
Canon vs. Nikon lenses, and so on. This world makes the Internet and the Web
seem like a rare anomaly. Tesla's opening of the patent portfolio in an
attempt to stave off incompatible fuel stations is apropos to this.

~~~
roberthahn
"I don't know about others, but I don't want to live in a world where my only
option to control my house, car, and life is to go to an Apple store."

Me either. Even so, I still believe Apple got the model right. If only we
could live in a world where we have a healthy competitive ecosystem of Apple-
like companies. Then you would have many options at hand to control your
house, car, and life.

~~~
malandrew
We need forward thinking investors like pmarca to drop some of the VC cash on
the W3C standards process. We have the most amount of innovations and
investible companies when there are more open APIs. The image tag, the current
implementation of which was first coded by pmarca, enabled tons of startups,
the biggest of which are companies instagram, facebook, imgur, etc.

The one API that is languishing at the W3C that would help us immensely is the
Contacts API. Right now your contacts is effectively owned by companies like
Google (via Android), Facebook, and Apple (via iOS). Every other company that
wants access to your address book for the purpose of a social experience,
needs to go through those three gatekeepers 99% of the time.

The ideal gatekeeper of your contacts should be the browser. The term for them
is "user agent", i.e. it acts as an agent on behalf of the user. Right now
there are a lot of "skills" these user agents lack. Investing in giving them
more skills creates more decentralization and debases the power of the giants
we resent.

~~~
roberthahn
I think you're right about using the web as an interop protocol. I want to see
that future (or that present, more evenly distributed).

But I believe the browser is NOT the ideal gatekeeper. The ideal gatekeeper
for your contacts is, surprisingly enough, an app designed to manage contacts.
And as long as the inerop protocols are respected, switching from one contacts
app to another will never be a problem.

~~~
malandrew
Browsers must be the gatekeeper, otherwise Facebook continues to be the only
way to get your contacts into web apps.

What browsers need to do is leave more of the experience to end developers and
expose as many low level APIs in a safe way. Browsers would do best if they
focused on a sane approach to ACLs.

Browser plugins like SafeScript for example one basic way in which things
could be better for users. What SafeScript lacks is reputation information on
resources to help non-technical users make decisions about what to trust and
what not to trust.

e.g. Alice and Bob are friends. Carol is a tech professional with a stellar
reputation. Alice is tech savvy. Bob is a luddite. When Bob is presented with
an ACL request for an unrecognized resource (such as an app or script from an
unrecognized domain), Bob should be able to check if either Alice or Carol
decided to trust that script.

Reputation systems, the web of trust, organizations like Spamhaus, EFF,
Mozilla etc. can all go a long way to helping users make sense of what they
can and cannot trust on the internet.

The ideal user agent would be like a docker container with an ACL for taking
sensitive user information and sharing it with whatever is running in the
container in a safe sane way that puts the user's safety and experience first.

I would love to see someone take the following things/features and mash them
up:

* docker/lxc * chromeless browser windows controllable via API and any programming language (not just javascript) * QT like windowing system with URI routing and skinnable with the good parts of CSS. * ACL * reputation system for resources with URIs * Incrementally loadable

Linux containers provide the ideal technology to reimagine what the web could
have been if Kay [0] and Engalls vision had become the predominant way of
internetworked sharing of stuff.

[0] [http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-
wit...](http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-
kay/240003442)

------
thrownaway2424
Gruber waves off the other players' devices or operating systems, but takes
Apple's web services / cloud infrastructure as a given. Here in reality,
Apple's web services are atrocious. Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently
unavailable backend services are not a healthy part of the triad that Gruber
is proposing.

~~~
coldtea
> _Weirdly implemented, slow, and frequently unavailable backend services_

Well, they do have the #1 app store, a syncing/backup service used by half a
billion people, and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh,
and a huge music storage service.

I don't find iCloud or iTunes or the App Store slow myself. And I'm tens of
thousands of miles from the US, and thousands of miles from a decent latency
ISP.

They're "slow" and "frequently unavailable" compared to what? Is the
experience of bying stuff from the Google Play store any better? Is the
experience of buying music off of Amazon any better? (I'm not talking about
Open vs Close, and other philosophical stuff -- I'm asking about what you
claimed here, e.g that it's "slower").

~~~
MAGZine
> a syncing/backup service used by half a billion people

Someone unwilling though, yeah? Lots of people I know don't turn on iCloud,
and are annoyed with the iTunes implementation.

> and the #1 music store in the world (per profit / people). Oh, and a huge
> music storage service.

But Apple has done nothing to stop/retain the market of those flocking to
music streaming sites (Spotify, which has record growth; rdio, Google Music,
among others) except BUY a streaming service with poor adoption.

I think the Open/Close part is part of the reason why Apple's services pale in
comparison.

As for speed, I would be very surprised if Apple had better service than
Google or Amazon, as these companies are _much_ more invested in the Web than
Apple.

~~~
gress
Can you explain why anyone would not turn on iCloud backups for their device?

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Privacy concerns. Speed. Efficiency. Mobile data costs.

~~~
coldtea
Well, the backup can be encrypted. It also doesn't use "mobile data" (over wi-
fi). And speed and efficiency, I never had any problem with.

Any comparable service doing it better? Because those are general concerns,
nothing special about iCloud.

------
leorocky
There is always a lot of careful insight in Gruber's posts that I like but it
is tainted with a type of enthusiasm that doesn't belong in journalism. Even
if he is correct, being a cheerleader with liberal praise isn't analysis. It's
opinion, and Gruber often reads like an opinionist. Apple is an amazing
position to build all kinds of wonderful technology, and Samsung does come
across as a shallow copy cat that throws shit on the wall and sees if it
sticks, and it's good someone points that out, but Samsung is also really good
at being a copycat, and they make amazing displays and their software is
getting better even as they plaster it with more junk apps. It's just not so
black and white, and to always frame it in such a way hurts credibility.

I've tried in the past to follow Gruber regularly but there is just too much
defensive negativity in his posts. I can only check it off and on, reading him
every day would make me unhappy.

~~~
thrownaway2424
The other problem is he just doesn't know anything about the industry he's
writing on, because he's been a tunnel-vision mac fan for decades.

Current example: just below this article he credits Amazon with inventing a
button that connects you to live customer service. The counterexample to that
claim is Bloomberg, whose terminals have a dedicated Help key. Striking this
key once gets you a help screen, but if you hit it twice someone from
Bloomberg calls you immediately. Bloomberg has had that for decades.

~~~
seiji
_credits Amazon with inventing a button that connects you to live customer
service._

oh my glob. Willfully misunderstand the world much? He's talking about
_consumer_ devices. How many devices in your home that aren't $10,000/month
stock terminals have live under-5-second video support?

~~~
thrownaway2424
Maybe he should just learn to write, then, because his statement is totally
unqualified. "unique" "no one" and "anything" all appear in this statement.
These are words with meanings.

"That’s truly remarkable, and a unique Amazon advantage. No one else has
anything like this." \-- Gruber

~~~
function_seven
The pumps at the local gas station also have such a button. Should he have
mentioned those? A reasonable reader understands that "unique", "no one", and
"anything" are referring to the market Amazon is selling the device in.

~~~
eridius
That doesn't seem at all relevant. That's like saying in a retail store you
can ask the retail employees for assistance. The addition of a button to
summon an employee does not make it special.

What interests me about this Amazon Mayday button (which I had never heard of
before) and why I think Gruber talked about it, is because it's a completely
free service provided to owners of a consumer device. It's basically customer
service, but it's extremely fast (average of 9.75 seconds to get a response?
Wow!) and apparently rather comprehensive too (e.g. helping a customer beat an
Angry Birds level) as opposed to being restricted to actual tech support with
the device in question. This is why Gruber is saying it's remarkable and
unique, and I think he's right.

~~~
function_seven
Just to be clear, I totally agree with you. I was using the gas pump as an
absurd example (as your sibling comment pointed out) of another instance prior
art. I don't think parent's complaint about the use of "unique", "no one", and
"anything" is a valid one.

------
joshfraser
Finding your one differentiating feature is incredibly valuable for any
company, especially in the context of sales.

When customers ask how you compare to competitor A or B, it's awesome to be
able to say "we're the only people in the world who offer ______". Having one
thing that only you do, allows you to completely reframe the conversation. If
the customer cares enough about that feature, you become the obvious choice.

A nice side-effect is increased focus on your team because everyone knows the
one thing that matters most.

~~~
blahber
/insight

Excellent way of putting it !

I think apple is going for the word "seamless-experience" here [1].

I do think microsoft has a word too, which they always strive for, and I hope
it continues -- "backwards-compatible".

I must be honest, I find compatibility-breaking painful as a developer and as
a user.

[1] I know, hyphenation is a cheap hack :)

------
slm_HN

                                Daring Fireball
                                is hard to
                                read because 
                                the website 
                                is so poorly 
                                formatted.
    
                                I rarely 
                                make it 
                                past the 
                                first 
                                paragraph.
    
                                The font is
                                too small, 
                                the margins
                                are too huge
                                and the colors
                                have poor 
                                contrast.

~~~
yzzxy
Yeah, avant garde doesn't really work for web design as soon as it starts
impacing readability.

~~~
bthomas
It's certainly memorable though, and that must help his personal brand. I
don't like it either, but I wouldn't dismiss it as a bad idea from his
perspective.

------
hayksaakian
Apple is doing well to optimize what the company already has, but has shown
little regarding what they plan to do next.

Seems like they're playing very safe.

~~~
zyxley
I dunno... Continuity, answering phones on a PC, etc, seems to point pretty
strongly at "we are going to make switching between all our devices as
seamless as possible" for "what they plan to do next".

That's not really "optimizing", considering that Apple is aiming at a range of
improvements to the cross-device experience that other companies have only
barely touched at (Chrome tab sync, etc).

~~~
m_mueller
This is especially true because introducing any new 'smart' (=connected)
products into your life if you already have computer, smartphone and tablet,
is going to be just too much if the issues about being in synch haven't been
solved until then. Apple has the right ideas about pushing in this direction -
as for me I've essentially given up on trying to keep everything both synched
and available for any use case. The main thing Apple's fall updates won't
offer that I'd really like is multi-user for iPads. If it weren't for that,
iOS 8 / OSX 10.10 are - on paper - pretty close to where I'd want everything
to be. That being said, it probably won't solve Apple's software QA issues
I've been experiencing lately.

------
philosophus
I guess this might be focused on the consumer end, but if you're looking for
this in the enterprise, you can get it from IBM and Oracle. You can buy Oracle
(Sun) hardware, Solaris, WebLogic, and Oracle database and never use a non-
Oracle product. Same with IBM.

And maybe I'm cynical, but "unified ecosystem" sounds a lot like "total vendor
lock-in" to me.

~~~
schoen
Another term for the "commoditization" that the essay suggests Apple is
successfully challenging might be software portability. Or standardization. Or
interoperability.

------
song
> Apple has proceeded from being OK at walking and chewing gum to being good
> at it.

That may be so but honestly the last release of OS X that really worked for me
was snow leopard. Just as a quick list of common well known issues with
Mavericks that I have and I'm not the only one to have...

\- Sometimes when I plug in my headphone, there's a bug and audio stops
working instead of switching to the headphone. The only fix I found is to
restart the computer.

\- I'm using a macbook pro retina with 16GB of ram and mission control slows
the system to a crawl whenever I want to use it. Expose just worked on a
computer with 4 times less ram and vastly less powerful.

\- Sometimes when I connect an external screen, the computer just crashes
completely.

Honestly, I just wish Apple would start actually doing some QA and fix those
issues... The machine itself is great and powerful but it's really a pain to
have to deal with all the bugs. And I say that not as an apple hater (all of
my computers are from them except my server).

~~~
Glide
Btw, I have a coworker that has the external screen problem and he's had it
crash 4 times in a day. He had to take it to the Apple store because it's a
hardware issue.

~~~
song
Thanks, that's something I'll look into. For me it started happening often
with the latest update so that's why I ascribed the issue to software but
could be just a coincidence...

------
bla2
> It has long been axiomatic that Apple is not the sort of company that could
> walk and chew gum at the same time. In 2007, they issued a (very Steve Jobs-
> sounding) press release that stated Mac OS X Leopard would be delayed five
> months because the iPhone consumed too many resources [...] Last week’s
> keynote was when we, on the outside, finally saw the results. Apple today is
> firing on all cylinders.

There still haven't been many OS X os kernel-level since then (say, NFS+ is
largely unchanged).

(But the point seems generally true other than that.)

------
malandrew
This is largely true, but it draws the playing field Apple wants you to see.
There is a large part of the playing field that is omitted, cloud, the web and
the Internet in general. And this playing field alone is as important as all
the playing fields Apple is competent in combined.

Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the
web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web
less than Apple.

Yes, they have cloud services, but for the most part, Apple's developer
community has been generally unhappy about Apple's iCloud offering. This stems
from two causes:

(1) first, the competency of Apple's team in this area are not comparable to
the competency of Apple's other teams (mainly operating systems devs, app
devs, industrial designers, supply chain specialists, etc.). No engineer who
is truly competent in these domains (cloud, internet, web) has Apple as top of
mind when they think about what company to go work for.

(2) second, Apple doe not only not understand the value of decentralization,
but they actively fight it. This works fine for "single-player" experiences,
but for "multi-player" experiences this is a disaster. I, as an Apple user,
cannot dictate the devices and software my friends, family, colleagues, etc.
will use, so any experience that is only truly complete when all these other
people are also part of Apple's walled garden, will either never truly succeed
or will outright fail.

So yes, only Apple can compete with Apple on it's home turf, but there are
other playing fields than the ones Apple likes to talk about.

Lastly, Apple has only succeeded as much as it has with the unified
experience, not because it did things better, but because the web (and
specifically the browsers and the DOM) have failed to truly acknowledge that
the web can't [yet] compete with Apple (and native in general), is that we
don't have a feature complete and performant browser-based alternative for the
building blocks you actually need to build apps, namely retain-mode scene
graphs.

Browsers need to give some really deep thought to creating the equivalent APIs
to things like qt, kde, gnome, Core Animation, etc. The DOM just does not cut
it. FWIW, it's exactly what we're working on at Famo.us, and we're hoping
others take note and some of the ideas we're exploring become co-opted by the
browsers for inclusion as an alternative to the DOM, but that still plays
nicely with the DOM.

Further proof that Apple has succeeded only because others have stumbled can
be seen by comparing iOS to Android as well. Apple was a much better
experience for a while before Android caught up. Some of this was because of
Apple's big head start, but some of it was due to one technical/product
decision made by Android early on, that when reversed made all the difference
in Android's ability to compete with Apple: Early on Android settled on
immediate mode graphics. This was the main reason Android user experience and
performance just felt wrong for a while when Apple's felt right. Once Android
embraced retain mode graphics fully, the Android experienced improved
dramatically, so much so that I would say that Android, with its developer
community, can also do anything Apple can do.

[0] [http://famo.us/](http://famo.us/)

[1] [http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/](http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/)

~~~
bane
I think this points to Apple's fundamental weakness: when they can't control
the experience, their efforts are second-rate.

It's a weird binary behavior that's tied to the pre-internet days. You buy
into Apple's ecosystem and you do Apple-y things and you'll have a world class
experience, a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale.

But as soon as you start interfacing with anything else, especially something
messy like the Internet, and hold onto your pants because you have no idea
what the experience is going to be like, but you can guarantee it won't be
better than a 5 out of 10 at best.

As much as other companies might like to provide an Apple-like walled garden
(and I'll completely agree that previous attempts by non-Apples have been 3
out of 10s at best), they fundamentally understand that there is a bigger
world out there. It's much harder to interface with the rest of the world, it
_is_ messy, but you can bring some kind of sanity to it if you work at it.
These companies work really hard to provide a 7 or 8 out of 10 experience
while Apple provides a 5. And they're rewarded for it. They hit these
perfectly reasonable experience levels in-spite of the underlying mess they
have to deal with, and they manage to make viable businesses out of it. What's
more remarkable to me is that despite Apple controlling 100% of the experience
in the Apple ecosystem, they aren't a perfect 10.

I think this magnifies the flaws even more and makes them more damning and I
think a surprising amount of it backfires. Otherwise Apple would absolutely
dominate the market, but it doesn't.

Where Apple _does_ talk to the outside world, it's an acknowledgment that it's
simply cheaper to deliver content through proprietary end-to-end points over
the Internet rather than build the infrastructure themselves. But it's such a
begrudging acknowledgment and the result is a collective "meh" out of Apple.
"It's not part of us, so why really try?" Make no mistake, if Apple could
replace Internet connectivity with a global AppleTalk network to deliver music
and videos to you and ensure no unclean non-Apple users weren't dirtying up
the bandwidth, they would.

The goal of other companies then is to try to hit the _feel_ of this kind of
tight vertical integration that Apple has, but to do it across vendors,
networks, software, etc...to do it in a non-integrated way. And you know what?
It's not bad. It's not Apple-level, but you have to admit the Internet, the
Web, etc. all that is pretty bad ass. These things that we take for granted
are the result of a decidedly non-Apple, very open, approach that benefits
people far more in the balance.

>Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand
the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the
web less than Apple.

Then again, Samsung and Apple are two of the largest companies in the world.
So maybe they're doing something right.

~~~
malandrew
Excellent comment.

The only thing I would contest is the last comment about Samsung. It is like
1/3 of South Korea's economy, but its not a true comparable because it
functions more like a keiretsu [0]. At it's core, it's a bank that finances
many companies operating in different industries that cooperate when it makes
sense. They are a giant in computing, but they also draw a ton of strength
from other lines of business. For example, Samsung Heavy Industries is one of
the biggest builders of large cargo container ships in the world. There are
many more lines of business like this.

On that note, one reason for Apple's ability to deliver a 9/10 experience with
a closed ecosystem is because it can afford to. There would be a lot more
companies able to deliver a 9 out of 10 closed experience if they had the cash
reserves Apple does. Cash funds the development of perfected services, but
more importantly it affords Apple's leadership the luxury to focus on the
long-term. When cash is an issue, companies have to make trade-offs that
compromise on building the foundation to get to a 9 out of 10 experience.
Apple never has to compromise. They just need to make sure there is a market
and then build out the foundational layers of the onion necessary to build a
unified experience including complementary products and services that make the
difference between a 7 out of 10 experience and a 9 out of 10 experience.

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu)

~~~
bane
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was only referring to the Samsung
electronics division (which is quite a bit bigger than all of Apple).

~~~
malandrew
No need to apologize. It was a spot on comment.

------
mariodiana
"What we saw last week at WWDC 2014 would not have happened under Steve Jobs."

I watched the keynote from the WWDC, and I was struck by the very positive,
upbeat, and friendly vibe that seemed to come from it. I'm a big Steve Jobs
fan, and I hate to agree with a statement like the above, but my thoughts
after watching the keynote were that Apple is done mourning the passing of
their founder and former CEO and, if anything, seems stronger now. "Mercurial"
isn't a compliment by anyone's standards, and it isn't easy working under
someone like that. Perhaps Apple will thrive in its new era. Watching the
keynote, it seemed like the people up on stage were pumped up in a very real
way.

------
cromwellian
Disneyland can be a more pleasant town experience than a real American main
street. But not everyone can afford to live in Disneyland, and not everyone
likes the controlled environment.

BTW, Gruber's article claims Apple makes most of their stuff, but as far as I
can tell, they only make the CPU. Everything else is licensed ip: camera
modules/sensors, GPU (PowerVR), etc.

------
prawn
Samsung dropped the ball with their smart TVs. Smart Hub is atrocious when it
could've been an awesome experience for developers that let the Plex's of the
world really shine. Instead we have horrible EPGs, sluggish interfaces and no
flexibility or hackability.

------
pistle
Since when does Foxconn not make anything for anybody else?

This article reads a bit too much like PR+. A main point is trying to argue
that Apple is genius at framing "conversations" to manage how their brand is
emotionally considered. It does this by applying similar techniques like
throwing the "Apple does their own CPUs!" and their stack is so unique, but
that's not true enough and pervasive across all products, subsystems, etc.

The battery is another place where story has nuance to it, but we sure aren't
going to get any of that here.

Crap. I've been post-baited.

------
sscalia
I find it hard to argue with any of the points he makes. I'm sure someone here
will, but I found myself doing the mental "gulp of air and raising a finger"
then getting silenced again.

I really wish Microsoft had pulled off Windows Phone; it arguably had a much
better user experience than Android did (and still does) -- and interesting
Nokia hardware.

I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart except
themselves and advertisers.

The next 10 years are going to be very interesting indeed.

~~~
markdown
> I simply don't believe Google has the best interests of anyone at heart
> except themselves and advertisers.

You think Apple has your interests at heart? Or Microsoft?

Like Google, they have your cash at heart. Not a thing more.

~~~
seiji
To march out some old tropes: Apple makes money by delighting users so they
will continue to buy products. Google makes money by tracking users,
forcefully if necessary, and abusing their advertisers. Microsoft makes money
out of legacy ties these days—they don't deserve to continue existing.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
That comment is just ridiculously biased - you might have a good point, but
it's hidden behind the opinion. For example, one could just as legitimately
counter with "Apple makes money by developing a desirable brand and
overcharging on hardware" but that wouldn't fit your spin, would it?

~~~
tomp
How is it overcharging? It's true, their devices are more expensive than the
rest of the market, but nothing on the market comes close to Apple's quality
and usability. Simply said, they have no competition, so they can set their
own price - and while the customers are paying it, it's not overcharging.

~~~
oneeyedpigeon
RAM?

------
mantrax5
This thread is 50 shades of gray, damn.

------
mantrax5
Oh look, it's a Daring Fireball post where Gruber is talking at length about
how awesome Apple is.

~~~
eridius
Oh look, it's a snarky comment on Hacker News dismissing Gruber for writing an
article on the topic of Apple, without even attempting to address any of the
contents of the article.

------
steele
lol Only Gruber.

Google is closest to the goal and Satya Nadella's new-guard at Microsoft is
taking risks to get there as well. Among them Apple is doing the least to play
nicely across platforms. So customers with 1-2 hardware touchpoints in the
Apple ecosystem have to rely on Apple's competitor software and services.

When I think of the line of Apple products, I definitely don't think
'seamless'.

------
quadrangle
Ubuntu…

------
asimpletune
This is an extremely unbiased, well argued essay. There's really nothing in
here to disagree with. I even enjoy the author's flair for nuance. The point
they make about the apple then and now is exquisite. Haters gonna hate.

------
markdown
I don't get what the significance of this post is, and why it is at the top of
HN.

Company A does this and Company B does that and these two are a little similar
but not really and this other Company wants this but can't get it. Only this
Company. Yeah not that Company. See I figured all this out; see how smart I
am?

Now and then on a lazy sunday morning with a cuppa in hand and the business
news in my lap, I sink into this level of naval grazing. But I'd never have
the time or motive to publish my drivel.

Thousands of hours are going to be wasted reading this shit, and to what end?

Clearly many people gained lots of value from this article, or it wouldn't be
at the top of HN. Could one of you please explain what the value was? What did
you gain from reading the article?

~~~
Bud
I don't feel like addressing your question directly, but it is ironic that the
criticism of Gruber is coming from a user named "markdown", which is something
Gruber invented. :)

~~~
markdown
hehe nice!

I am Mark, and any accounts I use for things I do in my downtime are called
markdown. Work related accounts have the username markup.

