
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all solving the same problems - jonbaer
http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351197/apple-google-microsoft-tech-innovation-uniformity
======
Someone
1978: Apple, Atari, Commodore, and Tandy are all solving the same problems.

Competition is what drives technology forward. The only thing that may have
changed is that hardware developments now spread faster to other companies
because a lot of it is outsourced.

Software knowledge still spreads through diffusion through the movement of
employees between companies, but also is sped up a bit because lots of
scientific ideas are distributed through the Internet.

~~~
digi_owl
The difference from then and now is patents.

Gates himself admitted that if the current patent system had been in place
back when MS got started, it would never have gotten off the ground.

~~~
ambicapter
What has changed since then?

~~~
digi_owl
Basically that software can be patented.

Back during the 70s-80s, a specific set of code was covered by copyright. But
the behavior encoded could be reverse engineered.

A famous example is how Compaq clean room reverse engineered the BIOS of the
IBM PC, thus opening up the market for the clones.

In constrast there are all kinds of issues with using FAT (FAT32/ExFAT)
variants on Android phones because MS have/had patents. And i think Android
early on didn't offer things like pinch to zoom because Apple held a patent
(not sure what happened there).

~~~
lordnacho
I asked a patent lawyer in Switzerland about this, and the law is different to
the US. Does that create any openings?

~~~
digi_owl
IANAL, but i suspect it will depend on how much you want to trade with USA...

------
bedhead
I'm supposed to believe that it was only at the exact moment that the public
market put Dell's stock in the shitter that Michael Dell magically got
religion regarding short-term earnings pressures or other related issues? Ha!!
Give me a break, Dell was public for 25 years!!! Funny it never seemed to be
an issue when his stock was doing well...

------
mojuba
> All these machinations and adjustments are precisely what Michael Dell
> sought to escape when he took his business private two years ago.

Got me thinking, what keeps companies like Apple and Google from doing the
same? What are the benefits of staying public for them? What would be the
consequence of going private? I'm just very curious now.

~~~
pcurve
If they remain as successful as they are now, going private will never be an
option because doing so would cause complete erosion of trust by shareholders,
customers, public, and world. They will become opaque entities, and it will
become very difficult for them to operate globally.

Putting that problem aside, at their current valuation, a group of investors
will need to raise a huge amount of capital for relatively small return.

Dell took it private because the market effectively wrote off Dell and it
wasn't trading much more above the book value. So raising capital to cover the
amount was not difficult because the company was still reasonably profitable
with good cash flow.

~~~
throwaway2048
surely "erosion of trust by shareholders" isn't an issue for a wholely owned
private company.

------
caseysoftware
I'd like to note that these are the problem they're _talking_ about and
promoting. Who knows what they have behind the scenes that no one is covering
for fear of being sued.

Prior to the unveiling of the iPhone - January 2007, iirc - there were some
rumors of a phone but mostly conjecture. It blindsided almost everyone. And
when it launched, it redefined phone design.

Pay attention to the PR and "leaks" all you want, but remember that their
entire job is to talk about and promote the things they want you to know
about..

~~~
FireBeyond
"it redefined phone design".

A shame that the LG Prada was released a month earlier - no lawsuit ever
materialized, but for a while there was back and forth threatening about
Apple's "inspiration".

------
petra
Not a serious article. Google is investing billions yearly in r&d for far
reaching, very risky innovations.

As for Microsoft and Apple ,we really don't know.

Could we have predicted the iPhone in 2005 ? Do we know what kind of car Apple
is working on ? Do we know about Microsoft "special projects" group which
recruited someone from Darpa ?

And than finally when we do know about innovative efforts , the author
dismisses them out of hand: "Google’s Project Ara modular phone and
Microsoft’s HoloLens AR headset, by contrast, are the tech equivalent of
concept cars: supremely ambitious today, but years away from hitting the
market in what will likely be a tamer, less revolutionary form."

~~~
greggman
> Could we have predicted the iPhone in 2005 ?

depends on what you mean by predict. It was pretty obvious that phone/data
would be added to PDAs soon. It might not have been obvious that Apple would
do it so well and take PDAs from a geek/niche thing to the mainstream.

~~~
petra
Yes ,i meant the iPhone as something Apple built.

~~~
orkoden
At that time the iPod was hugely successful. Phones got more and more features
very quickly: web/wap browsers, e-mail, cameras, installable games. The
Motorola ROKR was the first try at combining an iPod with a phone. It failed.
Back then everybody was expecting an iPodPhone in the near future.

------
ksk
Well there is overlap but then again, there is overlap in the functionality of
a car and a truck too. I see Google as primarily solving the "problem" that
they still don't have enough data on their users. I wish they didn't have to
solve this problem.

As an aside, theverge has become super annoying to read with their over the
top advertising. Did they start doing this recently?

[http://i.imgur.com/YFY05gY.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YFY05gY.jpg)

------
api
The problem is not just that they're all solving the same problems, but that
they are mostly solving them in the same way: put everything in the cloud,
'feudalize' the device, make everything free and then monetize the user, solve
security and OS-rot problems by closing the ecosystem and enforcing conformity
instead of by fixing the underlying problems with the platform that give rise
to this entropy and insecurity.

Read Zero to One, on competition and its downsides and the way you begin to
'clone' your competitors and nobody does anything interesting.

------
mark_l_watson
Voice enabled UIs with some AI capability are the future, even if it is a
little annoying hearing people talking to their phones or computers.

It might seem like all three companies are duplicating effort and inventing
the same things, but digital assistants that help us communicate easier,
access great content easier, and get stuff done easier, are where human-
computer interaction is headed.

~~~
Fiahil
> Voice enabled UIs with some AI capability are the future

I don't know if you are using voice enabled UIs, but from someone who's using
public transportation to go to work in the morning, that's not "a little
annoying", that's a big no-no. Talking to your watch spooks people around you
like crazy, and having to repeat 2 or 3 times (because noise, eh) your command
is just uncomfortable. Worst case ever is sending texts with that (as
everybody is actively listening to what you are saying).

Sure, these technologies make great marketing material, but apart from the
glowing on-stage demos, the actual use case of voice control immediately dies
when there's either other people or loud (and fully quiet) environments.

~~~
something123
public transport? What kind of peasant are you?

This technology is designed for our self driving Tesla future

~~~
mojuba
I see your sarcasm but Tesla shouldn't have been part of it :)

------
mpg33
Startups solve new problems. Large companies refine and scale the most popular
of those solutions.

------
ilaksh
Technopolies on the road to techno-communism. We need to decentralize our
systems.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Communism is supposed to be decentralized and democratic. I assume you mean
the Soviet conception of communism was a traditional top-down rule from above.
(It wasn't communism)

~~~
happyscrappy
Are there any examples of democratic communism?

~~~
Rexxar
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz)

I don't know if this count as "communist" but they are two type of collective
egalitarian democratic organisations that have got some success.

~~~
fixermark
How do they scale? Workable solutions need to allow seven billion people to
inter-operate.

~~~
xorcist
No known system scales to seven billion people. (Just try to calculate what it
would mean for every family in the world to buy a car.)

Why would you think that a political or economical system needs to be globally
scalable to be useful? Or that it would even be desirable?

It would be reasonable to believe that a family, a business or a city should
not be governed in the same way a country or a planet is.

~~~
fixermark
It's clear that it's not necessary for a system to scale globally to be
useful.

But a political system that scales globally is definitely desirable; an awful
lot of human suffering is directly traceable to sub-optimal decisions made
internationally because "those people" aren't "our people." There are big wins
to be had for solving that problem.

