
Planet Calacanis - blasdel
http://www.marco.org/159321665
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ajg1977
Is it just me or has Hacker News started to become an echo chamber for
debating internet meme's that are largely pointless and contain nothing of
substance?

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pg
We've gone to the dogs in just the 38 days you've had your account?

Sundays are always the slowest news days.

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ajg1977
_new_ account, yes :(

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mrkurt
I can't decide if the uber drama queens or the Apple apologistas are more
annoying right now. I think I'm leaning towards apologistas, though.

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blasdel
Marco is by no means an apologist for Apple -- he's written a bunch of posts
about the hideously stupid shit they keep pulling with the app store:
<http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amarco.org+app+store>

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SirWart
The part that bothered me was this:

"And which freedoms? The freedom to break Apple’s DRM? The freedom for Palm to
violate the USB spec by identifying the Pre with a different vendor ID?"

Palm wasn't actually breaking any DRM, and changing the vendor id was the only
way they could make their software inter-operate well. I understand that Palm
and Apple are huge competitors, but very rarely do people defend such blatant
attempts at platform lock-in. I wouldn't call him a apologist, but it
definitely feels reactionary to Calacanis's points.

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cakesy
More drivel. Maybe you can show us two huge competitors, where one has started
using the other software? You can not, because it hasn't happened before. Palm
have a lot of options, there are lots of free music organisers they can use,
they have chosen to use iTunes, which they know they are not allowed to do.

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SirWart
I think it's important to note that the major reason for Palm to use iTunes is
not because Palm didn't want to build their own music organizer, but because
most people already use iTunes to organize their music, and it's a huge pain
in the ass to switch or worse use multiple organizers.

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neilc
Why is it "important to note that"? Palm obviously have their reasons for
preferring iTunes, but that doesn't make faking the vendor ID any more
legitimate.

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nailer
Who are Palm harming and how? Pre end users don't see the vendor ID, so aren't
being deceived. iPhone end users keep working. Apple aren't under pressure to
support Palm, they can simply say the device is unsupported and to contact
Palm for issues.

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jsz0
The whole question of alternative web browsers on the iPhone is lacking in
reality. FireFox's mobile project is in the alpha/beta stage at best. Google's
browser is based on WebKit so not much point there. Microsoft can't even
produce a decent version of Mobile IE on their own platform. What does that
leave? Opera? When we see real mobile browser competition on open platforms
this might be a valid argument but today WebKit is, by far, the best mobile
browser out there.

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omouse
_With over 120 million shipped installations since 2004, Opera Mobile is the
proven solution for full Web browsing on mobile devices._

<http://www.opera.com/mobile/>

It runs on multiple devices, like the Nintendo DS, and other non-smartphone
mobile devices.

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blasdel
Mobile Safari has shipped on over 40 million devices since mid-2007

It totally dominates all other mobile browsers in real-world stats -- people
_actually use it_ , and that's what's important. Opera's piddling marketshare
in terms of actual usage (along with their historically odd JS engine, and
mobile reformatting proxy) has meant that major players (like Google) totally
ignored their browsers for years.

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omouse
Apple halo is in full effect here obviously. The power of the Apple brand is
quite awesome to behold, but it's also very sad to see people trying to
tarnish the reputation of competitive products that are, objectively, good.

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ZachPruckowski
There's nothing wrong with Opera Mobile, but simultaneously, there's nothing
"better than Mobile Safari" about it. Both render HTML/CSS equally well, and
both are accessible and usable. It's not that Opera Mobile is worse than
Safari, it's that it's not that much better.

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pj
Apple lost the personal computer war (EDIT: of the 1980's) because of its
proprietary hardware created under the leadership of Steve Jobs. Not letting
anyone else make a computer that would run MacOS was a big mistake for them.

I don't see anything new or shocking in the behavior with the iPhone or ipod,
either from Apple, or the user community who has purchased them.

Same song, new day...

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jsz0
Apple only lost the personal computer war if you assume their goal was high
volume/low margin market domination. I would argue it was not then and still
is not Apple's goal. The iPhone will almost certainly remain only a small
subset of the overall SmartPhone market however it will remain one of the best
and make Apple more money than companies with larger market shares of the
SmartPhone market. So I'd agree this is a repeat of what has happened in the
past but I wouldn't call it a mistake. I think Jobs knows exactly what his
company is good at doing.

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m_eiman
This video of Jobs talking about NeXT's target customers is interesting here,
and I'd say that the target demographic hasn't changed very much since then:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9dmcRbuTMY>

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socratees
Right On. Nice article.

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onreact-com
Calacanis is an agent provocateur and the people fall each time for it. Just
remember a few of the idiotic things he said in the past just to get attention
and links:

# SEO is bullshit

# Blogging is dead

# Mahalo is Web 3.0

etc. etc. etc.

