Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by irjustin | Hacker News Reader

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> we couldn't make too powerful a PC that might cannibalize the minicomputer sales (AS/400).

Agreed, knowing when to cannibalize your own market is one of the key inflection points.

Apple has done a fantastic job (up until now) of introducing something that basically makes a "current at the time" product obsolete.

Classic version was the iPhone when iPod was a household name. A more conservative company would figure out how to keep the iPod market extremely healthy, but in the end losing out on the whole pie. A lot of smaller/other instances as well.

> IBM made much more money on an AS/400 than a PS/2 model 95.

I wonder if someone high up in IBM made the same mistake for personal computing that Ballmer did with the iPhone - "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance..."

To be explicit, making the bet to cannibalize your own market is one of the toughest any company can make. High risk, high reward. It's so easy to point at the winners and forget the landscape that laid waste to the ones that lost.

But, being able to do it consistently is what makes a company multi-generational.

>> we couldn't make too powerful a PC that might cannibalize the minicomputer sales (AS/400).

> Apple has done a fantastic job (up until now) of introducing something that basically makes a "current at the time" product obsolete.

An interesting analogue at this time will be the iPad and the Macbook lineup now that they both use the same processor. It'll be interesting if they make one or the other obsolete or keep both going. (Yes, I realize there's all sorts of design tradeoffs between direct & indirect manipulation environments)

Personally I couldn't wait nor justify owning two devices - migrating to a Windows/Linux tablet after waiting so many years and invested into the mac platform for a decade.

The big problem is that they want people to be able to use iPads for 95% of what they use Macs for, but as developers we reside solidly in that 5% of critical functionality. It’s very hard to be productive as a developer on a system as locked down as an iPad. I want Emacs, Git, bash, and the Erlang runtime. That’s all I would need to be happy, but I think we’re a long way off from that on the iPad, if it ever happens at all. I’m not sure they can do it while maintaining their security model either, and they’re not going to give up their security model for anything less than antitrust action.

There's no real reason why Apple can't build a "development sandbox" app that emulates a terminal (that has no access to anything on the iPad outside the sandbox app) that includes a terminal, a package manager (possibly acquiring Homebrew to help them make it happen), possibly a wrapping GUI to manage secrets, IDE-style text editor, etc.

I'm not really sure why nobody's built one yet except for the sheer complexity involved. But it certainly seems doable.

There is iSH which somehow managed to make it onto the App Store. Only problem is it's emulating x86 so it's not exactly the full potential of the M1.

AIUI and IIRC, iSH implements just enough of an x86 emulator to be able to interpret x86 binaries and JIT "compile" them to a series of function calls rather than directly to native machine code, and it implements enough of the x86 Linux ABI to be able to run most binaries. In short, it's effectively treating x86 machine code as a scripting language, and Apple does allow scripting languages (e.g. Python) on the App Store.

The iSH team did run into some friction with Apple over the fact that the built-in filesystem image is Alpine and thus includes a package manager, but apparently they were able to resolve that situation in a way that allowed them to keep `apk` in the built-in filesystem image: https://ish.app/blog/app-store-removal

Yeah, there are certain critical functions that to me define a "real computer". Accessing external mass storage, system-wide volume control for individual programs, being able to back up the system without a second computer, not having any sort of settings or features that depend on a second computer (like things you can only do on bootloader-locked android using ADB from a PC). I'm never going to have a household without a real computer in it.

> direct & indirect manipulation environments

What do you mean by this?

I am guessing the commenter means computing with and without use of your fingers on touch screens.

Without the fingers? How does that happen?

That cannibalizing one's own market is a viable strategy at all speaks to the inherent flaws of free market capitalism.

I don’t understand what you mean.

Supposedly the advantages of free market capitalism are that it increases efficiency and makes for better products, primarily through competitive pressure. Yet here is a case where a company is actively stifling its own product in order to ensure its more profitable product isn't threatened.

My understanding from the OPs comment was that IBMs failure to cannabalize it's AS/400 market led to the failure of it's PC business. IBM chose to stifle it's own product to keep a more profitable product alive and as a result IBM's PC business failed. That sounds like exactly how things should work in ideal free market capitalism. The idea isn't that every business will choose to make better products to deal with competitive pressure, but that those who don't will die.

Parent also said:

> To be explicit, making the bet to cannibalize your own market is one of the toughest any company can make. High risk, high reward.

In other words, it is considered a viable strategy, although also a risky one. The fact that it didn't pan out in this instance doesn't change that.

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