3,484 karma · joined October 9, 2009
The video codec announcement had zero impact outside of the tech-heavy sphere. In no universe would it have undermined the Verizon announcement. The MP3 diversion is spurious and irrelevant compared to the video issue: You pick your battles.
The "argument" is a baseless conspiracy theory that is the desperate defensive clutching of so many Apple defenders, viciously taking up the fight against mean Google. The rest of the article is full of incorrect beliefs about the history of Apple, RISC, x86, etc, though I can't say that is all too atypical for an Asymco piece.
For all of the "it will just bring back Flash" grousing, note that Firefox will never support h264 without a major change in its licensing. Firefox is a dominant web browser. Nice that Apple, a MPEG LA member, supports h264 though, while simultaneously pushing Quicktime and iTunes junk on the web.
Sidenote -- Just went to view a movie trailer on Apple.com. What's with it trying to foist Quicktime on me? Apple still hasn't given up on that, and they're still licking their wounds about having lost to Flash.
The "if you don't fight every battle at once, you have no morals to fight any battle" angle is bullshit. It's agenda-driven juvenile sophistry, and the real world doesn't work like that.
And while I find the WebM initiative questionable (h264 is technically superior and widely supported already), I find it unbelievably boring (and predictable) how it has become a proxy for the iPhone/Android fight. I doubt the Android team had any bearing whatsoever in this decision, and every Android handset out there is just as screwed by the lack of hardware decoding.
Suddenly boring zealots like Gruber and Siegler are experts on web standards and video codecs. What a depressing day. Seriously.
The only ads that really make sense, I think, are the branding/image/guiding type ads, not the performance-based CTR ads that have taken over the tubes.
Toyota did a whole damage control series during the purported uncontrolled acceleration debacle, and I noticed them and it influences your opinion. As do ads that build an image or general awareness: If I know about a brand of SSDs, maybe I'll search for that brand the next time I'm looking.
Ads that succeed or fail based upon a click have always been dumb. Remarkable that Google built a whole empire on it.
Absolutely. And of course people who believe the same thing naturally come together. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with that. It's how it is supposed to work.
However there is a perspective lens when the posts from the same group are widely propagated, reinforced through repeated assertion. It's an opinion bloc more than valuable or interesting insight.
No one cares when a couple of guys at the bar rabble off about their opinions. When they're, say, Glen Beck and his cohorts of a certain sphere, though, the discussion of course changes because their opinion is propagated widely. Stop the presses: Glen Beck and all his cohorts disagree with something the administration does.
I read the piece and thought it added nothing that hasn't been debated and discussed countless times before.
Yet, the market has spoken, hasn't it? A year ago such was the argument about why Android could never succeed, with so many confusing choices and options against the iPhone's simplicity. Android has done pretty good for itself in spite of that, I suppose. In fact I thought the current angle was "of course Android would do well with so many handsets and so many options".
Every company does. Or do you really believe that Apple is actively preventing Flash just because they really care about the consumer?
Google's hypocrisy is unbelievable
Google is a big company. The world is full of crazy and complicated choices, and there are many shades of gray.
I'll skip over technical details in this post...
Um...okay. Thanks.
Where is the false dichotomy?
The current talking point on the h264 versus WebM war is that WebM is a patent landmine, while your back is covered with h264. There is some sort of broad belief that h264 is a universal got-your-back patent defense, and that is simply ludicrous.
I see this a lot. It purports that Jason Garrett-Glaser has done an expert analysis of all of MPEG-LAs patents and has proclaimed specific infringement by VP8.
Of course that's complete bullshit. His analysis was superficially that there are similarities, and thus there may be infringement. Not one actual patent claim was shown to be infringed upon, much less even referenced to show that there was any understanding of it.
His analysis was as a codec guy. Not as a patent guy.
The devil are in the details.
It turns out (ha ha!) that when people vying for standards lay their patent traps, they tend to be extremely specific, ensuring that they don't get caught by prior art (there is plenty), but that they trap anyone who implements the standard. See Microsoft ActiveSync patents as a perfect example of this.
Does WebM infringe patents? Almost without question, as is the nature of the ridiculously generous patent system. Just as h264 is almost certainly infringing on patents of other parties that just haven't come forward to make their claims yet (and for which a h264 license is zero protection).
But one gets the sense that the author sees it as some sort of devastating argument.
Just as Gruber's post was framed. Google supports Flash, therefore they can't possibly be open, therefore Google is closed, therefore Google is evil...or something like that. Preaching to the choir and all that so I don't think much critical thought is necessary.
Yes, there is lots of money to be made in, essentially, consulting. That is true pretty much universally.
Blame bandwidth delusions all around for that.
Carriers price on the assumption that while your caps are high, they really want your usage to be low. This is simply a response to customer delusions that the pipes are boundless and free (which is not true on landlines, and is enormously untrue in the wireless spectrum): See all of the salivation over the supposed unlimited plan Verizon might offer.
So my cell plan gives me 5GB. In an average month I seldom use 500MB (I'm always around wifi it seems), and that's exactly within their expectations. If I start tethering my phone, however, my average is going to go way up.
If carriers priced simply on throughput -- say $0.10 a MB or something -- they would be overjoyed to turn on and encourage all of the tethering you could ever want.
The majority of iOS devs make little to nothing, documented countless times. Of course when you hear the rare success story it is presented as a norm, which paradoxically leads to a gold rush that really ensures that no one gets rich (and quick!).
And the same is entirely true for Android. While the user base has grown dramatically, the number of applications have exploded as well so there's significantly more competition.
Quite humorous really.
Since July of last year Android's marketshare has more than doubled. The Desire Z is making a particularly big impact, along with the Galaxy S variants.
That's the case around the world. June 2010, or thereabouts, represented the peak of iOS saturation virtually everywhere. Since then, through the world it has been on the slide with Android being the beneficiary.
So again, those numbers are pulled out of fantasy land. This Verizon/AT&T situation exists nowhere else, yet still iOS is falling. Weird, no?
I would put money against any bullshit notion that millions would line up on a weekend to get an iPhone but just on a different carrier. It is a preposterous proposal.
If AT&T were some regional wireless company serving just the South East or something, I could see this. If the iPhone were 12 months into its life and subscribers were rolling out of plans and looking to upgrade, then sure.
Instead AT&T is a nationwide mega-carrier, and the iPhone has been out for years. Outside of the customers already with them, they had a massive influx of customers who went to AT&T simply for the iPhone (hence why AT&T paid big dollars to be exclusive).
Millions on its first weekend? Even the most optimistic analyst has lowered their forecast for the iPhone post adding Verizon to be "marginally more than if its AT&T exclusive". The only significant change that will bring is that AT&T will lose customers, but the net will level out.
The need is already serviced. The customer base is set. Most people who want an iPhone long ago moved to AT&T.
The iPhone, with all its allure and emotional value attached to it, against a dozen Android devices all running different versions of the OS, all with different capabilities and different advertising campaigns. Everyone knows what an iPhone is. Few people can name more than 1 or 2 Android devices unless they're a geek
You're resorting to some tired early 2010 material here. You need to move onto the "Of course Android is winning because there are dozens of devices" approach that is the current propaganda.
The only way the iPhone is going to significantly rebound is an accelerated iPhone 5 that really blows the world away (though damn, they have their work cut out for them if you've watched CES news), or if they use their position to get carriers to stop the subsidization game (as Google attempted) and introduced a very low end model like a iPod Touch+ or something.
Verizon getting the phone, however...who cares.
Woman sued cellphone company for sending her cell bill to her husband, allowing him to discover her cheatin' ways. Was a pretty humorous story.
However to get mentioned in mainstream news there needs to be a compelling story: Someone claiming that they missed a flight, missed their wedding, etc -- something to make it a real human interest story. The Android bug would have been front and center if there were a confirmed "example" story where someone got fired or dumped on their wedding day or something because of a misdirected SMS.
I'm not invested in Intel. I wouldn't invest in Intel. I don't know where the market will go. However I'm not so knee-jerkish to instantly discount them.
It is truly remarkable how many prophetic statements of absolute truth we've seen over the year based upon temporary states in the industry.
6.ARM biggest advantage is it's open business model , that leads to a very large cooperative ecosystem both at the hardware and software levels.
Intel used to be one of those businesses. Again, way back in the late 80s ARM and other RISC architectures were seen as, without fail, the imminent successors of the universe. Intel got heavily involved. It didn't pan out, so Intel dumped it.
How many netbooks shipped with ARM? Atom did what was necessary to win that race, even if it wasn't prepared for the subsequent very low power device explosion. The Atom chips themselves are actually remarkably efficient -- with a TDP down to 0.65W for some models, well in the ARM territory -- but Intel never bothered to make efficient supporting circuitry, while failing to full incorporate it into a SoC.
ARM is improving dramatically because it became a critical field with some low hanging advances that were possible. The pace of innovation is impressive, but it has slowed dramatically in the past year -- recall that the Tegra 2 was demoed over a year ago. Today, the high point of the ARM ecosystem is still the Tegra 2. People today are doing the sort of naive extrapolation that we've seen over and over again.
x86 is an architecture, like ARM, that has seen many contenders come and go over the years. Intel's dominance is because of engineering excellence, albeit coupled with some questionable business practices. Show me an ARM device that compares with a Core i7-950. Show me one that compares with one with 3 of the 4 cores turned off.
Microsoft, for that matter, has had versions of Windows for alternate platforms going back well over a decade. Those platforms got abandoned not out of some strategic affinity to x86 (much less to Intel), but simply because they didn't offer the advantage to be worth the bother: Instead they were pursued during the "the Future is RISC" era and it was preparing for the purported demise of x86.
As to manufacturers that were "Microsoft exclusive", show me even one. Such a thing hasn't existed in years.
There is nothing I have ever read on Asymco that isn't full of glossy big conclusions, yet absolutely falls apart under any scrutiny at all. It is garbage analysis.
I love the smartphone era. I love the fact that embedded chips in everything from your HVAC control to your PVR to inside televisions and cars, etc, are all massively benefiting from this explosion of reasonable performance, low power devices.
But let's get real. The only reason x86 is behind right now is because ARM had been working on low power processors for years, and the chips came up that it was the hot area. Intel isn't sitting on their hands, though, and I have no doubt they'll have some killer solutions in the very near future. People are so quick to jump to conclusions though, carried on by simplistic analysis of the sort that Asymco performs.
Wondered why Android devices with the same no contract prices go for "TWO FOR ONE!" and other values while the dated iPhone 3GS sat at $99?
Apple saw this as an image thing, and it has worked. Remarkable the number of people who'll talk about "giving away" Androids when the devices come with often thousands of dollars in contract fees.
But now the competition is underfoot. Wasn't it just a few days ago that Siegler was talking about how Apple wouldn't lower themselves to selling lower-end devices (which the 3GS overwhemlingly qualifies), and the sentiment was that they would never compete on price?
However most of the time that I and most people come across SO it's the top search hit for a technical question. The answers are seldom unique, but instead are usually pulled almost word for word from the online manual for the same.
That is overwhelmingly the value of SO -- it benefits by collecting aggregated content from all over the web. It is, hilariously, by design exactly what many in here are complaining about. In that case instead of an automated process it's a mechanical turk.
Hey I don't care because it gets me my answer, but I can see the hilarious paradox in some of the complaints.
I was once searching on a problem -- one that I had faced years earlier but had then forgotten -- and the top link was a SO QA. The answer sounded oddly familiar, when I remembered that it was actually from a blog entry I had posted two years prior.
I suspect where their algorithm isn't somewhat sure of the answer it essentially does A:B testing with users -- a while back I asked it who the governor of Illinois was and it replied Blagojevich (long after he was ousted). I pointed it out to a friend and they tried and got Quinn. In both cases it gives you the option of flagging whether it is wrong, though it seems suspect to let people who are asking the question in the first place declare its rightness, beyond egregiously wrong answers.
Everyone is ripping off someone's content.
And just to be accurate here, SO content is creative commons (created by the community). Are those just cheap words?
Inbound links and the calculated "credibility" from the same are what killed the web the first time around. There was once a democratized web era when that actually worked -- when millions of people had their little Goecities pages and were linking the cool stuff -- but in the modern era it's 99% consumers who cast no votes, and the last 1% is extraordinarily incestuous circular link love: Marcos links to Coding Horror who links to Daring Fireball who links to Scoble who links to Marcos, etc.
People with neither information or authority end up being the credible authority on matters they have aren't authorities on. Scoble a few years back pointed out the fact that according to search engines he was the most important Robert in the world. That is a frightening concept.
We will move from an era of search engines to an era of expert engines. Many of the questions I used to "ask" Google I now ask of Wolfram Alpha, and its approach has turned out to be quite useful. Expand that computer knowledge more broadly, and improve the human syntax parsing. and we'll have a winner. Several such systems are built around computer learning of the wikipedia corpus.
Google Navigation is on Android, a paid add-on that providers add to products that you pay for. There is nothing free about it.
Quality e-mail was not free. A quality office suite was not free. And it still isn't, because Google has failed so far to provide an alternative to MS Office, but they're trying alright!
No one paid for consumer email -- it was long a free, ad-supported market via options like Hotmail. Adding weasel words like "quality" to disclaim some exception doesn't make that any less true. OpenOffice is entirely free, and is a huge superset of the limited features Google offers.
But even then, the "free" Google office functionality is very limited. Businesses pay for business plans.
Speaking of Apple, they ARE a premium brand.
Most of the buyers of Apple are buying iPods and iMacs and iTVs and iPads, all fantastic values. The people buying Apple laptops are usually developers targeting the first set of buyers.
GM sells the Corvette CR1. They still aren't a premium maker.