Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all solving the same problems

http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/18/9351197/apple-google-microsoft-tech-innovation-uniformity

by jonbaer • 11 years ago

71 52 11 years ago

Someone• 11 years ago

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.

coldcode• 11 years ago

Science often solves the same problems over and over; each time you learn something new and knowledge moves forward. If everyone is an exclusive silo, no progress will ever happen.

digi_owl7• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

What has changed since then?

mojuba3• 11 years ago

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.

coob• 11 years ago

Apple are buying back stock at quite a rate.

iraphael• 11 years ago

How feasible/quick is it to completely buy your own company off again?

I ask because the idea is funny in my head: Something that is valued at price x and has the capital (aka x moneys and then some) to pay for itself.

pcurve• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

rhino369• 11 years ago

You can't just go private. You have to buy out shareholders, all of them. It is essentially a buy out. That means you have to sell at a price that the shareholders accept. Which means paying more than the marketshare.

For Apple and Google, you'd need a massive amount of money to buy the companies. Dell found it by taking his money plus taking billions in private equity partners and can creditors. One thing that helped Dell was that it was a pretty cheap company. Trading at less than 10 P to E.

Plus Wall Street trusts Apple and Google. There isn't a huge gain by going private.

ilaksh• 11 years ago

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

Synaesthesia• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

Are there any examples of democratic communism?

acheron• 11 years ago

No true communist puts sugar on his porridge?

bedhead• 11 years ago

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...

mark_l_watson• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

jon-wood• 11 years ago

Sure, you might not want to dictate a text message on the train, but at home its a different kettle of fish. I find voice activation particularly useful in the kitchen - I regularly use it for things like setting a timer or converting units from recipes.

mojuba3• 11 years ago

Exactly, and I think mentally controlled UIs will have a greater appeal in some (distant) future for the same reasons.

One interesting aspect of voice vs. tactile that remains overlooked is the amount of energy required for performing something with your phone. It is not at all obvious that voice is less energy consuming for us and thus more convenient. Never heard of any research that would prove it.

something123• 11 years ago

public transport? What kind of peasant are you?

This technology is designed for our self driving Tesla future

bztzt• 11 years ago

voice is just an input method. a natural language interface can also support typing or other inputs.

grkvlt• 11 years ago

Talking to your watch spooks people around you like crazy

I find there's quite a large disconnect between what people _imagine_ others will find odd, or will 'spook' them, and the reality - which is that the people around you simply do not notice or care.

petra4• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

petra4• 11 years ago

Yes ,i meant the iPhone as something Apple built.

TomDavey• 11 years ago

It was pretty obvious that phone/data would be added to PDAs soon.

Indeed. I had a Handspring Visor with the cellular add-on in 2000. And then there were the Palm Treos, awesome PDAs plus phones with a thriving app ecosystem. What Apple did was add a touch rather than a stylus interface. And the rest is history.

FilterSweep• 11 years ago

Could we have predicted the iPhone in 2005?

Actually yes.

LG phones beat iPhone with the LG Prada (and I think the Voyager too?). If not, at least the voyager was still a more usable phone than the "you're holding it wrong" days of the iPhone. The Neonode N1m had the slide to unlock before Apple used it as well. It beat both LG and Apple.

And people tend to forget Palm Pilots when worshiping the genius that is iPhone. These were released as far back as at the mid 90's and were extremely popular among the now older generation. When Jobs trashed the stylus I believe he was referring to these. My father had several models.

The point I'm getting at harkens back to an alleged Isaac Newton quote, which _ironically_ Google actually used back in the old days of Google ;) "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

jjoonathan• 11 years ago

Speaking of Newton, Apple released

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_%28platform%29

in August of 1993. The Palm Pilot came out in March of 1997. Of course, there were PDAs long before the Newton, too, but Apple's role in mobile goes back farther than you give them credit for. They were part of the "slog," not just the "breakthrough."

at least the voyager was still a more usable phone than the "you're holding it wrong" days of the iPhone.

Again, you have your timeline wrong. The antenna issues didn't pop up until the 4rd generation iPhone.

And people tend to forget Palm Pilots when worshiping the genius that is iPhone.

No, we remember Palm Pilots and the like which is why we worship the genius that is the iPhone design. There's a reason why all contemporary phones follow it. If you think "hype" is the only reason why people switched then you're selectively forgetting the issues with the older designs.

digi_owl7• 11 years ago

Nokia produced the first Communicator model in 1996.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

Compaq was making PocketPC based PDAs that could, via an external "jacket" make use of a PCCard mobile modem for connectivity somewhere around 2000-2001.

HTC was making phones running Windows Mobile as early as 2002-2003.

mpg33• 11 years ago

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

caseysoftware• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

"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".

api• 11 years ago

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.

ksk• 11 years ago

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

Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all solving the same problems

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