Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

http://www.startuptrekking.com/2010/05/steve-jobs-circa-2020-thoughts-on.html

by sendos • 16 years ago

97 75 16 years ago

th• 16 years ago

I like the parody but it's not really a fair comparison. In many cases paved roads evolve out of country roads while nothing can ever evolve out of Flash.

ANH• 16 years ago

Worth a chuckle, but yes, not really fair.

Qz2• 16 years ago

Having biked 5073 miles across the country in question on many of those country roads, I can say that they tend to have a certain 'rustic charm' despite all the bumps. The same could be said of Flash content on the web, in 2020. Do we really just want to throw all that content in the trash, never to be viewed or interacted with again?

pohl9• 16 years ago

I already have strawberry pancakes, badger badger mushroom, etc. indelibly etched into my brain. No runtime required.

sendos3• 16 years ago

Of course no analogy is perfect, but I fail to see the relevance of your point. Country roads can evolve into paved roads and content that is currently coded in Flash can evolve into content that is coded in HTML5.

But today, when I want to turn on to a country road / visit a site with Flash, the iCar / iPad won't let me. I, as a consumer, don't care what that ugly/bumpy thing might evolve into. I care whether I can access it right now.

By the way, I own both an iPhone and an iPad, and I like them. It's just that sometimes I wish I could drive them onto "bumpy roads".

grinich2• 16 years ago

Is there a phone on the market today that runs Flash?

drawkbox• 16 years ago

Well, you could also say lots has evolved out of Flash. Quick casual games, fast playing video, micro vector and raster content, experimentation and lots of Flash developers use lots of mathematics (trig, calculus) to make excellent graphic and effects libraries. I think every technology has had something to add in our trial and error machine including Flash.

Flash developers are unique people as well because it is a unique tool that merges code and design. Try Neave out if you haven't: http://www.neave.com/ Flash Earth, planetarium, the rebirth of slick. This stuff won't be cross browser in html5 for years, especially webcam, mic projects.

This work is being reimplemented in html5/canvas/svg and it has added benefits.

crux_• 16 years ago

This isn't about Flash; it's about homebrew applications, alternative programming languages, and the many other (technical) roads less travelled by.

megablast2• 16 years ago

I think the parody helps people think a bit more about the issue.

The problem with the analogy is that all Apple has to do to allow the iCar to run on country roads, is allow people to steer onto it. To get flash onto the iPhone/iPad, they have to allow a completely different development team to run code on the root user of their device. They would have to change the OS, to allow unproven code to run, from a company who can't even get the desktop version to work well.

andrewescott• 16 years ago

This is what Apple already allows with the App Store. Except if your app smells like Adobe.

waxman• 16 years ago

The difference is, country roads are not nearly as bumpy as flash.

Qz2• 16 years ago

Uh, maybe where you live? I've been on country roads all over the US and they are bumpy as hell.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

I think that's his point.

barredo• 16 years ago

I'm sorry. But Flash has a fallback (HTML5 for the web and iPhone Apps if wanna go native), country roads has not.

Also, real infrastrucures are a bit distant than web-infrasctructures. I mean, Google could possibly switch it's search engine from XYZ platform to ABC platform in a matter of months (made up numbers), try to switch road infrastructures of a country.

chc• 16 years ago

If HTML5 is a "fallback" for Flash, surely paving is a fallback for country roads. I mean, sure, it's nontrivial to change any nontrivial amount of existing work, but that's analogously true in both cases."

biafra• 16 years ago

If HTML5 is the fallback why is it working so bad on the iPad?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfmbZkqORX4

huangm• 16 years ago

I know the author's intent is to weaken Jobs' arguments, but to me he seems to strengthen them. The vast majority of people driving cars never need to drive on country roads. Anyone that needs to drive on country roads is by no means forced to drive an iCar - they are free to choose whatever car they want.

i80and• 16 years ago

"Vast majority" and "never" are extremely strong qualifiers. It must be nice living in a world where everything is constant and optimum. Granted, nobody is made to drive an iCar. But every so often, you are probably going to need a real car not designed for fantasyland.

Part of this is just a failing of the analogy; Apple has much tighter control over their platform than they ever could over roads networks.

astine• 16 years ago

Which is why I choose not to buy an iPhone or an iPad. When someone complains about an inadequacy of a product and you replay that they should buy something else, you are missing the point. The ability to buy a real car, does not make an iCar useful.

Many, many people live in areas where they could get away with using public transit only, most of them still own cars because sometimes they still need or want them. Only I can know whether I need to drive on gravel roads, and even I won't know whether I will need to in the future.

If I think Flash is a nuisance, (and I do) I am free to avoid it. But I don't want Steve Jobs or any company making such decisions for me. Jobs is free to sell his phones with whatever policy he wants, and I'm free to think that he sucks for it.

jsz02• 16 years ago

You're claiming inadequacy on your own perspective. I'm sure off-roaders think compact cars are inadequate for their needs. They may choose gas milage or design over off-roading capabilities. As such I think the don't like it? don't buy it argument is a good way to be a consumer.

spot2• 16 years ago

certainly but the question is does the limitation arise from a legitimate technical limitation, or because apple has shorted the country real estate market?

bkorte• 16 years ago

So don't buy an iCar. But if the only driving I do is to work and back and I choose that the iCar is right for me, who cares?

megablast2• 16 years ago

Ok, so you want someone else to decide what you can do with your car. Maybe you wouldn't mind if Apple stopped you from going to certain websites as well. Maybe if they blocked you from calling certain people, that would make life 'better' for you. Maybe you could get some isneakers, that only let you walk from your house to your car, or car to workplace?

I don't understand this point of view, you want less choice? Maybe you miss your mommy making decisions for you?

OldHippie• 16 years ago

did everyone just miss the point where Jobs said that Apple wanted to be able to be free to release new hardware features and not have to wait for some 3rd party to support development for them?

skorgu2• 16 years ago

All 'cars' are compromises. Any low-riding sports car would be damaged by riding on a rutted road, that's the tradeoff inherent in purchasing one.

Lotus (say) isn't saying you can't drive here or there, they just build cars that happen not to be suitable for a given activity. A passable analogy since car manufacturers have far less ongoing control might be Lotus voiding the warranty for your Elise if you took it on a rough track.

In any case, if that choice is not one you're comfortable with don't buy $PRODUCT, problem solved.

pedalpete2• 16 years ago

Very interesting, but I think most of the comments are missing the point that this isn't about the technology.

It is about telling the user where they can and cannot go.

We wouldn't accept that in a car for any reason.

Wanna go to Yosemite, great! But that parking lot isn't paved, so you can't stop there. You can drive by and see the rest of it from the highway though!

Oh, that highway is nice and paved, but it leads to google and some fancy voice technology they built. I'm sure as a driver you'd like to see it, but you'll just have to stick to our roads and roads that don't compete with us on any level.

pohl9• 16 years ago

We wouldn't accept that in a car for any reason.

Really? I see these on the road all the time and I would have no trouble whatsoever finding a road they couldn't handle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_(automobile)

Consumers do, in fact, willingly buy cars that limit their travels. Heck, a lot of people willingly buy cars that don't have enough oomph to take an entirely paved route over the rocky mountains.

pedalpete2• 16 years ago

A Smart car CAN'T go on an unpaved road?

'maybe' a Smart car shouldn't go on an unpaved road, but that decision isn't made for you by the manufacturer, or anybody else. You're free to take the Smart car you purchased anywhere you want.

sendos3• 16 years ago

I think most of the comments are missing the point that this isn't about the technology. It is about telling the user where they can and cannot go

Bingo!

It's like if an Italian suite maker somehow made it impossible for you to eat a hot dog while wearing the suite, because of the increased risk of getting mustard on the suite, thus ruining the experience of wearing the perfect suite. Look, I paid for the suite, I know that eating some foods will increase the probability that the suite will be soiled, and, I want to be allowed to make the decision whether or not to take that risk.

zts• 16 years ago

I'd say it's more like the organisers of a suit convention not allowing a hotdog vendor to operate inside.

This upsets the people who understand the risks associated with eating hotdogs while wearing their suits, while protecting other suit-wearers who don't appreciate the risk of soiling.

The problem with this analogy is that while any reasonable person can foresee condiment spillage, the average consumer is utterly unaware of the tradeoffs that Apple appears to be concerned about. Nor should they need to be.

ahoyhere• 16 years ago

People made the same arguments when Jobs killed the floppy. And serial ports.

And OS 9.

And built-in modems.

Surprisingly, nobody misses them.

Yawn. More histrionic nerd-posturing. It will be forgotten soon enough.

euroclydon• 16 years ago

That's funny. When you said: "built-in modems", I turned my Macbook up to the side, and sure enough... no modem.

blogimus• 16 years ago

And funny enough, I don't miss not having a modem on my macbook, not in the least. I also have a thinkpad which I never use the modem either, and my now long in the tooth Palm TX which doesn't have one (yeah, its a PDA, so we normally don't expect it to have one, but then why do we expect a notepbook to have a modem, because they have? That is the same argument as "It was good enough for my daddy so it is good enough for me."

And as another poster wrote, we can always vote with our dollars.

CamperBob5• 16 years ago

Killing Turing equivalence is a bigger deal than killing RS-232 ports and floppy drives.

pohl9• 16 years ago

Are there really 9 readers of HN (you and 8 positive mods) who think that neither C, nor Objective C, nor C++, nor JavaScript are as Turing equivalent as any programming language can be said to be whilst constrained in a finite amount of memory?

How else could one be said to have "killed" Turing equivalence unless it didn't remain after other source languages were excluded?

Melodrama trumps computer science today?

sambeau2• 16 years ago

You are allowed to program in C++ and C, too. There is also a good chance that Ruby will join that list as soon as the LLVM version (that Apple is working on) is finished.

(see http://www.macruby.org/)

sendos3• 16 years ago

Weren't there adapters/peripherals so people who had floppy disks and monitors with serial ports could still use them? (e.g. this one for floppy disks: http://www.jr.com/lacie/pe/LAC_706018)

That is, if you had a floppy disk that you had to read, there was a workaround, even if Macs stopped supporting them natively.

There is no adapter/peripheral/workaround to view some website with Flash that you want to view. (Unless you consider it a workaround to carry, alongside your iPad, a laptop so that you can view websites that haven't yet transitioned to HTML5)

derefr• 16 years ago

Just to be snide: there are plenty of VNC clients for the iPhone OS, which let you view the screen of a full-powered computer, and click and type into it. This would be the same workaround you'd use if you had to run, say, an industrial control system on your iPad. It's also a pretty good idea, UI-wise: since it overlays the mouse metaphor onto your touchpad, the resulting Flash doesn't require adaptation to be used.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

He got rid of the floppy in the first gen NeXT machines too early. You were supposed to just transfer everything via the network. He was wrong and everyone missed them and he brought them back for the second gen.

dalore• 16 years ago

I would say usb killed floppies and serial ports.

Built-in modems aren't dead, they are still on a surprisingly number of laptops.

He killed OS 9 so he could sell OS X. That's like saying Microsoft killed Win95. That's planned obsolescence.

rit• 16 years ago

By way of disclaimer... I recently switched off of iPhone in favor of Android - primarily because AT&T's network sucked and not really as any statement against Apple (I refused to continue paying monthly for a phone which had no reception through much of my workday).

Overall, as a developer I'm highly in favor of open platforms, language choice, etc. However, I can't help but thinking that a tightly controlled application space the way that Apple has maintained so far is what has helped make the iPhone and iPad successful. One thing I notice on android is the lack of consistency in UIs. Sometimes the back button takes me back a screen in an App - sometimes it dumps me back to the Home screen. Sometimes it dumps me back to the last App I was using.

The iPhone apps tend to look relatively uniform UI wise and behave as expected. Encouraging the idea of cross platform apps means you start to get less and less "platform integration". It means we end up with 4 or 5 smartphone platforms none of which have any advantage because they're all running inconsistent crap.

I want my hardware + software platforms to be able to be unique and tailored towards themselves. I have seen very few truly cross platform apps which actually work well. iTunes itself is a great example - it acts weirdly and looks woefully out of place on Windows. It's the ugly duckling, and it behaves like someone chopped one of it's legs off.

The benefits of tailoring software to a particular platform should be obvious, and I much prefer them.

boredguy8• 16 years ago

This parody did more to convince me of Jobs' point of view than anything I've read so far. If my car were as impressive an improvement over the status quo car as the iPhone is over the phone, I'd gladly give up the ability to drive on rural roads.

natrius• 16 years ago

That's ridiculous. The iPhone was a huge improvement over the status quo, but there are plenty of phones today that are comparable, if not better.

All of the goals Jobs mentioned in the article could be achieved just as easily by imposing those restrictions on the App Store, but still allowing users to install apps on their own. Apple's policies are harmful to its users compared to the alternatives.

With that said, a car that couldn't drive on rural roads would make sense if it drove itself, but required infrastructure that wasn't universal.

pohl9• 16 years ago

I grew up in rural Nebraska, where most of the country roads are fairly well maintained. Despite this, there are cars on the market that are horribly suited to driving on many of these roads, especially during the rainy season when deep ruts form, and thereafter when the ruts harden.

Far away from this setting, in the more urban environments, there is a phenomenon where consumers take vehicles - even those that might otherwise be suitable for these roads - and they modify them to make them exceedingly unfit by lowering the suspension. It has been going on for so long that the song "Low Rider" by the band War is used as a cliched reference to the 70s.

I know of someone, in the 2000s, who had a terrible time finding an apartment because his Jetta, modified at great expense, couldn't survive an apartment with speed-bumps in the parking lot. Not long afterward, he totaled his car - going over a speed bump he did not see.

At the other end of the suspension-spectrum we have millions of SUVs on the road, many of them capable of taking all manner of abuse, only to be driven exclusively on concrete to tame destinations like grocery stores and shopping malls. These vehicles are a suburban male peacock display: the suspension serves no function other than to signal virility.

I'm not trying to extend the analogy by mentioning any of this. But I do think that if we're looking to the automobile industry for guidance we should probably take note of the diversity and realize that there's probably room in the mobile computer space for devices without Flash.

mathamagics• 16 years ago

If the iCar is truly revolutionary (for instance, it can guarantee you will NEVER get into a fatal car accident) then I'd say the "full road" is a small sacrifice.

People who want the full road can still buy traditional cars, right?

Vote with your dollar.

mseebach• 16 years ago

The iCar might rely on special features in the full roads to provide some level of automated steering.

I've considered some passive "beacons", shaped as nails, to be placed in roads, that can outline the lanes, complete with information about direction, speed-limits, exits etc. A smart car should be able to use those, along with a (ra|li)dar, to provide automated steering on equipped roads.

jsz02• 16 years ago

I find the other extreme of this satire -- the idea that every car would have to be as fully capable as a military grade Hummer, to be far more off putting. The market will decide what it wants. Hopefully that includes a wide variety of options.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

Such bad writing. "get" instead of "drive"? Sigh.

bsergean• 16 years ago

I thought Hacker News readers were educated and intelligent but there are so many iTards it's not funny anymore. The Apple Cult ... is depressing. You are little ants who forgot what freedom means. Wake up guys ! Sorry to be harsh but I'm starting to be really angry I'm gonna stop reading anything about Apple/Adobe.

manish• 16 years ago

Many low clearance cars like Ferrari and Lamborghini do not run on our roads, we just drive other cars, so why not wait and see what market decides.

frisco• 16 years ago

I don't think that's why most people don't drive Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

sambeau2• 16 years ago

Would anyone care if the iCar drove itself on the Highway, Travelled at 400 miles an hour in silence, ..or flew?

Steve Jobs, circa 2020: "Thoughts on country roads"

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