Counternotions

An excellent essay about "concept" products, including (of course) cars: Why Apple doesn't do "Concept Products" http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

Siri already talks to Open Table, and fandango can't be far behind with all the movie stuff you can do with Siri already. Very interesting look at Siri's potential (via everyone's favorite Gruber): http://counternotions.com/2012/11/12/siri-future/

I think the entire suite of online synchronization that Google provides online to the droids as the rival to mobile.me not just itunes sync. Google provides mapping services, increasingly important to geolocation services, email, document creation, address book management, not to mention Google voice which is seamless on its phones. Apple has a great phone, and of course the ipad, but a great number of the users use Google services of which the droid enjoys an extremely fast pace of integration. This leaves Apple in a strange position, where its own clients rely by the millions on its chief rival technology. Droid can and will enjoy a very fast adaptation to the cloud, and apple doesn't have that scale capability, and to scale to a place that can rival Google in web services will be quite a feat, and a change of focus for Apple. http://counternotions.com/2010/05/25/mapwars/

Yes, I hear you. I'm not sure Steve Jobs actually said that quote verbatim, but here's where I first learned of it: http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/ What's interesting about this dual-screen "prototype" is that we're in the midst of huge speculation about the Apple Tablet. And yet Apple isn't talking, isn't doing demos, and isn't mocking up prototypes for public consumption. They do this for marketing purposes of course (free advertising), but they also do it for competitive reasons (don't show your cards in poker) and for brand-management reasons (don't show your cards AFTER a hand in poker either). My team at work has tons of great ideas. We ship only a small percentage. Our annual reviews don't have a line that says "Good ideas that weren't delivered." :)

That's because this was a product concept exercise. It's an exercise in thinking about functionality, design, and form and less about the underlying technology. There was a period during the Scully era where Apple did a number of these concepts, most famously the "Knowledge Navigator" video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc This was circa 1987, but was looking ahead to 2000 and beyond with things like always-on background networking and video conferencing. 30 years later we're finally getting to some of the stretch concepts shown in the video, such as conversational interfaces like Siri. Post-Scully and back into the Jobs II era, this stuff went away. And it's probably a good thing they did. Here's why: "Commercial entities have no advantage in releasing concept products the likes of which they hope to subsequently sell. If the conceptual piece truthfully captures their “best” it can only tell their competitors how advanced they are and where they fall short. If it camouflages their true capabilities in an effort to mislead their competitors, then what value is it to others? In fact, the intention to mislead competitors is really the only effective reason for a commercial entity to publicly release concept products" https://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

Slightly tangential response: "Why Apple does not do concept products" http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

Well, off the top of my head: 1) The "third party cookies block" championed by Safari for one. 2) Refusing to let the publishers get user info without the user opting in first (there was big hoopla about that from the publisher's end): http://counternotions.com/2011/02/16/stores/

"Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products" -- http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

Why Apple Doesn't Do Concept Products: http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/

http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/ A commercial company’s ability to innovate is inversely proportional to its proclivity to publicly release conceptual products.

There is no news here. All it says is that they've ported it to the iPhone hardware (not just the simulator, as they announced in June). And Apple has promised them nothing. This prompted me to write an email to Steve Jobs ([email protected] apparently actually reads all his email) as a nearly 20-year Mac (and now iPhone) ISV, begging him to stand firm and refuse to allow any kind of Flash technology on the phone. Flash flies in the face of all open Internet standards, and is a huge resource hog. Flash is Adobe's ploy to build an alternative OS that makes Windows and Mac OS irrelevant. Why should Apple give Adobe any ground on which to stand? Also see http://counternotions.com/2008/06/17/flash-iphone/ .

Ostensibly, http://counternotions.com/2008/08/12/concept-products/ this happened.

Flash versus Open Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the future of the web, mobile or otherwise, will be more or less open. That would be HTML, MP3, H.264, HE-AAC, and so on. These are not proprietary Adobe products, they are open standards…unlike Flash. In confusing codecs with UI, Wilson keeps asking, “why is it tha[t] most streaming audio and video on the web comes through flash players and not html5 based players?” The answer is rather pedestrian: HTML5 is just ramping up, but Flash IDE has been around for many years. Selling Flash IDE and back-end server tools has been a commercial focus for Adobe, while Apple, for example, hasn’t paid much attention to QuickTime technologies and promotion in ages. It’s thus reflected in adoption patterns. Hopefully, this summary will clear Wilson’s blind spot: Apple is betting on open technologies (as it makes money on hardware) while Adobe (which only sells software) is betting on wrapping up content in a proprietary shackle called Flash. From: Does "A VC" have a blind spot for Apple? http://counternotions.com/2009/02/16/open/