Convergence devices have a long history. I read in Steward Brand's 1988 book, The Media Lab, about devices that would converge, collect the functions of our small electronics. Xerox PARC was starting on ubiquitous computing and "pads, tablets, and slates" in the timeframe.
A 30 year progression has brought that old dream to hundreds of millions, who just call it a "phone."
I have a hard time seeing the long history in terms of just one brand, or even a few. The trend is much bigger.
I actually like the confusion of the Android market, but I chose a purely conforming Nexus for myself.
Still I like an ecosystem that is really that, and Xiaomi contributes to diversity, even if I don't buy one.
Grabbed a Nexus 5 myself, because hey, it's pretty hard to beat for $300 and also because of it's tight integration with Google service, with which I myself am tightly integrated.
But, for my mother? She couldn't give a damn less, which is where I think a lot of these smaller manufacturer's will succeed. I actually quite like the idea of a simplified/dumbed-down Android experience that Xiaomi is offering and would seriously consider it for my mother and less tech inclined friends/relatives.
I was one of those boys who bought a TRS-80. The thing is, I don't remember it as a peer accepted pursuit for me either. This was before anyone noticed, let alone Hollywood recast it as their version of Revenge of the Nerds. This was when being a nerd was not nice.
While I did get some quasi support from people who thought it might help in a career someday, the much more common response in those days was "who needs a home computer?"
Update: I agree that we should encourage everyone with an aptitude now to go into higher ROI fields (of which CS is one), I do think it is a bit reconstructed history to make TRS-80s actually "cool" and "non-cool kids excluded."
Indeed, the TRS-80 was not even a game machine. PCs as game machines came a bit later, and as price effective ones, much later.
I think this is a "stages of moral development(1)" thing. In post-conventional levels of development, all tools would be valued for their strengths. We wouldn't denigrate a tool for belonging to a class of tools.
As a guy with a chem degree, I prefer Metric in the lab, and Imperial (US) in the kitchen or workshop. It isn't really that hard to shift gears/units for your task.
Even better is when you learn to cook or build without measurement, just transferring sizes directly. See James Krenov on building a cabinet.
Went camping this week. Left my Prius behind, took my girlfriend's 4x4 up the forest service road to the campground ... found 3 Prius there ahead of me.
>> Car makers call it "contingency anxiety," the urge to buy a mechanically overqualified vehicle because maybe, once in a blue moon—or a hurricane on a high tide—the car buyer might need the extra functionality. The personal-use pickup market is a creature of contingency anxiety. After all, once a year, you need to bring home a Christmas tree.
I have a GMC Canyon that sits in the garage next to our Prius. I bought it a year before the Prius, but it has about half the mileage on it.
That said, I generally find myself having to move something big once a week during the summer months for landscaping, remodelling, maintenance, play, etc, and those are the times when I find my pickup to be indispensable.
Maybe when relayrides is more ubiquitous, I'll rethink the truck, but right now it's a luxury at about $17k.
Yeah, I had a Cherokee and knew that the road out from my house flooded every 3 or 4 years. When if finally did ... the police got there first and blockaded it. I had to drive around anyway.
In the 1970s in Colorado, I used to hear that a Volkswagen Beetle could make it up any road that a Jeep could--I guess that the short turning radius helped, and the lower ground clearance didn't matter that much.
I enjoyed this review from 2012, but in 2014 we are past a 2013 "MOOC backlash" and live in an era where lines are well drawn. There are still some educators committed to true distance learning, but some also who have circled the wagons and who decry such "solutionist" thinking.
The really sad thing is that the current battle isn't just about this or that "poor" offering in the present, it is against the whole effort. Do you have an idea for a better way to run distance learning? You too are a "solutionist" and have enemies in place.
You know, companies with the size and wealth of MS sometimes employ people just to have them NOT innovating elsewhere. Consider 18K smart people freed of that as the bright side.
While I defend "disruption" as a thing, that happens sometimes, I don't think this is it.
What Apple and IBM have really done is join an ongoing movement, something that has been going on for years. People already have these iPhones in their pockets, these iPads on their desks, and they very naturally have been integrating them with their life-and-business processes.
Sure, Google would love to have the IOS cache, but this deal more reinforces IOS market dominance than "disrupts" it, the leader.
Yes, it's the "ongoing movement" to mobile that is disruptive. This agreement is just part of it.
It's not even a technical change for Apple... the same devices, used in the same way (I think they'd fail brand-damaging if they tried to suddenly be "enterprise", you need "dirt under your fingernails" as Cook said).
However... the imprimatur of IBM will open the floodgates for all those enterprise VP waiting for a sign that it's time to switch. (Just as the IBM PC did for personal computers?). Suddenly, the herd of VPs will place orders, each massive in their own right, overwhelming even Apple. That's the budget that previously was allocated to desktops/laptops...
So, in a market sense, this is arguably the key to the disruption. And looking back, the moment the dam breaks might well be seen as the disruption (rather than the warning drips and trickles). Certainly the most consequential.
Sorry, but this all depends on an assumption I question: "normal people don't really need desktops".
It shows up over and over again, but its a failure of reasoning: on average no one uses any specialized software on a desktop, just a web browser and spreadsheet. But the average is not a real person to start with. All the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of bits of custom code people use to do their jobs do not easily translate to locked down mobile environments. Heck, ask anyone using Excel for a lot of work: there's more VBA out there that's utterly vital then anyone would care to admit.
If Apple aren't breaking into enterprise with Macs, they're not going to somehow manage it with iOS except in the same space they always have.
Agreed Apple won't win the Enterpise. But IBM already has.
Agreed tablets won't replace desktop completely - just as desktops didn't replace mainframes completely.
I imagine a normal distribution, over how much PC functionality is needed, by how many people. On the left, people who hardly need a PC - they've already switched to mobiles. Then the middle, the average, where they need a spreadsheet/word processor (to varying degrees). Finally, on the right, tapering off into specialized domain software (including your VB scripts), CAD/CAM, simulation, desktop publishing, animation, visualization etc. This is the long tail you mean, where each person requires a different subset of functionality.
There'll be a process of adoption, step-by-step, left-to-right, which eventually will get stopped (perhaps at spreadsheets?). The question is whether IBM can create apps that really do meet their customer needs well enough to displace desktops. There are many roles where they can.
And if we look at degrees of usage, perhaps if some role only needs occasional spreadsheet access, they might have one PC in the office (instead of one on each desk). Or, rearrange job roles so specialist does that. Or, perhaps google spreadsheets are "good enough" for their use. Or maybe some specialised app, with their exact subset of functionality will rise to the fore - that will actually be better for their specific use, because customized to it...
today, software is far cheaper to build than when spreadsheets became standardized and ubiquitous.
One last data point: it could be that iPads become desktops. Add a keyboard and mouse and a stand... This isn't disruptive of the usage, just of the supplier!
The data point is that that's how I use my phone, with a bluetooth keyboard. I'm using it now. I do most of my programming and ssh on my phone now. It is awkward in some ways (mainly, the bt keyboard sucks), but mostly is more convenient than my desktop.
So maybe this isn't really "opening the floodgates" as I first said, just the beginning of a trickle, as IBM starts to displace desktop usage in the enterprise, role by role.
How exactly iOS is the leader? Do you mean mindshare or marketshare? Perhaps among developers? Or US middle-class?
Besides this being just a traditional PR move by both companies (Apple doesn't have traction in the enterprise market, except for CEOs wanting the IT dept to support their iPhones -- and IBM doesn't have traction in the consumer market, nothing could be more boring than IBM products), this is two companies with cultures on opposite extreme sides of the spectrum.
I personally (redundantly) am an android/linux user, but I perceive that iPhone and iPad are accepted in rich and powerful circles, and are precisely the market for an IBM effort.
I don't think IBM wants to sell _both_ a corporate data initiative and a new phone at the same time.
I don't mean that this move in itself will be disruptive in that sense, but rather that it is going to force the rest of the market (including the current leaders, especially Microsoft) to do disruptive things to compete.
Should karma be an ephemeral thing? Should it age off in a week or so?
There could be a downside to the early entrants benefit. Sure, you can explore new territory and carve out a huge position, but you become a "Land Barron" in a sense, and no friend of later "squatters." (Relatedly, Bitcoin)
("sure I've got 20000 points, but they guy just climbing from 100 to 200 is a repwhore")
A 30 year progression has brought that old dream to hundreds of millions, who just call it a "phone."
I have a hard time seeing the long history in terms of just one brand, or even a few. The trend is much bigger.
I actually like the confusion of the Android market, but I chose a purely conforming Nexus for myself.
Still I like an ecosystem that is really that, and Xiaomi contributes to diversity, even if I don't buy one.