Don't Panic, But We've Passed Peak Apple (and Google, and Facebook) 307
waderoush writes "Over the last decade, just three companies — Google, Apple, and Facebook — have generated most of the new ideas and most of the business momentum in the world of computing. (Add in Amazon, if you're feeling generous.) But it's been a long time since any of these companies introduced anything indisputably new — and there are good reasons to think they never will again. This Xconomy essay argues that the innovation engines at Google, Apple, and Facebook are out of gas (the most surprising thing about OS X Mavericks is that it's not named after a cat) and that other players will have to come up with the underpinnings for the next big cycle of advances in computing. Granted, it's not as if any of these companies will disappear. But the idea that they'll go on generating ideas as groundbreaking as the ones that landed them in the spotlight defies common sense, statistics, and the lessons of history, which show that real innovation almost always comes from small companies. Apple, Google, and Facebook aren't too big to fail — but they may be too big to keep succeeding."
Re:Glass??? (Score:2, Interesting)
> Not only that, but the new Mac Pro is probably the most original desktop computer design since.. desktop computers were invented.
Only if you ignore hobbyists.
If you acknowledge the enthusiast case modding scene, then nothing that Apple has done with the Mac Pro is at all interesting. It's notable primarily for how it is mismatched to the market segment they are trying to sell it to.
The trash can would make a great high end consumer Mac.
Forcing it on computing professionals is criminal stupidity.
Just Journalistic Lazy Opinion (Score:5, Interesting)
Innovation does NOT occur just in "big pieces" in hardware and software. Arguably, the major innovations done today affecting the 'big pieces' are logistical and nano-structure components. Jounalists often see only the forest, not the trees, so they can't see what has just popped out of the soil.
These innovations are leading to miniaturization at a fast rate, parts with new properties, electronics with new functions, multi-functions, faster performance and software that knows how to integrate functions across devices and time.
The innovations inside the new MacBook Air don't excite a journalist as he has "seen that before", but to an innovator there is a lot to see both in hardware, ICs, battery and software. People forget that the MacBook Air is about 1/4th of the weight of the old PowerBooks of a half dozen years back and are faster and work longer hours on a charge.
Improved software systems are easy for journalists to ignore because that requires testing and journalists are basically lazy on doing actual testing and comparisons and retrospective analysis as software systems improve.
Re:Facebook, google invented little (Score:5, Interesting)
This article must be flamebait. Google didnt invent much, there were dozens of search engines when it came around
There were, but they sucked. And I say this as someone who was at Carnegie Mellon when they came up with Lycos (and had been through webcrawler, and archie and veronica in the pre-http days), and suffered through altavista when it was still at digital.com and plenty of other early efforts.
The idea of using the number of links to a page as an indication of its importance was huge, and it and the rest of PageRank were truly innovative--you went from normally going through 5-10 pages of results and sometimes more to almost always having the thing you were looking for on the first page. Simply the concept of having an "I'm feeling lucky" button was unthinkable in the earlier days.
They were also among the earlier places to recognize that XMLHTTP/XmlHttpRequest wasn't just an Outlook plugin, bringing AJAX into the mainstream (which was hugely significant, and one of the reasons we're not saddled with shitty Flash sites anymore).
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
Re:Hmm, maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
Or balloon based WiFi:
http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/google-floats-balloons-for-free-wifi-20130615-2oamm.html [theage.com.au]
Fucking clickbait.
Re:Glass??? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Not only that, but the new Mac Pro is probably the most original desktop computer design since.. desktop computers were invented."
Really? Because it sure seems derivative to me, and entirely self-serving on Apple's part. It's a disposable appliance with little configurability, serviceability or expandability---just like all of Apple's development for quite a while now. It follows their trend away from "desktop computer design" and it represents THE threat to traditional desktop computing. It does not do what you want it to, it does what Apple wants it to. Other than the shape, it's hard to distinguish it from a game console. Take it or leave it, the Apple way.
If it were square rather than round it could be far more expandable, but then it would be obviously derivative even to people like you.
Death of the Engineer? (Score:5, Interesting)
The period from 1950s to the 1980s was the age of invention.
People haven gotten stupider since then. They have wisened up. Why spend hard work on invention when you can buy a patent. And these smart people have created an ecosystem which nurtures MBA, Law and other non contributing disciplines. Its the culture of "Manage" rather than do. And when everybody just goes ahead and wants a pie from the big machine, what happens, slowly but steadily, invention, innovation starts dying. Over every invention lies the sword of patent. Invent a new touch screen? Give it to XYZ for free because you are stepping on some tiny patent somewhere.
And this will continue. Very soon the engineers will vanish, and the world will be doomed, as deserved.
Re:Innovation only from Google, FB, Apple ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyone who would give the packaging to FB (same as Apple, really) has to give the packaging of AWS to Amazon...and on a technical level, they are leagues and leagues beyond FB on "innovation" in that packaging.
How Facebook innovated (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll tell you what Facebook innovated. (You're not going to like it, though, because we tend to think of innovation as synonymous with "progress" and progress is usually measured in terms of end user utility. And what I'm about to say is totally not that.)
Facebook somehow had a website that was popular (that's not a part of the innovation, but it's an extremely important prerequisite) and then got a million other websites to embed references to Facebook resources into theirs, like Google did with Google Analytics. Since most browsers, by default, are happy to load any embedded resource referenced on a page, that gave Facebook an incredible number of "hits" from diverse sources.
Most classical (i.e. naive) 1990s-thinking web people would see these "hits" as totally valueless, because they're not pageloads, they aren't showing ads that you got paid to run, or whatever. The clever people, though, saw that you use this sort of thing with a cookie and combined with referer[sic], to build marketing profiles.
The mid-late 1990s clever people knew that too, but their references were ads themselves (e.g. doubleclick). They had to pay to get other webmasters to embed this crap. Nobody is going to embed a doubleclick image (i.e. an ad for something) unless you give them money.
You don't get paid to embed Google Analytics javascript, though. You don't get paid to embed a Facebook "like" button. So Facebook can do all the same "spying" that doubleclick.net could do a decade earlier, but without paying for it.
And webmasters embed these things for free, because they feel they get something out of it. With Google Analytics, you get the reports and analysis. Sure, you could get a lot of that from your own logs, but not all of it (Google knows some things about your visitors, that you might not, and this is their business, they're able to "keep up") and GA is easy and there and waiting for you. With Facebook like buttons, discussions, etc, webmasters are counting on the popularity of Facebook, to make it so that people who use their own site, will generate events on their Facebook profiles which will be seen by other Facebook users who don't use their own site, and maybe someone will curiously click through and you get a new visitor.
You gotta give Facebook some credit for that. I get how Google turns their spying into money, but I still don't really understand how Facebook does. (Apparently Wall Street doesn't understand it either, judging from the ever-falling stock price.) But there's probably an angle, and however it can be used, Facebook has very successfully put into place at least half of it already. Getting so much of the web to embed your script or iframe (and without having to pay them for it) -- holy crap, I totally can't imagine that happening fifteen years ago.
So it's innovation. Just not the kind users like to see happen.