On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 00:09:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> smaller search company, did with Android, leaving aside Apple because of your silly claims that their existing software gave them a headstart, which is why those former computing giants are all either dead or fading fast.

It is hardly a silly claim:

NextStep (1989) ==> OS-X (2001) ==> iOS (2007)

That is 18 years of evolution and experience, and it also meant that they had the development tooling ready + experienced developers for their platform (macOS programmers). It also mattered a lot that Apple already had the manufacturing experience with prior attempts and also the streamlining of the iPod-line as well as the infrastructure for distribution and following up customers (again from the iPod line).

So, for Apple it was a relatively modest step to go from

 iPod + Mac frameworks + standard 3rd party chips + existing tooling + iTunes

 =>

iPhone

I think you are forgetting that hardly anyone wanted to develop apps for Android in the first few years. Android was pariah, and everybody did iOS apps first, then if it was a big success then maybe they would try to port it over to Android (but usually not).

I also think we should add to this discussion that Google was hellbent on going forward with Android even when it was clearly inferior. Apple tried to squish out Google's services from their iOS products for a while. And that is exactly what Google tries to prevent by funding things like Chrome and Android.

So for Google Chrome and Android does not have to make sense in business terms, it is basically an anti-competitive tool to protect their own hegemony (relative monopoly) by retaining critical mass and making it difficult for competitors to build up a competing product over time (you need a source of income while your product is evolving from mediocre to great to do that).

On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:15:47 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 00:09:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> smaller search company, did with Android, leaving aside Apple because of your silly claims that their existing software gave them a headstart, which is why those former computing giants are all either dead or fading fast.
>
> It is hardly a silly claim:
>
> NextStep (1989) ==> OS-X (2001) ==> iOS (2007)
>
> That is 18 years of evolution and experience, and it also meant that they had the development tooling ready + experienced developers for their platform (macOS programmers). It also mattered a lot that Apple already had the manufacturing experience with prior attempts and also the streamlining of the iPod-line as well as the infrastructure for distribution and following up customers (again from the iPod line).
>
> So, for Apple it was a relatively modest step to go from
>
>  iPod + Mac frameworks + standard 3rd party chips + existing tooling + iTunes
>
>  =>
>
> iPhone
>
> I think you are forgetting that hardly anyone wanted to develop apps for Android in the first few years. Android was pariah, and everybody did iOS apps first, then if it was a big success then maybe they would try to port it over to Android (but usually not).

I agree that Apple had an advantage in getting into the smartphone market, but MS, RIM, Nokia, etc. had much larger advantages in this regard.  And you continue to ignore that Android and google started their mobile OS from scratch and now ship on the most smartphones.  Of course, they just grabbed existing tech like the linux kernel, Java, and various other OSS projects and put it all together with code of their own, but that's something any of the computing giants and many other upstarts like HTC or Asus could have done.

Yet, they didn't, which suggests a lack of vision or some other technical ability than "OS expertise."

On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:22:22 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> I also think we should add to this discussion that Google was hellbent on going forward with Android even when it was clearly inferior. Apple tried to squish out Google's services from their iOS products for a while. And that is exactly what Google tries to prevent by funding things like Chrome and Android.

Do you blame them, given such anti-competitive measures long undertaken by MS and Apple?

> So for Google Chrome and Android does not have to make sense in business terms, it is basically an anti-competitive tool to protect their own hegemony (relative monopoly) by retaining critical mass and making it difficult for competitors to build up a competing product over time (you need a source of income while your product is evolving from mediocre to great to do that).

There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what to tell you.  In other words, google cannot afford to spend a fraction of the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS, because google makes so little money off of Android by comparison, so there are disadvantages to their free model too.  It is one of the reasons why they have now plunged into the high-end smartphone market with their recent Pixel line.

I think the lack of a viable business model for Android vendors, other than Samsung, is a huge problem for the platform, as Apple hoovers up two-thirds of the profit with only a tenth of the phones sold:

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/80-of-global-handset-profits-comes-from-premium-segment/

As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there are more changes to come.

On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:42:41 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what to tell you.  In other words, google cannot afford to spend a fraction of the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS, because google makes so little money off of Android by comparison, so there are disadvantages to their free model too.
>  It is one of the reasons why they have now plunged into the high-end smartphone market with their recent Pixel line.
>
> I think the lack of a viable business model for Android vendors, other than Samsung, is a huge problem for the platform, as Apple hoovers up two-thirds of the profit with only a tenth of the phones sold:
>
> https://www.counterpointresearch.com/80-of-global-handset-profits-comes-from-premium-segment/
>
> As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there are more changes to come.

People that buy Android I find tend to keep their phones for longer. People with Apple phones keep buying new ones. Part of that is how many phone Apple claims are on the latest version. So developers only target the latest one, then their apps don't run on old phone and it encourages people to "upgrade". Android apps tend to support more versions as well, it's a more diverse OS. I've even seen websites that just straight up drop support for old versions of Safari. Can't get the latest version of Safari cause you can't update your phone. Then you go to firefox just to find out you can't install it cause it's no longer support for that iOS version. Can't even download an old version of firefox that did support it cause it's Apple's store and they don't support that.

On Thursday, 9 November 2017 at 14:42:41 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Do you blame them, given such anti-competitive measures long undertaken by MS and Apple?

Big businesses do what they can get away with. Once upon a time governments cared about anti-trust (E.g. AT&T and IBM), but nowadays it seems like they don't care much about enabling competition where smaller players get a shot. Governments seem to let the big multi-national corporations do what they want. It's not like MS was punished much for their behaviour…

(EU has mounted a little bit of resistance, but only thanks to individuals.)

> There is some truth to this, but if you cannot compete with a free product- cough, cough, Windows Mobile- I don't know what to tell you.

I actually think the Microsoft phones looked quite appealing, but I didn't get the sense that Microsoft would back it up over time. Perception is king. Google had the same problem with Dart. They kept developing Dart, but after they announced that it didn't get into Chrome, many started to wonder if that was the beginning of the end.

>  In other words, google cannot afford to spend a fraction of the money on Android that Apple spends on iOS, because google makes so little money off of Android by comparison, so there are disadvantages to their free model too.

As far as I can tell from the iOS APIs the internals doesn't seem to change all that much anymore. I'm sure they do a lot on hardware, drivers and tooling.

> As I said earlier, the mobile OS story is not over yet, there are more changes to come.

Yes, that probably is true. The teenager/young adults segment can shift things real fast if someone push out a perfect mobile gaming-device.

On Wednesday, 8 November 2017 at 11:47:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> Oh, I'm all for using FreeBSD, but most of the arguments for using FreeBSD over Windows apply to Linux. And if you can't get someone to switch from Windows to Linux, you're not going to get them to switch to FreeBSD. FreeBSD and Linux are definitely different, but the differences are small when compared with Windows.

Except, that Linux/GNU is basically a clone of a clone.

BSD is...just BSD..from which all the clones are made ;-)

More importantly, is the GPL vs BSD licence thing.

If you examine GPL code, and think..mmm..that looks good, I might use it in my app....then you're in trouble is you distribute that app without also distributing your code.

BSD gives you 'genuine freedom' to use the code as you see fit - just don't try claiming that you wrote it, or you'll be in trouble.

There is also the 'distribution' thing...FreeBSD is a single, managed, complete distrbution. Linux is just a kernel. It's combined with various GNU stuff to make up a distribution, and most distrubtions make their own little changes here and there, and you never really know what's going on. With FreeBSD there is only the FreeBSD distribution.

So there maybe similiarities between FreeBSD and Linux/GNU, but their differences are really significant and warrant attention.

Oddly enough, whatever draws me to FreeBSD, also draws me to D - I'm still not sure what it is...but the word 'freedom' keeps coming to mind. I cannot say that for Linux as much. I cannot say that for golang. They offer freedom, and at the same time setup out to restrict it.

On Thursday, November 09, 2017 23:42:37 codephantom via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 8 November 2017 at 11:47:32 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
>
> wrote:
> > Oh, I'm all for using FreeBSD, but most of the arguments for using FreeBSD over Windows apply to Linux. And if you can't get someone to switch from Windows to Linux, you're not going to get them to switch to FreeBSD. FreeBSD and Linux are definitely different, but the differences are small when compared with Windows.
>
> Except, that Linux/GNU is basically a clone of a clone.
>
> BSD is...just BSD..from which all the clones are made ;-)
>
> More importantly, is the GPL vs BSD licence thing.
>
> If you examine GPL code, and think..mmm..that looks good, I might use it in my app....then you're in trouble is you distribute that app without also distributing your code.
>
> BSD gives you 'genuine freedom' to use the code as you see fit - just don't try claiming that you wrote it, or you'll be in trouble.
>
> There is also the 'distribution' thing...FreeBSD is a single, managed, complete distrbution. Linux is just a kernel. It's combined with various GNU stuff to make up a distribution, and most distrubtions make their own little changes here and there, and you never really know what's going on. With FreeBSD there is only the FreeBSD distribution.
>
> So there maybe similiarities between FreeBSD and Linux/GNU, but their differences are really significant and warrant attention.
>
> Oddly enough, whatever draws me to FreeBSD, also draws me to D - I'm still not sure what it is...but the word 'freedom' keeps coming to mind. I cannot say that for Linux as much. I cannot say that for golang. They offer freedom, and at the same time setup out to restrict it.

I don't disagree that there are differences between FreeBSD and Linux, but my point is that for most folks, the differences are small enough that it's not all that different from trying to convince someone to use one Linux distro or another - especially if you're trying to convince a Windows user, since Windows is so drastically different from both. In most cases, whether you run FreeBSD or Linux really comes down to preference. For the most part, they both serve people's needs very well and on the surface aren't very different.

I definitely prefer the BSD license to the GPL as well as how the BSDs typically go about designing things, but if you don't care about the licensing situation, whether it even matters to you which you're using starts getting down to some pretty specific stuff that would seem fairly esoteric to a lot of folks (especially non-geeks). It's even the case that most software that runs on one runs on the other - including the desktop environments - so while the differences definitely matter, they tend to be pretty small from the end user's point of view. Plenty of us do get picky about details, which would lead us to one or the other, depending on our preferences, but there are way more similarities than differences - to the point that to many folks, the differences seem pretty superficial.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, 10 November 2017 at 00:23:03 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Plenty of us do get picky about details, which would lead us to one or the other, depending on our preferences, but there are way more similarities than differences - to the point that to many folks, the differences seem pretty superficial.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

No, the diffs really are considerable. FreeBSD is not Linux.

For example, FreeBSD doesn't have systemd ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpDdGOKZ3dg

On Friday, 10 November 2017 at 00:23:03 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> I don't disagree that there are differences between FreeBSD and Linux, but my point is that for most folks, the differences are small enough that it's not all that different from trying to convince someone to use one Linux distro or another - especially if you're trying to convince a Windows user, since Windows is so drastically different from both.

My Windows 10 just finished downloading.

I installed it, and even a technie nerd like me couldn't work it out.

I think Windows 10 is enough to convince users to switch ... to anything ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHG6fXEba0A