Ear Rational Thoughts

Steve Jobs' Influence

I was thinking about how great Steve Jobs is, and it dawned on me that you can really see his influence most when you compare the industries he's in to those he's not. In an industry that Steve Jobs is in, you can take any 5 year period and the technology you have at the end of the period would look magical to people living at the start. In industries he's not in, things might change slowly, but nothing seems even remotely magical.

Think about computers from 1979 compared to the Macintosh (1984) [just watch the tape of his Macintosh release – the crowd's reaction is the reaction you have when you watch a really good magician]. Or PCs in 1997 (when he returned to Apple) to 2002 (in 1997 computers were all white boxes; in 2002, think of the iMac), or from 2002 to 2007 (original iMac to the slick iMac with the flat screen). Or think of cartoons in 1990 when he was running Pixar to 1995 when Toy Story was released. Or music in 1999 (compact discs) to 2004 (iPod + iTunes) to 2009 (iPod touch). Or cell phones in 2003 to 2008 (iPhone). Or the iPad to the (what to compare it to? a book? a magazine? a laptop?).

Then think about PCs from 1986 (when he left Apple) to 1996 (when he returned). They're basically the same over that 10 year period (they just got incrementally faster). Or any 5 year period before 2001 in music technology. Sure you had LPs going to tapes going to CDs, but no one would regard that as magical, it was just more convenient each time. Or take a VHS player to a DVD to a blueray. Sure the picture improves, but it's just the same thing with a slightly higher SNR. Or even phones over any 5 year period before 2008. Cell phones evolved slowly from useless bricks to the Blackberry between the early 80s and the mid 2000s, but at no point in there was a 5 year period where you couldn't predict what the phones would look like 5 years later.

Really, over the last 30 years, nearly all of the magical things we now have came from Steve Jobs (I would put the Internet as the one thing he didn't directly work on, although that arguably took longer than 5 years). The world keeps evolving at a decent clip, but it's really just from Steve Jobs that you get those "holy crap, I never thought I'd see something like that" moments. I wonder if we'll ever get those again.

Microscopic view of the iPad and Kindle

This is very neat. The Kindle display is very impressive at high magnification. I've never seen one, but I would be amazed if it's not far clearer than the iPad.

Apple Monopoly

Don Boudreaux has a good post on the FTC's investigation into Apple for trying to monopolize the cell phone:

That case rests on the theory of “network effects” – effects which ... antitrust enforcers believe “grant outsize advantages to first movers and make it particularly difficult for competitors to break in.” But as the WSJ also reports (quoting Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Electronics Association), the first significant mover in the market for smart phones – and still the dominant supplier there – is Blackberry.

So if the FTC’s theory of network effects is correct, Apple has little hope of gaining monopoly power because it is unlikely to displace Blackberry as the dominant firm in that market. If, on the other hand, Apple does pose a genuine competitive threat to Blackberry’s dominance, then this very fact casts serious doubts on the validity of the theory used by the FTC to justify its investigation of Apple.

I think you have to look no further than Microsoft to see that these OS monopoly lawsuits are a bunch of bunk. Microsoft is now just a shell of their former self (sure, they make just as much money, and they have just as much market share in the PC OS game, but they just have absolutely no relevance anymore). And it had nothing to do with the antitrust settlement 10 years ago given that at the time most people felt the settlement itself was a load of bunk and would do nothing to curb MS's dominance. The fact is that high-tech moves too quickly - and has far too low a startup cost - for a "first mover advantage" to be much of a factor.

What's next, suing Linux because they give their stuff away for free? How's a for-profit company supposed to compete with that? They must be stopped...

Mac is dead

Newsweek has a post up on the death of the macintosh. The punchline:

The future, for Apple, is all about iPhones and iPads, and, more important, the operating system software that powers them—the sexy new iOS 4...

This seems scary in the way that not having a 3.5" floppy drive seemed scary in 1998. At the time, there wasn't an unambiguously more convenient way to transfer files. Today we have USB sticks if you must, but the internet is really how you move data. In 1998, USB sticks were still a couple years off and most people still had dialup. So the idea of no floppy seemed quite radical. Now floppy drives look a little like rotary phones.

I think the future will look more like the iPad and less like the iMac. And I think it will be good in the same way that the death of the floppy was ultimately good – new technology that we can't even really imagine now will make all the things the iPad doesn't do either easier, or more likely irrelevant.

H/T TUAW

The definition of freedom

Courtesy of Macrumors, we get details of an exchange between a blogger and Steve Jobs:

[Blogger:] If Dylan was 20 today, how would he feel about your company? Would he think the iPad had the faintest thing to do with "revolution?" Revolutions are about freedom.

To which Jobs replies:

Gosh, why are you so bitter over a technical issue such as this? Its not about freedom, its about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users. Users, developers and publishers can do whatever they like - they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to. This seems like its your issue, not theirs.

... By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

I used to get very frustrated reading Slashdot for the same reason Jobs gets annoyed here. Here was a group of people who seemed to only care about "freedom". As a long-time Linux user and libertarian, it seems like a group of people I could enjoy. But their idea of freedom - and it's shared by the improperly named Free Software Foundation (FSF) - is in forcing everyone else to do what they want. You make software? You must give me the source code. You make music? You must give it to me without DRM.

Listen, if you build something, you can do what you want with it. But when I build something, it's not "freedom" if you're going to tell me what to do. I suspect that much of what they claim is about "free" as in speech is mostly about "free" as in beer. As in, "I don't build anything so I have no money, but I still want all the neat stuff that you build, therefore you must make it "free"."

The singularity and programmability

Arnold Kling has a post on the Singularity under the title "The Singularity is Not so near":

Generally speaking, the more open-ended the problem and the more adaptive that the machine needs to be to provide a solution, the less far along we are in arriving at a technological solution.

I have this theory that there is a theoretical limit to how sophisticated a computer program can be given how much work it is to program, and the shape is roughly logarithmic (i.e. exponential programming complexity for linear increase in functionality).

Computers today have very limited abilities - interestingly, most of their ability is in things that humans are terrible at like math - and the programming is relatively straightforward.

As we try to do more complex things like pattern recognition (of which speech recognition is one example), what you'd love is for the programming of such an algorithm to be basically the same as for doing mathematical tasks, just more so. But I have a feeling that as you approach human levels of sophistication, you'd be just as happy programming at the genetic level as trying to get a computer to do it. And that we may find that the human brain is about as simple a device to program for its given level of complexity as is theoretically allowable.

Yes, yes and more yes.

Cubee cutouts of your favorite Mac personalities