[malandrew]

This is largely true, but it draws the playing field Apple wants you to see. There is a large part of the playing field that is omitted, cloud, the web and the Internet in general. And this playing field alone is as important as all the playing fields Apple is competent in combined.

Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple.

Yes, they have cloud services, but for the most part, Apple's developer community has been generally unhappy about Apple's iCloud offering. This stems from two causes:

(1) first, the competency of Apple's team in this area are not comparable to the competency of Apple's other teams (mainly operating systems devs, app devs, industrial designers, supply chain specialists, etc.). No engineer who is truly competent in these domains (cloud, internet, web) has Apple as top of mind when they think about what company to go work for.

(2) second, Apple doe not only not understand the value of decentralization, but they actively fight it. This works fine for "single-player" experiences, but for "multi-player" experiences this is a disaster. I, as an Apple user, cannot dictate the devices and software my friends, family, colleagues, etc. will use, so any experience that is only truly complete when all these other people are also part of Apple's walled garden, will either never truly succeed or will outright fail.

So yes, only Apple can compete with Apple on it's home turf, but there are other playing fields than the ones Apple likes to talk about.

Lastly, Apple has only succeeded as much as it has with the unified experience, not because it did things better, but because the web (and specifically the browsers and the DOM) have failed to truly acknowledge that the web can't [yet] compete with Apple (and native in general), is that we don't have a feature complete and performant browser-based alternative for the building blocks you actually need to build apps, namely retain-mode scene graphs.

Browsers need to give some really deep thought to creating the equivalent APIs to things like qt, kde, gnome, Core Animation, etc. The DOM just does not cut it. FWIW, it's exactly what we're working on at Famo.us, and we're hoping others take note and some of the ideas we're exploring become co-opted by the browsers for inclusion as an alternative to the DOM, but that still plays nicely with the DOM.

Further proof that Apple has succeeded only because others have stumbled can be seen by comparing iOS to Android as well. Apple was a much better experience for a while before Android caught up. Some of this was because of Apple's big head start, but some of it was due to one technical/product decision made by Android early on, that when reversed made all the difference in Android's ability to compete with Apple: Early on Android settled on immediate mode graphics. This was the main reason Android user experience and performance just felt wrong for a while when Apple's felt right. Once Android embraced retain mode graphics fully, the Android experienced improved dramatically, so much so that I would say that Android, with its developer community, can also do anything Apple can do.

[0] http://famo.us/

[1] http://acko.net/blog/shadow-dom/

[bane]

I think this points to Apple's fundamental weakness: when they can't control the experience, their efforts are second-rate.

It's a weird binary behavior that's tied to the pre-internet days. You buy into Apple's ecosystem and you do Apple-y things and you'll have a world class experience, a 9 or 10 on a 10 point scale.

But as soon as you start interfacing with anything else, especially something messy like the Internet, and hold onto your pants because you have no idea what the experience is going to be like, but you can guarantee it won't be better than a 5 out of 10 at best.

As much as other companies might like to provide an Apple-like walled garden (and I'll completely agree that previous attempts by non-Apples have been 3 out of 10s at best), they fundamentally understand that there is a bigger world out there. It's much harder to interface with the rest of the world, it is messy, but you can bring some kind of sanity to it if you work at it. These companies work really hard to provide a 7 or 8 out of 10 experience while Apple provides a 5. And they're rewarded for it. They hit these perfectly reasonable experience levels in-spite of the underlying mess they have to deal with, and they manage to make viable businesses out of it. What's more remarkable to me is that despite Apple controlling 100% of the experience in the Apple ecosystem, they aren't a perfect 10.

I think this magnifies the flaws even more and makes them more damning and I think a surprising amount of it backfires. Otherwise Apple would absolutely dominate the market, but it doesn't.

Where Apple does talk to the outside world, it's an acknowledgment that it's simply cheaper to deliver content through proprietary end-to-end points over the Internet rather than build the infrastructure themselves. But it's such a begrudging acknowledgment and the result is a collective "meh" out of Apple. "It's not part of us, so why really try?" Make no mistake, if Apple could replace Internet connectivity with a global AppleTalk network to deliver music and videos to you and ensure no unclean non-Apple users weren't dirtying up the bandwidth, they would.

The goal of other companies then is to try to hit the feel of this kind of tight vertical integration that Apple has, but to do it across vendors, networks, software, etc...to do it in a non-integrated way. And you know what? It's not bad. It's not Apple-level, but you have to admit the Internet, the Web, etc. all that is pretty bad ass. These things that we take for granted are the result of a decidedly non-Apple, very open, approach that benefits people far more in the balance.

>Apple is second to last in that respect. Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple. Only Samsung understands the web less than Apple.

Then again, Samsung and Apple are two of the largest companies in the world. So maybe they're doing something right.

[malandrew]

Excellent comment.

The only thing I would contest is the last comment about Samsung. It is like 1/3 of South Korea's economy, but its not a true comparable because it functions more like a keiretsu [0]. At it's core, it's a bank that finances many companies operating in different industries that cooperate when it makes sense. They are a giant in computing, but they also draw a ton of strength from other lines of business. For example, Samsung Heavy Industries is one of the biggest builders of large cargo container ships in the world. There are many more lines of business like this.

On that note, one reason for Apple's ability to deliver a 9/10 experience with a closed ecosystem is because it can afford to. There would be a lot more companies able to deliver a 9 out of 10 closed experience if they had the cash reserves Apple does. Cash funds the development of perfected services, but more importantly it affords Apple's leadership the luxury to focus on the long-term. When cash is an issue, companies have to make trade-offs that compromise on building the foundation to get to a 9 out of 10 experience. Apple never has to compromise. They just need to make sure there is a market and then build out the foundational layers of the onion necessary to build a unified experience including complementary products and services that make the difference between a 7 out of 10 experience and a 9 out of 10 experience.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu

[philosophus]

Kind of off-topic but the Korean term for a Samsung type of company is Chaebol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaebol

[bane]

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I was only referring to the Samsung electronics division (which is quite a bit bigger than all of Apple).

[malandrew]

No need to apologize. It was a spot on comment.

[anko]

I personally think Safari is better than 5/10. And I'd also suggest that their web browsing (interfacing with something messy like the internet) capability on iphone 1.0 set the standard for internet usage on a mobile device.

I think what you're saying is that apple doesn't try to do everything like google does. They try and remain focussed on products that they think are the most important. I see this as a strength.

[coldtea]

>Google and Amazon both understand the web a whole heck of a lot better than Apple

I really doubt this. Google yes. Amazon no.

What has Amazon did that shows it "gets" the Cloud?

It has its one (and that's it) highly succesful store front (which is like a Google that only offered the search service). That's is, as far as the Cloud goes for Amazon.

As for AWS, the do get cloud infrastructure and services to developers. But that's not the Cloud (like CISCO is not the Internet), and it's a far cry from "getting" the Cloud itself, and being able to create cloud services people use.

Amazon can sell you the infrastructure to create Twitter, ot the new Gmail, or whatever yourself. But they don't really create those things themselves.

[malandrew]

There are different layers of the cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.

The only layer Apple gets is SaaS and really only for its own apps/services. Apple keeps trying to do PaaS, but the anti-decentralization and specifically wall-garden approach of a seemless experience across all your Apple devices, but a sometimes intentionally crippled experience across other devices you own and a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

They might be able to get somewhere with HealthKit, since AFAICT, that may be largely a single-player experience (at least for a while). HomeKit on the other hand is a different story. The moment you move to a household with more than one person, they will need to either play nicely with other devices not their own or become increasingly seen as irrelevant. HomeKit only working with Apple devices is a dealbreaker for every home with at least one resident using a non-Apple device. Now that Android has a comparable experience to Apple, that's a fairly common phenomenon.

Google understands PaaS and SaaS.

Amazon understands IaaS and PaaS.

[anko]

I think Apple understands both PaaS (the new icloud stuff in ios8/yosemite) and SaaS (most of their offerings which were decent up until now).

I don't think IaaS really comes into this discussion at all - If they did it or didn't do it, it wouldn't matter because it doesn't change how many phones or devices they sell. IaaS is targeted at a niche - companies/people who can afford server admins.

Calling apple's experience "intentionally crippled" is also disingenuous. Maybe you can find a few examples ie. storage size costs, but generally, they are trading off user simplicity and security against user control.

Apple's not alone in this regard either. You might say Google "intentionally cripple" their open source version of android: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-....

What I find more appalling is that google pretended to be open to get a marketplace advantage.

As for Homekit - can't you just buy home automation devices that adopt more than one standard? I would love for apple to open up more of their new apis to other platforms, but what do they do when an android device's insecurity causes someone's house to be hacked?

[malandrew]

Providing only device APIs and few to no network APIs counts as intentionally crippled in my book. But as you said, Google does this as well, but not nearly to the same degree as Apple.

Google doesn't cripple the end-developers, it cripples the OEMs and their ability to take Android in other directions. This sucks because it hurts diversity of ideas that can succeed in the market. I don't like either Google's or Apple's approach here, but Google's is the lesser of two evils.

[drewcrawford]

I don't think you understand HomeKit, or Apple's view of it.

What's important to Apple is that you have a good user experience. As this applies to HomeKit, there are a few important requirements: battery life, and security/privacy. Keep in mind we are in the early days of home automation, and all it takes is one bad story about the hacker adjusting your thermostat to sour the market.

The only way to achieve those objectives is to exercise some control over hardware manufacturers. Sure, you may lose some compatibility this way, but that is infinitely preferable to a security risk in a poorly-understood environment without good security hygiene traditions. As a software developer who works with Bluetooth hardware, the Apple MFI certification process is the only hardware cert for home automation I am aware of. So even if I was an Android dev, I would prefer to purchase hardware that went through MFI as it gives me a basic level of confidence that somebody signed off on this.

Secondly HK explicitly includes measures for compatibility, including a type of "bridge device" that can translate between HK and a manufacturer's proprietary (or open, as the case may be) format.

Thirdly you have to consider HK's target audience. One of the headline features inside the HK Apis is the support for multiple homes. The people who are early adopters of HK in the near future are not hackers sharing an apartment. It's the Tim Cooks of the world where throwing out the existing automation hardware is not of any concern.

Sure, at some point it will become ubiquitous, and as the market matures news stories about the dangerous thermostat hackers will be less of a concern. But that's not this release, and it may not be within the next five years. That's more than enough time to create HK bridges and poly lingual lightbulbs that speak multiple APIs and so on.

[coldtea]

I already aknowledged Amazon has a fine IaaS in AWS, but that's not really what we were talking about. The cloud we were talking about is the SaaS part.

Apple doesn't do IaaS anyway (at all), so it makes no sense to compare offerings in this area with Apple's.

For the SaaS that Apple does, it has huge successes with iCloud and iTMS and the App Store.

We might find them klunky or whatever (compared to what? Google Play? Kindle's sync?), but if it was a third party company called iTunes that had the #1 music store in the U.S, it would be hailed as a huge success in itself. And for Apple it's just a byproduct, and coming from a company with no roots in the music business at all when it started it.

>a certainly deficient experience with devices owned by others with whom you may want to share an experience, Apple will always be second fiddle.

At least Apple has the "seamlessly between Apple devices" right. There are platforms that even between devices of that one platform the sharing experience is subpar.

But, as someone who works with Windows and Linux too, and has an iPhone and a cheap Android phone, I really don't see any platform that does this cross-platform sharing thing any better ("first fiddle").

How's sharing from Android to iOS or Windows Phone or PC any better?

[MAGZine]

I disagree.

Kindle is a shining example of this.

Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?

[coldtea]

>Apple on the other hand... well, they created iTunes... but that's really the only "cloud" technology that they have besides the actual iCloud (hosted on AWS, possibly?). Apple has shown that they struggle when creating web experiences for customer. Remember ping.fm?

Yes, what about it? I also remember 20+ music stores that were created, touted to high heavens, gone nowhere and stopped existing (from Napster to Rhapsody etc), whereas iTMS succeeded widly.

It's not like Google for example doesn't have its share of Cloud failures. Google Wave anyone? Google+ that everybody seems to hate except some a-list tech writers, and which hardly made a dent against FB usage? Google Video? And tons of other folded attempts.

And it's not just iTunes.

It's also the App Store (which is a different beast to the music store). The Movies. iCloud for sync and backup and image sharing etc.

I agree that their web (in-browser) offerings (like iCloud office apps) are not very enticing.

But Apple's really not into using the Cloud for in-browser web apps -- they use it for enabling native apps to communicate and share data, and at massive scale at that.

[malandrew]

Exactly.

And iTunes worked for three reasons: (1) it's a single player experience; (2) the iPod; (3) DRM lock-in (there is no longer lock-in, but only for songs purchased after the date lock-in was expired. iTunes Match was a service added to maintain lock-in after DRM-free music was announced.)

[eridius]

Given that Apple tries to lump all its cloud offerings under the iCloud banner, deliberately dismissing iCloud in order to claim that iTunes is the only "cloud" technology Apple has is extremely disingenuous.

[MAGZine]

I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage. It doesn't prove apple is any good with making web services that people want to use, just that they're good at sending data, receiving it, storing it for later retrieval.

I'm not handing out praise for being able to run an smtp server. (alright, that's a bit reductionist, but you get the idea)

[eridius]

> I dismiss iCould because it's large data storage.

It's a lot more than that. It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services like Find My iPhone.

There is a lot of stuff Apple is doing with iCloud, but the vast majority of it just silently works, so you aren't even considering that it exists when you talk about iCloud.

I suspect that what you're really trying to say is that Apple has not done much in the arena of building web apps, but even that's not accurate anymore, they have a decent suite of stuff available on icloud.com (including collaborative document editing).

[malandrew]

    "It's all of Apple's cloud offerings, including email, 
    contacts, calendars, iWork, backup, document 
    synchronization, data-specific synchronization of various 
    things like keychain and mail accounts, photos (storage, 
    syncing, and galleries), it even covers their services 
    like Find My iPhone."

Yes, but almost all those APIs are made available as a cloud offering to Apple software only. Third party developers are only afforded the ability to interface with most of these APIs via APIs in FoundationKit.

If I can only get access to this stuff via an API on the device, then it is not really cloud API. It's not like Apple is making these APIs available to developers via something like REST.

The only ones that are available are those that have a strong open standard that Apple can't wall gardenify like IMAP/SMTP, CalDAV and CardDAV.

[rudy750]

Very well said. I have been tinkering with famo.us and it is looking very promising