Over at SLOG David Goldstein is defending his love for the new iPhone and mourning the loss of Steve Jobs.
The odd thing about Job’s death is the wierd comparisons to Einstein, Edison, … even Aristotle. A better caparison is to the Beetles. I think David confuses the Beetles’ Apple brand with the Logo from Cupertino.
Look at the less than thrilled reaction to the new iPhone. The iPhone is fine, especially now that they even let you choose between three of the (largest) cell providers. BUT it is just a phone. Mac, iPhone, IPad .. all this is heading for trouble because of Apple’s business model.
Remember SONY? They were the Apple of the day. SONY invented the transistor radio, high quality “trinitron” TVs, walkmen, then ….
Betamax lost out to the more universal VHS, SONY’s products had to compete for mass market attention with Panasonic, Korea and GE.
I bought SONY stuff because it was cool. SONY was where APPLE is today.
Look at Amazon’s Fire (what I call Applesauce). Amazon has put an elegant front end on an Android and backed it up with an open access cloud resources. Most of these resources are available on ANYAndroid because Amazon uses those resources to get you to buy stuff. They do not need to make a buck on Androids. Apple is rather limited because Apple is not a retailer like Amazon or a cloud provider, It can not compete in services with Google, Amazon or Microsoft. . Why buy music from iTUNES when you have open markets on Amazon or Kobe? Why use Apple’s cloud when you have Dropbox?
As for “Siri”(Apple’s version of HAL) … Android has a much more powerful set of Google tools for free. For a couple of bucks you can go even further with Vliingo or Nuance’s dragon speak.
Jeff Bexos announcement was obviously intended to recall Steve Jobs. He may be able to do that. Cox the emaciated look-alike successor of the Steve Jobs, really has a problem with cool. Jobs was not just the soul of Apple, he was their front end. Folks bought stuff because it was cool and Jobs sold cool. . When the Federation’s gadgets are no longer impressive to the natives, it is less cool to play Captain Kirk!