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Innovation, in the end, really doesn't matter. As has been demonstrated by the numerous arguments over innovation both here and elsewhere on the internet very few people even agree on what is or is not innovative. Ultimately people choose the product that is most attractive to them according to their criteria. If you want to argue about phones argue about their features, performance, things that actually matter rather than a pretty pointless history lesson on who did something the first the most number of times ( if that's how one person chooses to define innovation).

The confusion arises from inventive vs innovative.

I agree. And I'm not even arguing that Android has now surpassed the iPhone in many ways. It's not relevant. The point is, it didn't start out as a fundamentally innovative idea, and thus you can understand Steve's attitude. Doesn't matter what is happening now, this was a reaction to events from 3 years ago.

> Cloud based apps,
Google has been developing cloud based apps for many years. What did people expect from Google? Not to use them?

> a tablet,
Did people expect Google to give up markets?

> and a unified OS
So Google has not diverse OS like Chrome and Android?

> Android was just an iPhone clone.

"Besides a mobile phone, the major applications were a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touchscreen to select phone numbers with a finger".

It was an invent from Apple? No.
http://www.retrocom.com/bellsouth_ibm_simon.htm
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF8&pr...

Yeah, a clone that can't even run apps made for iOS, or even have some compatibily at SDK level, not even the same language to develop for.

Something weird happened to the definition of "clone" word in the IT. Now, just sharing a vague physical shape make a product a "clone", an illegal copy of another one.

All this is not getting silly, it *IS*.
Since far too long.

Too many people seems trapped in a distortion field.



As 99.9999% of software code. Even iOS, MacOS X, Windows, Linux share a large portion of software design that were written decades ago.
Under iOS, there is an UNIX layer.
Same for MacOS X. Apple invent none of them.
But without them, no iDevice, zero.

What Android did is to put a fast quasi-java runtime and write an orthogonal framework that doesn't need to learn a language only used by one company products (Objective C). Suddently, all java coders could see a new opportunity, when they didn't with Apple ecosystem.
This kind of choice also matter.



You mean, not like the lack of multitasking in iOS until 3.0? Or system-wide copy&paste?
Sure, multitasking, aka the ability to NOT have to restart from scratch what you were doing before you accept to answer that call is not a major change in design for a smartphone operating system. It was so fun without multitasking, so true.

Yeah, right.
Sorry, but sporting an apple logo is not a major design change anymore. The same apply to huge margin.
And consumer started to see that since a year.
What did Apple innovate since?
Their latest innovation is whinning about stealers.
Indeed, that's a very big change, for a company that started to gain profit by copying Xerox WIMP design.



Which has yet miss success, mostly because smartphone users are now expecting user interface they already how to use and are fluent with, like before others users were hooked to Windows and less ready to try something different like... a Mac.

How ironic.

Apple innovate. They create a new design paradigm, so great that nobody can think to use a smartphone that won't be a touch device and behave similar to the new paradigm.

But they are hangry that their paradigm is copied!?
It's the price of success.

For some people, being successful and rich is never enough. They want to be the only one successful and rich?

Won't work. Never had, never will.

> As 99.9999% of software code. Even iOS, MacOS X, Windows, Linux share a large portion of software design that were written decades ago.
Under iOS, there is an UNIX layer.
Same for MacOS X. Apple invent none of them.
But without them, no iDevice, zero.

OSX and Linux are very different systems. Both are based on Unix, but Mac OS X uses a different kernel called Mach, which was developed from scratch by Avie Tevanian, a NeXT engineer. Mach differs in design philosophy when compared to traditional UNIX and Linux kernels, as the former are monolithic, while OSX is a hybrid kernel.

Also, iOS (and Mac OS X) have a completely different set of programming API's (Cocoa), an unique display manager (Display PDF) and a desktop (Finder). The closest thing to cocoa you have in the Linux space is GNUStep, which is essentially an incomplete re-implementation of YellowBox/Cocoa under linux which nobody uses.

Also, over the years, most of the UNIX based system tools which run under the hood in Mac OS X (and are part of Darwin) have been replaced with Apple-developed alternatives. Launchd is one small example, to replace the cron/init stuff from UNIX. A bigger example is the compiler, where GCC has been replaced by Clang/LLVM.

The only thing which is more or less the same consistently between UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X are the BSD userland tools and X11 window system, which make you able to run UNIX and X11 applications on these systems. Both are an optional install for Mac OS X and not really required to boot the system.

Edited 2011-10-24 23:23 UTC