'Why Ive shouldn't kill Apple's skeuomorphic interfaces'
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 3rd Nov 2012 01:11 UTC, submitted by Panajev
Apple "Earlier this week Apple fired Scott Forstall, the architect of its iOS platform, and handed his duties over to the company's chief industrial designer, Jonathan Ive. Ive and Forstall had an infamously chilly working relationship, and one of their biggest disagreements was over the role of so-called 'skeuomorphic' design in Apple's products. Forstall, like his mentor Steve Jobs, favored it; Ive disliked it. To many observers, Forstall's forced exit looks like a vindication of Ive's stance. But if he wants to continue Apple's enviable trend of innovation, he'd be a fool to throw the baby of skeuomorphism out with Forstall's bathwater." Hoped for a thorough article on the benefits of skeuomorphism - got the age-old and intrinsically invalid excuse 'because it sells'. Windows isn't he best desktop operating system because it sells so well. Lady Gaga isn't the best artist because she sells a lot of records. This argument is never valid, has zero value, and adds nothing to what should be an interesting discussion.
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zima
Member since:
2005-07-06

MS certainly played dirty (OTOH I wonder how many companies wouldn't, in such position?) - but even without that, Windows would quite possibly still get the market position it enjoys ...simply because it was the best choice - or rather the least bad out of all more or less meh options, at the time when it really mattered.

When Windows got big, with 3.x & 95, there was hardly any alternative - Macs were too limited and expensive, RISC OS machines similar, Amigas even more limited & from a failing company & their "productive" side never really grabbed people's attention, Atari TOS, GEOS, or GEM even more so, OS/2 too demanding on hardware and with the underlying goal of returning to IBM the control over the PC (so of course the clone makers didn't go along, rebelled Gang of Nine style, chose MS), NeXT self-exiled into the "premium" market & ported too late to PCs, as BeOS will do half a decade later (way too late), Linux in its cradle and DEs for X not yet viable for general consumption.

For better or worse, picking up Windows was sensible - network effects and economies of scale did the rest.
That was the case also in places where people rarely paid for Windows, when they chose to pirate it, when they still choose that... (or grab a MSDNAA license, at best)

Edited 2012-11-03 05:00 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 1

bert64 Member since:
2007-04-23

Amigas were more poorly marketed than anything else, the hardware was perfectly capable while the OS was in many ways better than anything from MS or Apple. They were also extremely competitively priced, with a usable system being far cheaper than any of the competitors with plenty of scope for upgrades if you wanted.

Reply Parent Score: 7

vaette Member since:
2008-08-09

Even if the Amiga had been better marketed the PC would have won out simply because it was more open. Commodore would have to have been good at so many more things simultaneously to have had any chance.

Reply Parent Score: 1

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zima Member since:
2005-07-06

Amigas were more poorly marketed than anything else, the hardware was perfectly capable while the OS was in many ways better than anything from MS or Apple. They were also extremely competitively priced, with a usable system being far cheaper than any of the competitors with plenty of scope for upgrades if you wanted.

That's a non sequitur*, largely irrelevant to what I said & way to miss the point. Sure, the 500-generation was nice, the OS nice and generally well-utilising, tied into the hw (though it was also not particularly stable; and come on, its contemporary versions still don't have memory protection).

But people barely used Amiga for their OS - they were gaming machines, and mostly with console-like dynamics (but without matching business model): most people never upgraded past 500-generation, most devs were targeting nothing more than 500 (but Commodore couldn't extract money from the devs, like for example Nintento could; so they bled out the same way Atari did at 1983 video game crash ...curiously, this one was largely brought by Commodore, seems they didn't realise what they did in 83).

And all this highly tied hw & sw made improvements difficult and expensive, it's what killed Amiga (& that approach in general; note that no Amiga-style platforms survived, apart from consoles which have a matching business model of course; even Macs are just PCs nowadays) - 1200 was not much better than 500, and already worse than PCs at the time.

Oh yeah, and WRT PCs, their less rigid architecture, economies of scale from many OEMs... look at this onslaught http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ (and the next 6; and keep in mind that most of those were inexpensive "toy" Amigas) - there was nothing Commodore could do, maybe except releasing a PC GFX&sound expansion card loosely based on Amiga tech...


BTW, Amigas were very popular at my place, NVM marketing ...people still moved en masse to PCs at the first chance they got (and usually pirating Microsoft OS, which means they want it)



*how you get upvoted through the roof and me... downvoted for some reason, shows that logical fallacies in short posts do work; and perhaps also that Amiga myths are strong with some people.

Reply Parent Score: 2