The battle over digital music is just another verse in Apple’s sad song: This astonishingly imaginative company keeps getting muscled out of markets it creates. So what does Apple have to tell us about innovation?
Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Oak was designed for set-top boxes by James Gosling and not to repalce C++ and is not based on objective C’s feature set.
I stand corrected. A little research reveals that Objective C did influence Java. Java as a platform is still none the less innovative.
you guys bickering over wether or not java is derived from Object C or C++ is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is; Apple influence the whole computing industry. And wether or not you choose to accept this fact- is also irrelevant
Java is basically a C clone with a few nasty changes, like the removal of pointers. The only innovation, and it’s turned out to be an ugly one (in implementation, though the idea has some attractive aspects) is platform independence.
Anybody who’s actually used the languages will tell you how closely Java was derived from C.
Innovation is very much subjective. This fact is overlooked.
It cannot be ignored that Apple produces and/or implements many new ideas and many new products routinely. I will refer to these collectively as ‘innovations’, using quote ‘ ‘ marks to indicate that not everyone may agree.
Some see the ‘innovation’ in the ideas and the products themselves. The fact that they exist, and enable users to do better and to do more, is where the ‘innovation’ comes from.
Others see the ‘innovation’ in being able to bring the ideas and the products to the mass market. The ‘innovation’ comes from the products not requiring large investments in time, money and effort to acquire and use.
And yet others imagine ‘innovation’ as something more akin to revolution. They will find a definite lack of innovation in the personal computer and digital music market as revolutions are by nature rare and not commonplace.
Those proponents of the first definition are those that see Apple as innovative in all their markets. Those proponents of the second don’t see Apple as innovative in the personal computer marketplace, but likely do see them as such in digital music sales & storage. And proponents of the third viewpoint don’t generally see Apple as innovative at all.
This article has been written by those that subscribe to the second viewpoint; that having new ideas and new products is a fine thing, but the challenge and, thus, the real innovation comes from making it easy to get and easy to use. Witness their upbeat appraisal of the iPod and iTMS as launched, but their bleak outlook as they haven’t seen Apple continue to innovate away ‘barriers’ to use of their products (price & compatibility were of course mentioned).
Personally, I’d like to see Apple keep a noteworthy proportion of the digital music sales and digital music storage markets. They, for once, have put in the effort needed at the right time and show all the signs of continuing to do so. They’ll need to fight to keep it of course once all their competitors really get going; since they know that, there should be interesting times ahead.
These arguements are really silly, Apple is an innovator PERIOD. They have invented,m created and implemente ideas and technology that have had an effect on the whole industry.
Here are some examples…
FireWire…still kicks USB2 azz so we don’t even need to talk about FW800.
Newton…failed attempt and was way ahead of its time. Who else had CONSUMER deployed handwriting technology at the time. Read the executive bios of Palm employees.
iTMS…yeah sure their have been billions of other online music stores. None of which made money or had the finnese that iTMS has. Don’t even tell me how Napster did things better before iTMS. They filed for bankruptcy.
MacOSX…its not a Linux or BSD distro and it doesn’t look like XP either.
iPod…yeah billions of MP3 payers were made before but the iPod the gold standard for MP3 players.
Don’t get me wrong a lot of other companies innovate. But to call Apple not innovative is just stupid. Also for all those people saying that Apple stole from next…how can you steal what you already own?
Java is basically a C clone with a few nasty changes, like the removal of pointers. The only innovation, and it’s turned out to be an ugly one (in implementation, though the idea has some attractive aspects) is platform independence.
Anybody who’s actually used the languages will tell you how closely Java was derived from C.
This is a blatantly false statement. Java though influenced by C is not derived from it. Only the synax/lexical structure was influenced by C/C++ not the semantics or scope rules. Objective C, small talk have all influenced Java. But just becuase the designers chose to adopt a few good things about certain languages doesn’t make it a copy or a derivative work. Go look at the java language specification.
Java has many things new in it that none of the languages that influenced it have.
I program in C on Unix and assembly every day. I wrote some java programs in my life, includuing RMI, JSP and Applets. I can tell you that java and C only have similar syntax. 3 million developers wouldn’t use it if it was just a copy of C without pointers.
Christ, if we want to get really technical, if copying a feature means you derived from a language, then almost all imperative languages are based on Fortran. while I know this is no the case, that just highlights the silly nature of the argument.