A piece by Robert Scoble on 🔗 ‘Why Tim Cook better worry’. Scoble opens with his take on ‘the fourth visible user interface of the personal computer era.’

The first was character mode. MS-DOS.
The second was the GUI, graphical user interface. Macintosh and Windows.
The third was touch. iPhone and Android.
The fourth is spatial computing.

…. and then goes on to suggest that Cook ‘doesn’t get it’ and Apple should be worried.

He seems to forget that Apple.

• is never first
• never talks about what they have until they are ready
• always puts market readiness ahead of vaporware

And - remember this piece was 🔗 written by the guy that wrote that he would never take his google glass off … and was generally THE world’s leading advocate of same. But that was in 2013.

Then last year he wrote;

Last night before Skrillex at Coachella came on two guys were talking next to me. One said ‘I want to get away from the Google Glass guys.’ I turn around and there are two guys wearing Glass. Google does have a problem here. I haven’t worn mine at all this weekend. What is going on here in a world where I am carrying around a camera and EVERYONE uses their phones or a GoPro but Glass feels freaky and weird? Google has launched this product poorly, is what. But wearable technology needs a different set of skills than Google has. What? Empathy.

and just last week;

Yes, Google Glass had its problems, but that’s because it was released too early. It was a misunderstood product that could stand up to neither expectations nor criticism.

Meanwhile - Apple’s R and D spend is running close to 10 billion a year - do we really think they aren’t working on interesting, game changing, futuristic ideas ?

As Asymco’s Horace Dediu wrote;

While other companies make a bigger show of their projects, ‘Apple’s’ work is in secret. It is substantial and calibrated by market opportunity.

Update - June 2nd - 2016

Funny - this just in today - from a piece called ‘When Should Apple Introduce Its Innovations’. (Sorry the mangling - see below - lost the link)

A couple of choice quotes;

What Apple’s critics stubbornly fail, or refuse, to acknowledge - even though the evidence before them is overwhelming is that it’s not first that matters, it’s first to get it right. The critics want Apple to invent the next big thing. But Apple doesn’t invent. They never have invented. They reinvent.

and

Everything at Google IO so far: Here is our answer to a rival’s product. Ours is way better. It will be out later this year.

💬 Farhad Manjoo on Twitter

#word

Update - Jan 24th - 2024

I rediscovered this post on Jan 23rd, 2024 it having been imported from one of my other blogs a while back. It had clearly got severely mangled in the process. So I have just demangled it - including moving out of that ‘special’ Wordpress HTML that we all ‘love’ so much and reformatted with Markdown and added some of my little emojis for better discovery in the future. Otherwise what you read above is what went live way back then.