Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
- Subject: Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2016 18:12:32 +0100
On 27/06/2016 22:42, Stephen Cronin wrote:
On Jun 27, 2016, at 11:10 AM, has <email@hidden
<mailto:email@hidden>> wrote:
*you'd think they'd be taking it to the logical next level by now,
which is to supercede Apple events as the standard high-level IPC
system for Mac *and* iOS*.
This.
Here’s my followup thesis:
Macs have quietly been accumulating sales momentum (e.g. unit
shipments continue to rise despite general market)
Macs haloed in Enterprise by virtue of iOS initiatives with IBM seems
obvious to me....
Folks prefer to use Macs if given a chance.
I think you vastly overstate the Mac's importance. Remember, business is
all about Product; and (contrary to what all geeks think) technology is
the LEAST important part of that. Macs are a tiny fraction of Apple's
business, and really only exist to supply software products to the
mobile ecosystem where Apple makes the vast bulk of its cash. From a
purely technical standpoint, the Mac platform doesn't offer iOS software
developers anything that a Windows platform couldn't; if anything the
Windows ecosystem would be even better for development due to all the
extra resources it can provide due its much greater size. The reason
Apple maintains its own development platform is simply because it'd be
insane to hand the keys to iOS over to a direct competitor who could
then flip the off-switch any time it liked.
I don't see Macs ever becoming significant players in enterprise,
because a business PC is just a single cog in a far larger machine.
Apple might sell the prettiest looking cog, but enterprise has no
interest in buying single cogs: they only care about the whole machine.
Whole-machine vendors like Microsoft, IBM, RedHat, Oracle, SAP, and the
rest have invested decades in building up the end-to-end expertise and
assets and customer base, so even if Apple _wanted_ to break into that
market it could never do it by trying to play that game by those
players' rules.
The only way any outsider could break the enterprise hegemony would be
by doing what Apple did to break the old consumer hegemony: completely
disrupt it by creating a compelling product that is everything the old
system is _not_; which for enterprise would be something completely
cloud-based and accessed through ultra-lightweight terminals and mobile
devices through big fat pipes, all pre-built and pre-integrated with a
big old bow on top, and the sheer massiveness and stability to convince
customers that this is an operation built to last the next thousand
years, and thus something they can safely afford to trust their own
existence on. And that is everything that Apple is NOT: because as a
mass consumer market vendor their products must be born, live, and die
like fireflies; the only thing _remotely_ stable about Apple is their
internal backend infrastructure that keeps all that customer-side
excitement and transience generously fed - and they're still trying to
work out the right way just to tie those two components together, never
mind build out the rest of a non-existent enterprise product ecosystem
as well.
Net: Mac represents an mis-understood gold mine that is waiting for
new hardware and macOS to ship.
This opportunity can help address the financial issues presented by
changing iPhone market.
Macs have a clear opportunity to deliver more money to the company.
It's not. It's just the basement on/off-switch that Apple needs to keep
in its own pocket in order to ensure the long-term foundation for
everything else above it.
automation is an incredibly valuable macOS (and iOS?) asset vis-a-vis
the competition.
It COULD be an incredibly valuable resource, if Apple knew what the hell
to do with it. But right from the day Jobs visited Parc and was wowed by
the GUI while completely missing the Ethernet, they've _never_ been any
good at networks. And I mean, if you think the AppleScript platform is
screwed up, you should take a look at the ENTIRE modern-day WWW
sometime, which is so far off the rails from what it was meant to be
it's no longer even wrong (and if you think my criticisms of the AS team
are harsh you should read what I say about the whole so-called web
developer "profession"). Whereas a product that's mismanaged,
misunderstood, and dropped on the floor it now consists more of dents
than anything else is not a valuable asset to the business; if anything
it's a drain and an embarrassment. Apple have unreservedly pulled the
trigger on numerous products - Xserve, Aperture, iAds, and so on - that
have failed far less egregiously than Mac automation has.
Remember: AppleScript is a product that musters maybe a few tens of
thousands of users in the world. Xcode alone has something like TEN
MILLION REGISTERED USERS. That's ten million incredibly valuable
automation customers - i.e. hardcore geeks who by rights should be all
over Mac automation thicker than flies on shit - that have been dropped
straight on the floor and left there. If I was Apple, I'd have already
killed Mac automation out of absolute shame just on that failure alone.
Do the math: A failed product makes a company look bad; better to
eliminate it altogether ASAP than keep it around. And there's hardly
another company in the world that takes its image more seriously than
Apple, or puts more time and money into making it look ten - a hundred -
a million! - times even more stunning than it actually is. So you tell
me what's going on there, cos I have no idea any more.
delivering this high level bridge considering NOT breaking existing
functionality is not doubt challenging and will take time to fully bake.
However, there is too much money on the line in the coming years in
enterprise to give up the opportunity to leverage existing technology….
Again, forget enterprise. Look at how ordinary users, consumers, live,
work, play, and interact not so much with their technology but with the
worlds that technology opens up to them. Even if it's just automating
the process of counting the number of 'likes' or 'friend requests' on
their Facebook, that is exactly the sort of thing Apple should be
targeting, because there's a BILLION Facebook users in the world and
even if only 1% are vain or OCD enough to do that sort of thing 50 times
a day then the ability to take control of that whole process and
delegate it to one's personal agent to do on their behalf is potentially
TEN MILLION customers locked into, and loving, the Apple platform and
what it empowers them to do: take control of their machines and make
them do what THEY want, instead of what the machines think they should
be allowed to do.
And there, I think, is perhaps the greatest challenge facing Mac
automation today, because if programmers and managers and sales droids
are control freaks who can barely stand the thought of LETTING THE USERS
TAKE CONTROL - and possibly using that freedom to route straight around
all of the meticulously positioned toll booths or grand monuments to
their own extreme awesomeness that those serried marinets have dedicated
their lives to erecting IN OUR WAY, then who knows WHAT COULD HAPPEN
NEXT!?!!!???
And if there's also a more control-freaky company in existence than
Apple today then I've not heard of it either. But sometimes you just
gotta let go, let your users make their _own_ decisions for themselves -
to try and fail and try again, to explore and discover and grow for
themselves, - and stop trying to dictate every step of their lives for
them. And maybe if you empower and encourage them like that, they'll
come to love you a million times more than they did when you had them
cooped up in a perfectly polished gold cage.
A little like raising family, I guess. :)
Regards,
has
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