• Open Menu Close Menu
  • Apple
  • Shopping Bag
  • Apple
  • Mac
  • iPad
  • iPhone
  • Watch
  • TV
  • Music
  • Support
  • Search apple.com
  • Shopping Bag

Lists

Open Menu Close Menu
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Lists hosted on this site
  • Email the Postmaster
  • Tips for posting to public mailing lists
Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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





_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
AppleScript-Users mailing list      (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
Archives: http://lists.apple.com/archives/applescript-users

This email sent to email@hidden


  • Follow-Ups:
    • Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
      • From: Stephen Cronin <email@hidden>
    • Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
      • From: has <email@hidden>
References: 
 >Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store (From: has <email@hidden>)
 >Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store (From: Stephen Cronin <email@hidden>)

  • Prev by Date: Re: AppleScript "standard libraries" project - need to hand, off now
  • Next by Date: Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
  • Previous by thread: Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
  • Next by thread: Re: 10.11 additions to NSAppleEventDescriptor & Mac App Store
  • Index(es):
    • Date
    • Thread