pixxa
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If Edward Tufte designed PowerPoint... http://pixxa.com
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Comment · 7 months ago
Apple's AI Strategy: Let Rivals Spend .6T in Data Centers.
The "back end" vendors (Google, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Facebook) don't have much of a choice than to jump in head first, to compete with likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.
Apple owns distribution of profitable "front end" consumption, so she can afford to 'rent-to-own', albeit to the chagrin of us developers. Wait the competition out, fund good deals when the investment cycles run out?
Comment · 2 years ago
This is true (about Twitter.)
Apple falls very far from that tree. Lots of money is being transferred to developers even today. It's just hard to see because so much is getting sloshed around.
Comment · 2 years ago
Developers on Apple's platforms pour their careers and lives into building apps that predominately depend on Apple. This is a very large commitment, yet most developers tend to have a scant understanding of Apple's business model beyond the usual headlines about AppStore's 30% commission or supply chain rumors about the next product.
Given the significance of this investment by us developers, perhaps it makes sense for us to better understand the business of Apple, which we all depend on.
The question is: how?
Comment · 11 years ago
"Best stuff" depends on who "we" are...
Here are some other users who may feel they are getting the "best stuff":
Compiler designers, programming language researchers, or even CS students the Swift core is a fount of of information to learn from, modify, experiment.
Teachers whose school could not afford Macs. They can now use Swift on cheap Linux machines, and eventually on Windows.
...
Comment · 11 years ago
It's in Apple's advantage for server-side Swift to take off, and do so quickly and robustly.
It also makes little sense (nor is in character) for Apple to agree to open source Swift and not take a leadership role in the effort.
One step at a time...
Comment · 13 years ago
Speculation of course is that this is the foreshadowing the arrival of Kindle Phone.
A more intriguing possibility is that Amazon is setting stage for its next move in Platform Wars. Between his gigs at Microsoft & Amazon, Kindel was an advisor to the Buddy mobile cloud platform. (See http://www.geekwire.com/2011/exmicrosoft-mobile-exec-charlie... ) Many other startups (such as parse.com, ubran airship) are attempting to build this layer, most of them built right on top of Amazon AWS, but it is hard to imagine such a product going mass-market amongst developers without the trust of a brand such as Amazon.
Amazon is in great position for this. AWS is probably the best-regarded major cloud platform amongst developers, in contrast to Apple's trouble in wooing developers to use its cloud platform ( http://rms2.tumblr.com/post/46505165521/the-gathering-storm-... .) While Google has enormous cloud resources, they are mostly there to serve Google's own purposes, not to mention its "spring cleaning" practices which make the developers less than comfortable. This leaves nice space for a flanking campaign by Amazon: to create a universal mobile cloud services API that works well across all platforms.
If true, this could move the basis of competition away from the device and toward the cloud (and in Amazon's favor) and may lead to the establishment of a third (and thus different) mobile platform beyond iOS and Android. Note that this approach mirrors Amazon's Kindle consumer strategy: to sell their own hardware, but also to proliferate their platform on all other devices.
Interesting times to come...