This article goes about to paint a hypothetical future where megacorporations rule the world, plus just how that might happen. Today’s subject is Apple (includes some speculation of new product release).
First things first, what is a Megacorporation?
According Wikipedia,
“It refers to a fictional corporation that is a massive conglomerate, holding monopolistic or near-monopolistic control over multiple markets (thus exhibiting both a horizontal and a vertical monopoly). Megacorps are so powerful that they can ignore the law, possess their own heavily-armed (often military-sized) private armies, hold ’sovereign’ territory, and possibly even act as outright governments. They often exercise a large degree of control over their employees, taking the idea of ‘corporate culture’ to an extreme.”
While the private armies are bit of a stretch still, the rest of it just could be possible.
Why Apple?
For all of you haters out there, even though I tend to criticize Apple a lot, this isn’t personal. The whole thing started when I was thinking about a product concept and came to conclusion that there are couple of things that are vital to the concept, and all of those Apple has a stranglehold. Thus, the idea was scrapped and morphed to Megacorporations article.
First of all, Apple has bunch of special traits that tend to tint it towards possible Megacorporation:
read more…
Today I stumbled upon an article (Apple vs. Palm) in Engadget, where they analyze the rather blunt patent infringement threat that Apple made towards Palm (and Android) when asked what do they think of ‘em. Now, I’ve never been a particular fan of software related patents, just because you basically seem to be able to patent anything, be it simple or complicated. However, now I’ve got new pet peeve: user interface patents. (I try to keep this short, as I have tendency to rant…)
Patents, bad!
Patents started as a way to protect something that was basically expensive and time consuming invention to develop, and could be copied by competitors thus earning unfair edge; gaining new tech without the resources spent for actual research. In those golden ages patents were good, in fact, in many cases they were essential for upstarts and thus healthy market. The problem comes when they are applied directly to the fuzzy world of IT; they just don’t work. In fact, they start to work against the market, restricting the possibilities of upstarts and fortifying the big companies. Basically, patents have become a stick that you keep beating your competitors with, by patenting everything and all you absolutely can. *wham* *bam*
read more…
RETYPE is a new concept for text input in touchscreen phones/devices. Instead of that huge QWERTY keyboard, which wastes massive amounts of valuable screen estate from your small screen, it relies heavily on gestures. Each key can be used to enter three letters; tap, swipe up and swipe down. It also seems that they have done some optimization regarding the letter positions, the most common letters you can simply tap, the not so common letters you have to swipe.
One potential problem with the concept though: whenever optimized letter positions come to play, the whole keyboard becomes heavily language specific. Now, of course you could optimize the layout for every language but it’s a quite big amount of work. Nevertheless, it’s a intriquing concept.
Check the video from full post
read more…
I can almost see Apple enthusiasts rallying up with their pitchforks and torches, but let’s just continue bit further into this, before going all witch-hunt on me.
Well, ok. Multi-touch as a concept isn’t completely useless, I give you that. The simple idea of using multiple input points has so much potential but everyone has been just blindly following Jeff Han, whos initial concept was just that, a concept, not a polished product. The idea has depreciated so much that today, even though there are practically no products around, multi-touch is useless, just a buzzword to sell a product and nothing to do with usability. So far, I haven’t seen single useful commercial end user solution. Why has no-one stopped to rethink the whole idea?
read more…