My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

Real computer companies are scarce: some thoughts on WWDC

tech
by Antonio on

It may be a sign of the times, but the most striking feature of the 2009 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is that it would be hard to assemble this many people that are that familiar with all of the different layers of the computing stack under one roof were it any other company running this conference.

And it shows. From the low level tools like LLVM and their own compiler front end and the Open CL stuff to make a general purpose computing platform out of the gates on the GPU to the high level improvements to Finder and the native apps, these guys seem to have it all covered.

Snow Leopard and iPhone OS apparently share 85% of the same codebase which is a bit nutty given that the former runs basically super computers and the latter is made to fit in pockets. Grand Central provides new ways to enable multicore threads-based programming while Bonjour proxies allow peripherals on your home network to remain asleep for the 99% of the time they are not in use. Lithium polymer is the new black when it comes to integrated laptop battery technologies (that are supposedly greener) while the ARM 7 instruction set is the new jacks-to-enter for mobile instruction sets. The XCode debugger now can step backwards while at the same time allowing source level variable inspection. And to boot we're also getting 1,000 new improvements to the speed, stability, and look & feel of the applications we've come to depend on thanks to this new build toolset.

I'm droning on to make the point that the sheer breath of stack traversal from silicon to tooling to enduser applications and even web services that power new forms of micropayments is all being covered here. By one computer company— albeit one that stands on the shoulders of open source and the power of the Internet.

And while I'm on that topic, the new iPhone 3GS looks fantastic— a worthwhile upgrade for anyone who has come to depend on it as a key piece of their personal technology. AT&T is going to make no bones of the fact that this is an honest-to-goodness $700 mobile computer they are arming you with, which is why this is the new unlocked price of the high end unit— or $500 for the folks who rolled their hardware last year for the iPhone 3G and who don't want to wait until December to upgrade.

But you know what? This is actually not a bad thing. Subsidized business models are evil and it's time we consumers put a stop to them. They misalign the interests of the end users, the sales channel, and the folks who slave all day to make the products. I've seen it first hand in the printer industry, and I imagine that it's not much better when it comes to nickel-and-diming wireless carriers with their roach motel plans and inability to execute on behalf of the user.

So before folks start complaining, let's stop to consider that these are real honest-to-goodness computers being put in our pockets by what is perhaps the world's last standing Real Computer Company.