[Discuss] Google's Nexus 7

[bogstad at pobox.com (Bill Bogstad)]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Richard Pieri <richard.pieri at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/11/2012 9:52 AM, Stephen Ronan wrote:
>>
>> One reason I asked... my impression (pls correct me if I'm wrong) is
>> that you think that iPad's dominant position in 10" tablets is quite
>> secure.
>
> I do.  I don't think that Jellybean is going to unseat iPad in that
> space for one simple reason: iOS has never been technically superior to
> Android.  It doesn't matter how much better Jellybean is to either iOS
> or prior versions of Android because the technical superiority of the OS
> has never been a factor in the public's eye.  Consumers don't care about
> technical superiority.  They care about convenience first and maybe
> affordability second.  Cases in point:
>
> VHS vs. Betamax:  VHS won for the simple reason that you could get 2-4 times
> as much recording time per cassette than you got with Betamax.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

VHS was cheaper from practically day one in the US and it stayed that
way because the format was licensed to multiple manufacturers while
Sony kept it in house.    Tape length probably would have given VHS
the win anyway, but cost was the final nail in the coffin.   Apple
hasn't shown any inclination to be the low cost provider since
probably the Apple II days and their attempt to license their
technologies (e.g. PPC clones) always seemed like a very half hearted
effort.    I'm not sure what the "convenience" factors are that iOS
has that can't be added to Android in what is likely to be a
multi-year battle for the tablet market.
Now if we are just talking about JB, I might agree.   But longer term
(1-2 years), Android can add a lot of functionality while I don't see
Apple ever being the price leader.

>...
> iOS is doing the same thing in the mobile spaces.  Sure, Google activates
> twice as many Android devices a day as Apple activates iOS devices.  That
> makes for a nice press release but it's not the whole story.  The most
> recent figures I can find (Feb 2012) place HTC at about 16% of all Android
> activations daily, Samsung at about 11% and Motorola at about 10.5%.  Apple
> is beating the top three Android OEMs combined in terms of activations per
> day.

So what.   Manufacturer market share for PCs have gone up and down for
decades now.  Top tier vendors have literally disappeared, but Windows
continues forward.   Android IS the dominant OS in the overall mobile
device space and now has a credible version for both tablets and
smartphones.   I'm starting to see ads for no-name 10" tablets for
under $200 whose branding is essentially "Android ICS".   They are
literally crap, but people said that about the specs on OLPC's $100
laptop (when laptops were routinely hitting $1000).   We never did see
a $100 laptop, but netbooks got pretty cheap (<$300) and, unless you
want an ultra-light, very credible laptops are available for <$400.
For those parents not in the 1%, a decent $200 Android ICS/JB tablet
sounds like a much better deal then even a $399 iPad 2.   I bought the
HP $100 closeout TouchPad on a lark and am much happier with it then I
would have been with a $499 iPad.   I got the wireless charging stand
and when I'm at home it sits in my living room.   While watching TV
with the kids, I can pick it up, check my email and do a little web
browsing on a screen big enough to handle standard web pages.  No way
I would have spent $500 to do that.

>>[voice to voice language translation.]
> Twenty years?  Conversational voice recognition is hard.  Really, really
> hard.  It's one of the most challenging problems in computer programming.
> Machine translation isn't much easier.

No disagreement with this one.   You have speech recognition, machine
translation, and then speech generation.   Generation is relatively
easy.   The other two remain hard.   Some years back, I talked to some
people in the speech recognition (transcription) business and was told
that modern CPUs weren't actually helping them much.    The problem
was that they needed to randomly access large memory datasets to do
speech recognition.   Their datasets wouldn't fit into CPU caches and
random access speeds to main memory weren't keeping up with CPU
speeds.

Bill Bogstad