Originally Posted by
Omnitech The comment that I followed-up to, and which you commented-upon with your "fast/efficient/simple" comparison was the one about BB10 not having "proper buttons".
I stand by what I wrote. "Proper" has nothing to do with "fast/efficient/simple". One is authoritative, the other are quantitative or qualitative.
Danger Will Robinson. When people write "plenty of examples" it's basically meaningless as any sort of comparator. So excuse me if I take such claims with a big giant rock of salt.
As someone who knows about the diversity of humanity, sweeping generalizations such as the one you made there are laughably dumb. Furthermore, if most people on earth were truly willing to learn things simply because of an appeal to rationality, then the world would not be composed of many billions of people under the spell of ancient religious mythologies and essentially poised with arrows and daggers pointed at those who pray to a slightly different deity than the one that they do.
Actually they did not really seek it out in the beginning. As Steve Jobs famously said, most people don't even know what they themselves want until you show it to them and tell them why they want it. And that little axiom is, in my view, at the core of Apple's success. Furthermore, I can tell you from my years in the retail business that Apple knows exactly what they are doing in that regard. People want to be led. True individualists are rare as hen's teeth, regardless what American cultural mythology says.
It's an "internetism". In response to your sage observation that "traditionalists" might not like something new. :p
Because you cannot support traditional things forever, it saps your product development and production and support resources for something of interest to a tiny fraction of people that are either unable or unwilling to provide even a fraction of the revenue necessary to continue to produce old-fashioned products for them. It's like building an 8-track tape player into a Prius. I'm sure there might be a few people in this world that would think its cool (and who might actually still have 8-track tapes they want to play in their new-fangled contraption), but the cost and tradeoffs entailed in doing such a thing would not even remotely be covered by any revenue such a feature might hope to generate.
Once again, I would think that such things should be obvious. Software companies no longer release their software on 5.25" floppy disks either.
And that is a key reason why I fled retail and ended up doing technology consulting for businesses. Unlike the "consumer" market which is irrational and capricious as hell, at least most decently-run businesses are comprised of people who are capable of seeing how technology might benefit them and doing at least a half-*ssed job of judging its cost/benefit. In this role I regularly get much appreciation from business-owners for solving problems for them and helping their business succeed, which makes it all worthwhile, to me. Whereas in the retail world what you usually get (besides the occasional nugget) is a lot of whining crybabies who want to be pampered, who pretend to come to you for advice and then ignore it, who make decisions based on fashion trends, opinions of ill-informed friends or how impressed their friends will be when they see it in their living room*, rather than a product's actual benefits or detriments. I could go on and on, but I'll leave it at that.
*(If you want to understand life as a hi-fi salesman, the scene from "Ruthless People" in the hi-fi shop is scarily close to reality. I know that particular reality quite well. Of course, "hi-fi salesman" in general is sort of an anachronism in these days of crappy MP3 players and battery-powered Bluetooth speakers. FWIW, I was also in the photographic equipment business and general home electronics business.)
My comment there was observational, not cause/effect. When a product has a 1% market share, that generally means that not only do most people not use that product, most people have never even seen that product. When I said "which is why" that was sloppily constructed. The point is - BlackBerry's marketshare today is miniscule, and the VAST majority of people in the world PREFER an all touchscreen device, even Crackberry users, by-and-large - by my observation.
Yet we have certain die-hards who endlessly conflate failure of BB10 with the alleged "success" of legacy BBOS, which is absurd, as has been pointed-out repeatedly.
As a newcomer to a thread which has gone on for a month now and ~1100 posts, I think that's a bit presumptious to be speaking on behalf of everyone here.
Secondly, I never claimed people thought it needed "no improvement", but you will find that the loudest partisans arguments here are actually not that far removed from that sentiment.
If only what you wrote there about "true push" were actually true.
The kind of "push" that the major proponents here are fond of is not actually "true push" at all, as has been pointed-out many times in this thread and the constant march of similiar threads that those same few squeaky-wheels perpetuate for months on end here.
Makes me wonder if you are not a veteran of such discussions yourself, making such a claim.
And FWIW, there is no inherent value in a term like "true push" or "untrue push" or whatever you want to call it. The end-result is the value, regardless of how "true" someone thinks some technology is.