“Facebook is set to release its virtual reality headset, Oculus, next week. It will be big and clunky, expensive, and cause nausea and other problems for its users,” Vivek Wadhwa writes for The Washington Post. “Within a few months, we will declare our disappointment with virtual reality itself while Facebook listens very carefully to its users and develops improvements in its technology. Version 3 of this, most likely in 2018 or 2019, will be amazing.”
“This is the way innovation happens now. You release a basic product and let the market tell you how to make it better. There is no time to get it perfect; it may become obsolete even before it is released,” Wadhwa writes. “Apple hasn’t figured this out yet. It maintains a fortress of secrecy and its leaders dictate product features. When it releases a new technology, it goes to extremes to ensure elegant design and perfection.”
“Steve Jobs was a true visionary who refused to listen to customers — believing that he knew better than they did about what they needed,” Wadhwa writes. “Jobs’s tactics worked very well for him and he created the most valuable company in the world. But without Jobs — and given the dramatic technology changes that are happening, Apple may have peaked. It is headed the way of IBM in the ’90s and Microsoft in the late 2000’s. Consider that its last major innovation — the iPhone — was released in June 2007.”
“Even the announcements that Apple made Monday were uninspiring: smaller iPhones and iPads. All it seems to be doing is playing catch up with Samsung, which offers tablets and phones of many sizes and has better features. It has been also been copying products such as Google Maps and not doing this very well,” Wadhwa writes. “There is nothing earth shattering or compelling about Apple’s new phones — or any of the products it has released since 2007. By now, Apple should have released some of the products that we heard rumors about: TV sets, virtual reality headsets, and cars.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Just getting this myopic pile of crap on record for future reference. We’re not even going to bother listing the litany of innovative products, services, and features Apple has released since 2007 or since Job’s death, for that matter.