You think Munster is wrong? I kinda thought the same thing as he's saying: It's a positive development, but we shouldn't let excitement exaggerate our expectations of its effect.
Apple and IBM have been working on this for two years. It didn't just become ready yesterday, I'm not suggesting Apple is going to have a bad quarter, just wondering why announce it now considering Apple doesn't usually make announcements right before earnings release. Also there were some Wall Street analysts on CNBC yesterday wondering if IBM announced to now to cover up a not so great quarter.
I think the answer is as Dick points out, Swift ... the timing is right for all this now, not two years ago.
Through MR, BGR reports that Apple will release the next beta of iOS 8 (and Yosemite?, Xcode 6?, and AppleTV?) next Monday.
The last release (beta 3) included a lot of Swift changes -- bug fixes, syntax cleanup, playground enhancements. You can run all of this on current Mavericks OS X.
XCode 6 is the key here -- that's where the Swift language resides, and all the new (and newly-exposed) APIs. For example you can write apps using HomeKit and test them with a HomeKit simulator tool provided in Xcode 6. *
I suspect with a few more bi-weekly release cycles, XCode/Yosemite will be settled enough for the public beta that Tim promised. That would mean that Swift and the XCode IDE will be available to any Mac capable of running Mavericks or later. Trust me, Swift programming is great!
* I've opined elsewhere that HomeKit is robust enough that it could be adapted to everything from a small business or an enterprise with multiple locations. Think that might be of interest to hospitals, campuses, airports, factories, etc.?
"With Swift and REPL, you write your validation suites as you write your program", said Tim, testily!
I'll take a wait and see approach about this deal. "cloud" and "analytics" have become buzzwords for companies to attract attention. Let me see what kind of apps they can come up with. Will this deal really benefit enterprise users or is it just turning IBM into another Apple store?
Even if it is, it's a big store. IBM is a mainline multi-tier (cloud, managed data center, development, infrastructure, managed services, *aaS, custom SW, COTS SW, consulting, solutions, business) consultancy. Few compete with them soup to nuts.
it may sound trivial, but managing endpoint devices is an 8digit problem for most companies that have to show 'managed endpoint security' (Factoid: If a business does business in Massachusetts with a person or a corporation, All their computers that connect to their network or have the potential to hold data on MA entities must be proven to be fully managed and have all the controls in place to detect and prevent the exposure of said data that a full fledged data center has (in layman's terms, if some downloads a report from the company server, every view, printing, emailing of that report has to validated to be appropriate business use, and the activity logged, and the logs reviewed by someone who reports to someone who could go to jail for failing to do so). F500 companies spend big bucks in 'asset and configuration management' but most of those products are better 'how to manage ours and our employees (BYOD) Windows devices' mousetraps. iOS devices are square pegs to the round holes of Tivoli End Point Management. And agreement like this is great for IBM, and great for Apple, as they can focus on the SMB and the home, and let IBM solve the problem for the 30,000 iPad/iPhone population for the State of NY, or Chevron, or whomever.
Mmm ... Does the IRS do any business in Massachusetts :???:
I agree. I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it but it feels much more natural to me. I am a long time php guy and swift is very similar. I think they went a bit overkill on the brevity and inferencing but at least I can still use type declaration, parenthesis and semicolons if I want, which I intend to do as I feel it makes reading the code easier for everyone.
I find it interesting that they decided to bail on Obj-C only after Steve passed. He probably had a strong emotional attachment to Obj-C. I also wonder if there is any Swift in Yosemite. The fact that you can combine Obj-C and Swift should allow them to gradually replace legacy code.
There was a TV Show in the 1960s called the Defenders with father and son lawyers -- E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed (Bradey Bunch). One episode in particular, involved the defense of an [I]Exotic Dancer.[/I]
The next morning, a local radio DJ (AIR, Dick Whittinghill) was discussing the show ... He thought he'd have a little fun while Mom was cooking breakfast, so he dug out a (then obscure) record and talked over it ...
Something like: ... "flip those eggs" ... "Now, scrape 'em off the ceiling" ...
While in the background he served up:
Well, last evening, my daughter took her two teen-aged boys shopping for back-to-school clothes ...
This AM, after breakfast, she asked them to model their new clothes ...
I couldn't resist -- and the boys put on quite a show!
BTW, the obscure record shot into the top 40 -- #1 in some venues.
Well there is Apple's first point of influence on IBM - there is no way that page was written by the same guy responsible for the rest of IBMs web site it is Apple through and through.
OMG, is that an IBM page??? I used to work for Big Blue back in 2006-2008, and even up until recently, their sites were AWEFUL, but this is a work of art!!!
Definitely see a little Apple-isk inspiration here! Love it!
You think Munster is wrong? I kinda thought the same thing as he's saying: It's a positive development, but we shouldn't let excitement exaggerate our expectations of its effect.
How do you see this playing out?
Yes I think he's wrong because he's hearing Cook say 90%+ Fortune 500 companies use iOS and thinking there nothing really for Apple to gain. What I think he's missing is penetration. How many people inside those organizations are using iOS devices (besides BYOD being used for non-work related stuff)? That 90% could include companies where only a handful of employees are using iOS devices. I think this is going to help Apple sell a lot more iPhone and iPads (and maybe even Macs too) in the workplace.
Yes I think he's wrong because he's hearing Cook say 90%+ Fortune 500 companies use iOS and thinking there nothing really for Apple to gain. What I think he's missing is penetration. How many people inside those organizations are using iOS devices (besides BYOD being used for non-work related stuff)? That 90% could include companies where only a handful of employees are using iOS devices. I think this is going to help Apple sell a lot more iPhone and iPads (and maybe even Macs too) in the workplace.
Perhaps there are only a handful of activities in the corporate environment where an iOS device is an appropriate solution. Corporate managers are not stupid. If it is obvious that an iOS device would improve efficiency then they will adopt it. If a desktop computer is more suitable for a given task they are not going to swap it out for an iPad just because iPads are cool. What percentage of corporate employees are actually mobile? iPads are great for casual mobile use and although complex tasks can be done on an iPad it is seldom as efficient as using a proper desktop computer.
Yes I think he's wrong because he's hearing Cook say 90%+ Fortune 500 companies use iOS and thinking there nothing really for Apple to gain. What I think he's missing is penetration. How many people inside those organizations are using iOS devices (besides BYOD being used for non-work related stuff)? That 90% could include companies where only a handful of employees are using iOS devices. I think this is going to help Apple sell a lot more iPhone and iPads (and maybe even Macs too) in the workplace.
Munster agrees with you. All he's saying is that the potential unit sales aren't enough to have a really significant effect on Apple's bottom line, even with a high rate of adoption. He's not saying the market is saturated, he's saying the market this serves just isn't big enough to matter. A few hundred companies buying a few thousand iOS devices each isn't all that significant. It's good, it's positive, it just isn't the Earth-shattering game changer some people seem to think it is.
As for getting Macs into cubicles, how awesome would that be? I just don't know if it can be done with existing hardware. ~$1000+ per seat has gotta be a tough sell. Longer replacement cycles should be possible with Macs, so that would drive down the total COO somewhat, but it's still a far cry from the pocket change companies pay for the dumpster fodder workers use now.
Cook is suggesting that just like Apple transformed the consumer computer market, iOS can transform and reinvent the enterprise market as well. The problem with that logic is that 90% of consumers do nothing but texting, Facebook, email and consuming entertainment. All simple tasks. Corporate users can use iOS for email, txting, etc, but their daily work description usually includes a lot of stuff that iPads are not very good at. iPads are wonderful but they are a compromise device made to use when a proper desktop is not available. Touch input is clumsy, slow and imprecise. Not at all a corporate desktop replacement.
[CONTENTEMBED=/t/181378/apple-and-ibm-join-forces-in-landmark-push-for-ios-in-enterprise/200#post_2564904 layout=inline]<span style="line-height:1.4em;"> Trust me, Swift programming is great!</span>
[/CONTENTEMBED]
I agree. I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it but it feels much more natural to me. I am a long time php guy and swift is very similar. I think they went a bit overkill on the brevity and inferencing but at least I can still use type declaration, parenthesis and semicolons if I want, which I intend to do as I feel it makes reading the code easier for everyone.
I did a lot of Perl and JavaScript, some php ... most of my paid development was database-driven and I found ColdFusion to be much easer to program and read -- didn't need to mess with connections, timeouts, errors, forgetting to close; had concise, self-documenting, high-level code. You could include Java/JavaScript components if you needed more granular control.
One of the problems with many languages (especially Perl and APL) is you couldn't read your own code 6 months later -- so I strongly agree that readable code is a must.
However, verbosity is is not always the best answer (Occam's Razor). There's a simple elegance to something like:
sorted([3, 5, -7, 2, 0])
I find it interesting that they decided to bail on Obj-C only after Steve passed. He probably had a strong emotional attachment to Obj-C. I also wonder if there is any Swift in Yosemite. The fact that you can combine Obj-C and Swift should allow them to gradually replace legacy code.
Yeah, a lot of the talent that created Obj-C at NeXT is no longer at Apple. Those that remain, appear to recognize the need for a modern, safe, fast OOP language. But, I think that Obj-C will be around for years.
It's kind of exasperating at first that the Swift compiler seems to flag a lot of errors (won't let you do things that you could get away with in Obj-C). But, the promise is that if your Swift code compiles -- it will run without errors. *
* Recommended programming practices -- if you override with AnyObject, etc., you're on your own (just like in Obj-C).
And, the Swift Playgrounds ... I love the Swift Playgrounds! You can interactively try things, learn the language syntax, implement complex constructs and test them dynamically (ViewControllers, Views, TableViews, datasources, delegates, asynchronous tasks, etc.).
Background: About 10 years ago, I was working on a ColdFusion app that needed to download a lot of data to the client. I tried using XML but it was large, slow, bandwidth hog, memory hog -- difficult to encode, difficult to parse. Frustrated, I developed a concise replacement for a common format of XML packet -- eliminated all the verbosity issues, didn't need encoding/decoding and was created/parsed with a single instruction. I tested it with things like an iTunes store search, and found that it could realize about an 80% savings over XML in bandwidth alone. For example, a search for Elvis would return 100 + songs.* With XML, it took 30 seconds. With the XML-alternative, it took 1-3 seconds.
* No built-in limit to 50 hits, back then
Anyway, after reading the Swift docs, trying a few sample programs, I decided to use this XML-alternative as an incentive to create a real app. (Lotta' interruptions, posting to AI threads -- something about iBeacons ...
I got this all working last night using Swift Playgrounds and am refactoring now (even while the Swift syntax evolves with each XCode release). I looked at JSON as an XML alternative -- it it is somewhat less sucky than XML, but is still verbose, requires serialization/deserialization, etc. The XML-alternative is more efficient than JSON too! After I finish refactoring, I'll use it in a compiled app to get accurate timings vs XML and JSON ... I expect it will perform pretty well.
I did a lot of Perl and JavaScript, some php ... most of my paid development was database-driven and I found ColdFusion to be much easer to program and read -- didn't need to mess with connections, timeouts, errors, forgetting to close; had concise, self-documenting, high-level code.
I am also really experienced in Coldfusion going on 15 years. I have a couple really big applications that I wrote and still support. I can say, unequivocally, that php is a much more modern scripting language and also way faster. Although CF can run on UNIX it is better on Windows. I dislike the way that CF connects to databases only through CF admin. Clunky and slow compared to mysqli. No comparison in my opinion and that "EQ, NEQ, AND" nonsense is just crazy. My project for next year is to completely rewrite my big CF app in php. Plus CF/Windows/MSSQL is super expensive and php/linux/mysql is free.
Cook is suggesting that just like Apple transformed the consumer computer market, iOS can transform and reinvent the enterprise market as well. The problem with that logic is that 90% of consumers do nothing but texting, Facebook, email and consuming entertainment. All simple tasks. Corporate users can use iOS for email, txting, etc, but their daily work description usually includes a lot of stuff that iPads are not very good at. iPads are wonderful but they are a compromise device made to use when a proper desktop is not available. Touch input is clumsy, slow and imprecise. Not at all a corporate desktop replacement.
Who said anything about replacing desktops? A lot of mgrs, avps, execs,etc travel and they bring their laptops. Usually they only check email, review reports, run presentations. These guys aren't crunching numbers too often. Why can't the iPad be the perfect tool for them? Plus IBM could probably produce more work related apps for specific needs.
My employer is rolling out reporting tools for iPads for those users that just review reports and such.
This would validate HP's strategy under Apotheker to acquire Autonomy. Over paid still but in the right direction. Meg Whitman went right back to making commodity hardware. Apotheker even had WebOS and a few years head start. That may have changed the future sufficiently to alter the Apple IBM partnership. It would have been a break from Microsoft that would have been a bit more profitable. Of course, not saying they would have the needed cloud infrastructure.
Anyone saying this is not big news is just trying to pour cold water on it. Nothing in the past that these two companies have teamed up on is anywhere near this big a leap. Nothing Apple has done in the past can be considered a frontal assault on Microsoft. This is probably as unexpected news for MS as it is for anyone else. I can't see a way back for either IBM or Apple. Especially Apple. This lead need 100% commitment and a lot of confidence. Looking around the competitive landscape, it's hard to imagine a time when any of the relevant players could have been caught more flat-footed. Forget that Apple and IBM could not be any more complementary, even if they weren't, the timing couldn't be better. Watson isn't going to be sitting around. And 'Peak Apple' now has an entirely new implication.
Perhaps there are only a handful of activities in the corporate environment where an iOS device is an appropriate solution. Corporate managers are not stupid. If it is obvious that an iOS device would improve efficiency then they will adopt it. If a desktop computer is more suitable for a given task they are not going to swap it out for an iPad just because iPads are cool. What percentage of corporate employees are actually mobile? iPads are great for casual mobile use and although complex tasks can be done on an iPad it is seldom as efficient as using a proper desktop computer.
I'm not sure why you're so against IBM and this deal. None of the arguments you have made so far have made sense to me, which makes me suspicious of some ulterior motive/bias, but maybe there's something I'm missing. IBM's large business sales force suggests they continue to have significant relevance in enterprise. Everyone needs a phone, not just for a "handful of activities," so I'm not sure why you think there are limited use cases for Apple hardware. Also, with Apple's advanced biometric security, the typical use cases of a phone expand dramatically. A significant portion of most businesses is sales/marketing, for which an iPad is ideal. Just because Apple has high enterprise penetration doesn't mean there is high volume (a point which Tim implied during the interview), which suggests substantial room for growth.
As an aside, it's amazing that MSFT is up 3.8% today despite just being stabbed in the spleen by Apple, and announcing layoffs, etc; I wonder if people were paid to manipulate the stock, or whether wall street just has too much money tied up in microsoft to let it tank. Meanwhile AAPL is down 0.5%.
It's amazing how well Apple does as a company despite having to fight corruption from entrenched incumbents, a hostile media (often paid off by competitors, e.g. bloomberg), attacks from the federal government, and copying from google and samsung. Seems to me Apple's biggest flaw so far has been PR (the only area where I feel Apple needs significant improvement), but hopefully that will change soon. It's one thing to take the high road in a hands-off approach, but when people succeed in bashing Apple to a high degree, people (stupidly) get suspicious when Apple doesn't defend itself. Yeah, Apple has great information on its website (e.g. supplier responsibility, environment, etc.), but most people's attitudes are "oh I expect Apple to make itself look good," and go on to form an opinion without even comparing Apple to its meager competitors. Sometimes proactive measures are needed. Ok, done ranting, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
I did a lot of Perl and JavaScript, some php ... most of my paid development was database-driven and I found ColdFusion to be much easer to program and read -- didn't need to mess with connections, timeouts, errors, forgetting to close; had concise, self-documenting, high-level code.
I am also really experienced in Coldfusion going on 15 years. I have a couple really big applications that I wrote and still support. I can say, unequivocally, that php is a much more modern scripting language and also way faster. Although CF can run on UNIX it is better on Windows. I dislike the way that CF connects to databases only through CF admin. Clunky and slow compared to mysqli. No comparison in my opinion and that "EQ, NEQ, AND" nonsense is just crazy. My project for next year is to completely rewrite my big CF app in php. Plus CF/Windows/MSSQL is super expensive and php/linux/mysql is free.
Ahhh ... You go back through the Allaire --> MacroMedia --> Adobe years of CF.
I haven't done any for pay web sites since 2001.
But, I did port Linux CFMX to OS X in 2002 (with some behind-the-scene help from MacroMedia employees)
Once the port was proven viable, MacroMedia decided to support CFMX on the Mac (with some behind-the-scene lobbying by MacroMedia employees). They, originally supported the Mac version for development-only -- but, later added support for deployment.
I never ran CF on Windows except under emulation -- and only ran on Linux, under emulation, for the port.
At that time, CF ran pretty well on OS X.
I did like the way CF connected to databases. As an indie web developer, I was often faced with converting a customer's in-house database to whatever database(s) was available on the web hosting site. Usually the in-house db was MS-Access (yeah, I know, I know) and the target db was MSSQL, mySQL ... It was trivial to to convert these dbs -- 2 db definitions and 1 CF app that moved the fields across. The CFAdmin in my developer system had about 20 different db systems defined -- to handle almost any db I ran across!
Of course, MSSQL was super expensive compared to almost anything. Do they still charge by the number of concurrent threads (users) they allow?
Later, Phil Cruz and I developed a technique we called CFAnywhere -- where you could run a complete CF system from a CD. The package included: CF, Web Server, J2ee Web Application Server, SQL Server, CF Applications and database. If the database was read-only, you could run it directly from the CD. We included an app that copied the data to the desktop for read/write operation.
The idea behind the CFAnywhere concept is that a developer could send a potential customer a live demonstration of his work on a CD (or download it from the web).
Ahhh ... You go back through the Allaire --> MacroMedia --> Adobe years of CF.
Yikes! Now that I think about it, it was 1996 when I did the first paying CF job. It was for a print fulfillment company that needed an ordering system. So that's more like 18 years. We were using Window NT 3.51 and connecting to a SCO database.
Quote:
I never ran CF on Windows except under emulation
Originally it only ran on Windows. I tried it when the first UNIX version came out, but it was buggy.
Quote:
Of course, MSSQL was super expensive compared to almost anything. Do they still charge by the number of concurrent threads (users) they allow?
Not sure how the pricing works but a website with a single db is counted as one seat I believe. We use a corporate unlimited version.
Exactly right. MS are getting squeezed out from all sides and deservedly so. Good riddance!
Yes M$ is dying, but it will be a long gradual death because many business IT depts know nothing else but M$.
I had for years an ex IT broker who kept telling me to dump my Apple shares at every little dip. (BTW I'm retired IT myself) I did sell on certain downs, but also bought back on good news. Buy low sell high, as they teach us ! I'm sure my broker chokes over what I've made on Apple shares over the years. In his defense, his brokerage company doesn't understand Apple either.
Comments
Totally clueless.
You think Munster is wrong? I kinda thought the same thing as he's saying: It's a positive development, but we shouldn't let excitement exaggerate our expectations of its effect.
How do you see this playing out?
Through MR, BGR reports that Apple will release the next beta of iOS 8 (and Yosemite?, Xcode 6?, and AppleTV?) next Monday.
http://bgr.com/2014/07/16/apple-ios-8-download-beta-4-release-notes/
The last release (beta 3) included a lot of Swift changes -- bug fixes, syntax cleanup, playground enhancements. You can run all of this on current Mavericks OS X.
XCode 6 is the key here -- that's where the Swift language resides, and all the new (and newly-exposed) APIs. For example you can write apps using HomeKit and test them with a HomeKit simulator tool provided in Xcode 6. *
I suspect with a few more bi-weekly release cycles, XCode/Yosemite will be settled enough for the public beta that Tim promised. That would mean that Swift and the XCode IDE will be available to any Mac capable of running Mavericks or later. Trust me, Swift programming is great!
* I've opined elsewhere that HomeKit is robust enough that it could be adapted to everything from a small business or an enterprise with multiple locations. Think that might be of interest to hospitals, campuses, airports, factories, etc.?
"With Swift and REPL, you write your validation suites as you write your program", said Tim, testily!
Mmm ... Does the IRS do any business in Massachusetts :???:
I agree. I haven't had a lot of time to play around with it but it feels much more natural to me. I am a long time php guy and swift is very similar. I think they went a bit overkill on the brevity and inferencing but at least I can still use type declaration, parenthesis and semicolons if I want, which I intend to do as I feel it makes reading the code easier for everyone.
I find it interesting that they decided to bail on Obj-C only after Steve passed. He probably had a strong emotional attachment to Obj-C. I also wonder if there is any Swift in Yosemite. The fact that you can combine Obj-C and Swift should allow them to gradually replace legacy code.
There was a TV Show in the 1960s called the Defenders with father and son lawyers -- E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed (Bradey Bunch). One episode in particular, involved the defense of an [I]Exotic Dancer.[/I]
The next morning, a local radio DJ (AIR, Dick Whittinghill) was discussing the show ... He thought he'd have a little fun while Mom was cooking breakfast, so he dug out a (then obscure) record and talked over it ...
Something like: ... "flip those eggs" ... "Now, scrape 'em off the ceiling" ...
While in the background he served up:
Well, last evening, my daughter took her two teen-aged boys shopping for back-to-school clothes ...
This AM, after breakfast, she asked them to model their new clothes ...
I couldn't resist -- and the boys put on quite a show!
BTW, the obscure record shot into the top 40 -- #1 in some venues.
Enjoy!
BTW2, It makes for an interesting ringtone
Definitely see a little Apple-isk inspiration here! Love it!
Perhaps there are only a handful of activities in the corporate environment where an iOS device is an appropriate solution. Corporate managers are not stupid. If it is obvious that an iOS device would improve efficiency then they will adopt it. If a desktop computer is more suitable for a given task they are not going to swap it out for an iPad just because iPads are cool. What percentage of corporate employees are actually mobile? iPads are great for casual mobile use and although complex tasks can be done on an iPad it is seldom as efficient as using a proper desktop computer.
Yes I think he's wrong because he's hearing Cook say 90%+ Fortune 500 companies use iOS and thinking there nothing really for Apple to gain. What I think he's missing is penetration. How many people inside those organizations are using iOS devices (besides BYOD being used for non-work related stuff)? That 90% could include companies where only a handful of employees are using iOS devices. I think this is going to help Apple sell a lot more iPhone and iPads (and maybe even Macs too) in the workplace.
Munster agrees with you. All he's saying is that the potential unit sales aren't enough to have a really significant effect on Apple's bottom line, even with a high rate of adoption. He's not saying the market is saturated, he's saying the market this serves just isn't big enough to matter. A few hundred companies buying a few thousand iOS devices each isn't all that significant. It's good, it's positive, it just isn't the Earth-shattering game changer some people seem to think it is.
As for getting Macs into cubicles, how awesome would that be? I just don't know if it can be done with existing hardware. ~$1000+ per seat has gotta be a tough sell. Longer replacement cycles should be possible with Macs, so that would drive down the total COO somewhat, but it's still a far cry from the pocket change companies pay for the dumpster fodder workers use now.
Cook is suggesting that just like Apple transformed the consumer computer market, iOS can transform and reinvent the enterprise market as well. The problem with that logic is that 90% of consumers do nothing but texting, Facebook, email and consuming entertainment. All simple tasks. Corporate users can use iOS for email, txting, etc, but their daily work description usually includes a lot of stuff that iPads are not very good at. iPads are wonderful but they are a compromise device made to use when a proper desktop is not available. Touch input is clumsy, slow and imprecise. Not at all a corporate desktop replacement.
I did a lot of Perl and JavaScript, some php ... most of my paid development was database-driven and I found ColdFusion to be much easer to program and read -- didn't need to mess with connections, timeouts, errors, forgetting to close; had concise, self-documenting, high-level code. You could include Java/JavaScript components if you needed more granular control.
One of the problems with many languages (especially Perl and APL) is you couldn't read your own code 6 months later -- so I strongly agree that readable code is a must.
However, verbosity is is not always the best answer (Occam's Razor). There's a simple elegance to something like:
sorted([3, 5, -7, 2, 0])
Yeah, a lot of the talent that created Obj-C at NeXT is no longer at Apple. Those that remain, appear to recognize the need for a modern, safe, fast OOP language. But, I think that Obj-C will be around for years.
It's kind of exasperating at first that the Swift compiler seems to flag a lot of errors (won't let you do things that you could get away with in Obj-C). But, the promise is that if your Swift code compiles -- it will run without errors. *
* Recommended programming practices -- if you override with AnyObject, etc., you're on your own (just like in Obj-C).
And, the Swift Playgrounds ... I love the Swift Playgrounds! You can interactively try things, learn the language syntax, implement complex constructs and test them dynamically (ViewControllers, Views, TableViews, datasources, delegates, asynchronous tasks, etc.).
Background: About 10 years ago, I was working on a ColdFusion app that needed to download a lot of data to the client. I tried using XML but it was large, slow, bandwidth hog, memory hog -- difficult to encode, difficult to parse. Frustrated, I developed a concise replacement for a common format of XML packet -- eliminated all the verbosity issues, didn't need encoding/decoding and was created/parsed with a single instruction. I tested it with things like an iTunes store search, and found that it could realize about an 80% savings over XML in bandwidth alone. For example, a search for Elvis would return 100 + songs.* With XML, it took 30 seconds. With the XML-alternative, it took 1-3 seconds.
* No built-in limit to 50 hits, back then
Anyway, after reading the Swift docs, trying a few sample programs, I decided to use this XML-alternative as an incentive to create a real app. (Lotta' interruptions, posting to AI threads -- something about iBeacons ...
I got this all working last night using Swift Playgrounds and am refactoring now (even while the Swift syntax evolves with each XCode release). I looked at JSON as an XML alternative -- it it is somewhat less sucky than XML, but is still verbose, requires serialization/deserialization, etc. The XML-alternative is more efficient than JSON too! After I finish refactoring, I'll use it in a compiled app to get accurate timings vs XML and JSON ... I expect it will perform pretty well.
I did a lot of Perl and JavaScript, some php ... most of my paid development was database-driven and I found ColdFusion to be much easer to program and read -- didn't need to mess with connections, timeouts, errors, forgetting to close; had concise, self-documenting, high-level code.
I am also really experienced in Coldfusion going on 15 years. I have a couple really big applications that I wrote and still support. I can say, unequivocally, that php is a much more modern scripting language and also way faster. Although CF can run on UNIX it is better on Windows. I dislike the way that CF connects to databases only through CF admin. Clunky and slow compared to mysqli. No comparison in my opinion and that "EQ, NEQ, AND" nonsense is just crazy. My project for next year is to completely rewrite my big CF app in php. Plus CF/Windows/MSSQL is super expensive and php/linux/mysql is free.
My employer is rolling out reporting tools for iPads for those users that just review reports and such.
Anyone saying this is not big news is just trying to pour cold water on it. Nothing in the past that these two companies have teamed up on is anywhere near this big a leap. Nothing Apple has done in the past can be considered a frontal assault on Microsoft. This is probably as unexpected news for MS as it is for anyone else. I can't see a way back for either IBM or Apple. Especially Apple. This lead need 100% commitment and a lot of confidence. Looking around the competitive landscape, it's hard to imagine a time when any of the relevant players could have been caught more flat-footed. Forget that Apple and IBM could not be any more complementary, even if they weren't, the timing couldn't be better. Watson isn't going to be sitting around. And 'Peak Apple' now has an entirely new implication.
Perhaps there are only a handful of activities in the corporate environment where an iOS device is an appropriate solution. Corporate managers are not stupid. If it is obvious that an iOS device would improve efficiency then they will adopt it. If a desktop computer is more suitable for a given task they are not going to swap it out for an iPad just because iPads are cool. What percentage of corporate employees are actually mobile? iPads are great for casual mobile use and although complex tasks can be done on an iPad it is seldom as efficient as using a proper desktop computer.
I'm not sure why you're so against IBM and this deal. None of the arguments you have made so far have made sense to me, which makes me suspicious of some ulterior motive/bias, but maybe there's something I'm missing. IBM's large business sales force suggests they continue to have significant relevance in enterprise. Everyone needs a phone, not just for a "handful of activities," so I'm not sure why you think there are limited use cases for Apple hardware. Also, with Apple's advanced biometric security, the typical use cases of a phone expand dramatically. A significant portion of most businesses is sales/marketing, for which an iPad is ideal. Just because Apple has high enterprise penetration doesn't mean there is high volume (a point which Tim implied during the interview), which suggests substantial room for growth.
As an aside, it's amazing that MSFT is up 3.8% today despite just being stabbed in the spleen by Apple, and announcing layoffs, etc; I wonder if people were paid to manipulate the stock, or whether wall street just has too much money tied up in microsoft to let it tank. Meanwhile AAPL is down 0.5%.
It's amazing how well Apple does as a company despite having to fight corruption from entrenched incumbents, a hostile media (often paid off by competitors, e.g. bloomberg), attacks from the federal government, and copying from google and samsung. Seems to me Apple's biggest flaw so far has been PR (the only area where I feel Apple needs significant improvement), but hopefully that will change soon. It's one thing to take the high road in a hands-off approach, but when people succeed in bashing Apple to a high degree, people (stupidly) get suspicious when Apple doesn't defend itself. Yeah, Apple has great information on its website (e.g. supplier responsibility, environment, etc.), but most people's attitudes are "oh I expect Apple to make itself look good," and go on to form an opinion without even comparing Apple to its meager competitors. Sometimes proactive measures are needed. Ok, done ranting, if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.
Ahhh ... You go back through the Allaire --> MacroMedia --> Adobe years of CF.
I haven't done any for pay web sites since 2001.
But, I did port Linux CFMX to OS X in 2002 (with some behind-the-scene help from MacroMedia employees)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/08/08/coldfusion_three.html
Once the port was proven viable, MacroMedia decided to support CFMX on the Mac (with some behind-the-scene lobbying by MacroMedia employees). They, originally supported the Mac version for development-only -- but, later added support for deployment.
I never ran CF on Windows except under emulation -- and only ran on Linux, under emulation, for the port.
At that time, CF ran pretty well on OS X.
I did like the way CF connected to databases. As an indie web developer, I was often faced with converting a customer's in-house database to whatever database(s) was available on the web hosting site. Usually the in-house db was MS-Access (yeah, I know, I know) and the target db was MSSQL, mySQL ... It was trivial to to convert these dbs -- 2 db definitions and 1 CF app that moved the fields across. The CFAdmin in my developer system had about 20 different db systems defined -- to handle almost any db I ran across!
Of course, MSSQL was super expensive compared to almost anything. Do they still charge by the number of concurrent threads (users) they allow?
Later, Phil Cruz and I developed a technique we called CFAnywhere -- where you could run a complete CF system from a CD. The package included: CF, Web Server, J2ee Web Application Server, SQL Server, CF Applications and database. If the database was read-only, you could run it directly from the CD. We included an app that copied the data to the desktop for read/write operation.
The idea behind the CFAnywhere concept is that a developer could send a potential customer a live demonstration of his work on a CD (or download it from the web).
Ahhh ... You go back through the Allaire --> MacroMedia --> Adobe years of CF.
Yikes! Now that I think about it, it was 1996 when I did the first paying CF job. It was for a print fulfillment company that needed an ordering system. So that's more like 18 years. We were using Window NT 3.51 and connecting to a SCO database.
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Originally it only ran on Windows. I tried it when the first UNIX version came out, but it was buggy.
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Not sure how the pricing works but a website with a single db is counted as one seat I believe. We use a corporate unlimited version.
That sound you hear is Microsoft employees collectively shitting themselves.
M$ screwed themselves in the late 1980s with the Windows 3 vs IBM OS2 dirty trick they played on IBM.IBM finally gets back at M$ !
Exactly right. MS are getting squeezed out from all sides and deservedly so. Good riddance!
Yes M$ is dying, but it will be a long gradual death because many business IT depts know nothing else but M$.I had for years an ex IT broker who kept telling me to dump my Apple shares at every little dip. (BTW I'm retired IT myself)
I did sell on certain downs, but also bought back on good news. Buy low sell high, as they teach us !
I'm sure my broker chokes over what I've made on Apple shares over the years. In his defense, his brokerage company doesn't understand Apple either.