Could Steve Jobs Have Made A Difference At Apple in 2020?

This is one of those what-ifs. There is Larry Ellison, the colorful Founder CEO of Oracle, best friend to Steve Jobs for 25 years, who will have you believe Steve Jobs was Steve Jobs. Tim Cook can not wear the shoes. It is true Apple has since only been milking what was already built. They are still milking the iPhone and the iPad.

It is said Steve Jobs was thinking about tackling the TV next. If you go from the PC to the iPod-iPhone-iPad, it is a paradigm shift from the GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the touch screen. But do you really want to touch your TV? TV was and is a harder nut to crack. The innovation perhaps is not on the screen. It is in how content is created and distributed. Netflix, and YouTube and Amazon are tackling some of it.

It is true Steve Jobs managed to be a pioneer for both GUI and the touch screen. But what's next? Obviously we are looking beyond touch. They talk of NUI, Natural User Interface. Voice commands. Gesture, things like that. Computing is so seamlessly integrated to the natural environment around you, you simply speak to it, or you wave at it.

Could Steve Jobs have tackled it? It is not like you are saying, Steve Jobs grew up speaking English, could he have beat the Chinese at Mandarin? Steve Jobs would not have been handicapped by the NUI. But it might have been hard for the same person to also be the pioneer for that third paradigm. It is remarkable enough that one person became the master of two paradigms. Three? Three would have been a lot. But it was possible.

Steve Jobs' Apple had almost a hundred billion dollars in the bank. Jobs liked to say he liked to keep his gunpowder dry, in case something showed up. Perhaps things like VR and AR are more capital intensive. Perhaps not.

It is conceivable Apple under Steve Jobs might have also been a leader in this next emerging paradigm, the paradigm of the Natural User Interface. Tim Cook is already missing out. Tim Cook is more like Steve Ballmer. Ballmer kept showing crazy good numbers. But he totally missed out on the smartphone. Cook is similarly showing pretty good numbers. But it is Google and Amazon that are Hey Google! and Hello Alexa!

VR is going to be amazingly democratizing. Before VR you have bought a TV for hudreds of dollars. In a VR headset, a TV is maybe a one dollar app. Suddenly a dollar a day people might be looking at high end TV. And it can be a tremendous educational tool. Super-customized education.

Google Going High End

Image via CrunchBase

That used to be Apple's territory. Past tense.



The Chromebook Pixel, for what’s next

1500 dollars for a laptop.

I think this is a hint at at the X phone. There is going to be a wow factor to it. It is going to bend, for one.

Why Google Made Its Own High-End Laptop, the Chromebook Pixel

the Chromebook Pixel, a laptop that it designed and built itself ..... Unlike prior Chromebooks, whose main draw was their value, this one is built to compete with the top end of the market...... The three biggest appeals of the Pixel will likely be its touchscreen and high-density display, its elegant design, and the fact that it’s a Web-based device. .... The focus on detail and design is unheard of for a Google product. Where the company had tiptoed into hardware before, it’s striding in wholeheartedly now. .... The smooth device’s hinge gives “the feeling of a luxury car door opening and closing” .... The touchpad is made of glass, and has been tuned with a laser to have a maximally grippy surface. There are three microphones, with an additional one set below the keyboard so typing noises can be canceled out. ..... “tuning the force function of the mechanical keys to be more responsive.” ...... the Pixel is similar to Google’s Nexus device line ..... Google isn’t even naming the Taiwan-based OEM it is working with for the Pixel. ..... this is very much a first-generation device. Some of the Pixel’s hardware capabilities — like the third microphone, and gestures on the touchscreen — aren’t even supported by Google’s own services yet. .... The Pixel brings Google back to the perpetual question of why Google is building two operating systems, Chrome and Android, that are converging on each other. ..... once you build a touchscreen laptop, the lines blur

This is Google beating everyone on hardware. That also used to be Apple territory. Past tense.

Great design, used to be Apple territory.

But this still is not the hardware for NUI, the fast impending Natural User Interface, the next big paradigm shift after touch.

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Touch Is Transient

Gesture will go mainstream before we know it.

A Shape-Shifting Smartphone Touch Screen
Leaping Into the Gesture-Control Era

a matchbox-sized device that adds intuitive gesture control to any computer ..... The technology, which is also being adapted for mobile devices, could even leave the beloved pocket touch screen looking outmoded. .... The black glass on the Leap’s upper side hides two small cameras and a handful of infrared LEDs, which track the motion of a person’s fingers to an accuracy of a hundredth of a millimeter .... Leap provides the solution to “gorilla arm,” a term used to describe the dubious ergonomics of a person repeatedly lifting his or her hands from the keyboard or mouse and reaching out to operate a computer’s touch screen. Users of Leap’s device can lift their hands just slightly off the keyboard and make more economic gestures with their fingers. .... significantly faster than using a mouse and keyboard .... Holz says touch screens soared in popularity because they are more intuitive to use than keyboards and mice, but believes they are limited in a way the Leap is not. “The fact is that you can’t really do anything with a tablet, with tap and swipe, but it feels natural,” he says, meaning that people love touch screens but can’t easily create content using them. “We have that same natural experience but we have more power.” ..... since the [developer’s kit] is still in the preview stage, more features are being added that make capturing specific motions even easier. ..... over the longer term, the Leap will be used for very complex interactions. “You’ll be reaching into a 3-D world and grabbing hold of and moving things.” .... a chunk of simulated clay. He reached out and pushed and pulled with his fingers in the air in front of the monitor, creating a stylized human head in about a minute. ...... gestures can help remove a barrier between people and their technology ..... Leap Motion’s closest competitor may be Kinect, Microsoft’s body-tracking sensor for the Xbox games console

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GUI To Touch To Gesture

Steve Jobs took the lead on touch and Microsoft is playing catch up. Steve Jobs stole the Graphical User Interface - a big jump from what existed before - from Xerox, and Bill Gates stole it from Jobs. But it was Gates that won the PC wars.

But there is something beyond touch. That is gesture. And there Microsoft seems to be ahead. Gesture promises to be even more intuitive than touch. It is exciting what they might do.

Point and click feels one dimensional. Touch feels two dimensional. Gesture feels three dimensional. It is a paradigm shift.

Microsoft's Plan to Bring About the Era of Gesture Control

The company wants to make it as common to wave your arms at or speak to a computer as it is to reach for a mouse or touch screen today. ..... "We're trying to encourage [software] developers to create a whole new class of app controlled by gesture and voice," says Peter Zatloukal, head of engineering for the Kinect for Windows program. ...... "We initially used keyboards, then the mouse and GUIs were a big innovation, now touch is a big part of people's lives," he says. "The progression will now be to voice and gesture." ... A conventional keyboard, mouse, or touch screen can be difficult to use in classrooms and hospital wards, or on factory floors. ..... Microsoft needs software developers to create killer applications. Along with the hardware, the company provides a software developer's kit, or SDK, that offers a range of ready-made tools, including voice recognition and body-part tracking .... by using infrared, your apps can see in the dark now ..... Nissan has introduced a gesture-controlled system for dealerships that lets prospective buyers look inside a virtual version of a new car. ...... It even trumps voice recognition, he says. "Voice recognition is 95 to 98 percent accurate, so one time in 50 it won't work," he says. "This works like a tool—it will work for you every time." ...... "When using a computer today, we think of our bodies as a fingertip or at most two fingertips," he says. But humans evolved to communicate with their whole bodies. .... detecting fidgeting or defensive body language such as folded arms. The hope is to address the social cues that are lost when video calls replace face-to-face communication

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Leap Motion

English: 6 degrees of freedom (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Big Data could save Yahoo. Gestures could save Microsoft. But startups stand strong chances in those spaces.

The Most Important New Technology Since the Smart Phone Arrives December 2012

Leap Motion, a small, $70 gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works ..... Unlike a touchscreen interface, with the Leap, there's no friction. That sounds trivial, but it isn't. It's the difference between attempting to conduct a symphony with a wand and attempting to conduct the same symphony by sketching out what the orchestra should do next via chalk on a blackboard. ..... Leap operates in three dimensions rather than two. Forget pinch-to-zoom; imagine "push to scroll," rotating your flattened hand to control the orientation of an object with a full six degrees of freedom, or using both hands at once to control either end of a bezier surface you're casually sculpting as part of an object you'll be sending to your 3D printer. .... the Leap can see almost any combination of objects - a pen, your fingers, all 10 fingers at once

This is a leap from 2D to 3D.

One question though, if it picks up gestures well, would you not need to be trained to use it? What if you end up making unwanted gestures? Not everyone can conduct a symphony, you know.

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