John Gruber

Yesterday Amazon and Apple reported earnings at the same time, which made it even easier to contrast these two outstanding companies, especially now that they compete directly.

I’ve been beating the drum for a while that Jeff Bezos is the greatest entrepreneur alive and, with Steve Jobs‘ passing, his true heir as the greatest business innovator alive. (Even John Gruber, the King of Apple Bloggers, now agrees.)

If you look at the two earnings together, it’s become even clearer.

Paul has historically been opposed to posting rumors of new hardware here, which is why I’ve held off on discussing this until now, but the weight of the reports coming in seems to suggest there may be more than mere rumor at work. Sources as diverse as John Gruber, a Chinese news site, Bloomberg, and [...]

Android tablets have nowhere near the market share that Adroid phones have captured.  Why is this?  Well, John Gruber, in Daring Fireball, speculates as to the reason: My hypothesis has long been that Android has very little traction in and of itself. What has traction is the traditional pattern where customers go to their existing [...]

In his Daring Fireball blog, John Gruber quotes from a very interesting Nicholas Carr post and then, in Gruber’s last paragraph makes a most telling point about Disney: Nicholas Carr argues that book publishers should include e-book versions with print books: So why give away the bits? Well, traditional book publishers have three big imperatives [...]

Apple has built its iBooks platform on the back of an open standard. With last week’s introduction of iBooks 2.0 and the free iBooks Author software for Mac OS X, Apple is deliberately locking out that popular open standard.

Apple’s behavior is a modern, sophisticated version of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” behavior that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 1990s: Enter a product category supporting a widely used standard, extend that standard with proprietary capabilities, and then use those differences to disadvantage competitors.

In an attempt to differentiate itself from the Kindle Fire, Kobo is playing up the Vox’s openness. A lot. “Kobo Vox—The Peoples’ Reader! (Vox populi, voice of the people),” the site proclaims. “Based on Kobo’s founding principle ... FREEDOM.” Users can “read freely” (unlike Amazon, Kobo supports the open e-book format EPUB, which can be read on any open e-reader) and access the open Android store.

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