Saturday 4 December 2010

It goes without saying

 

Predicting the future has always been one of the strongest wishes man has had throughout times. Either to benefit from anticipated information, or to prevent eventual bad news, it’s sort of a constant throughout human history.

History is therefore full of examples about predictions, some of which became true (probably by chance), many more of which turned out completely wrong.

One of the most recognized visionaries in the IT world is, no doubt, Steve Jobs at Apple. In fact, his leadership within that company made it possible to actually contribute to define the future of that industry, for the good or for the bad. Apple’s influence is actually tangible in our opinion.

No matter how much this influence might have been (which could be subject to debate depending on personal opinions), it seems not all Jobs’ opinions are exactly right, however. Even successful visionaries might not be completely right.

His widespread comment about mid-sized android tablets being DOA is not exactly what is happening, according to Samsung’s Galaxy tablet performance so far.

Which is not necessarily bad for Apple anyway. Competition is healthy for an industry development, we’d all probably agree.

However, as important in our opinion as what was explicitly said, it is what was not explicitly quoted in Jobs comment. Certainly not usual for Steve Jobs to criticize competition openly or so directly, his strong attack to Android-based tablets indicated his concern about its potential success. In other words, he could have been seeing what Android could achieve…

If he foresaw the results Androids (through Samsung) are apparently achieving so far, then he was not that bad a visionary at the end of the day… and a master of propaganda, the way he presented his forecast.