Apps are a temporary state of affairs (but isn't everything these days?). In a few generations, your phone will be little more than a terminal that connects to your personal virtual machine hosted on Apple/AWS/Google servers. This VM will run the respective company's OS as well as its native apps. These apps will be unrecognizably more powerful than the ones currently on your phone, and your phone itself will be significantly lighter and more efficient (and, yes, probably wearable).
Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual spaces will have private and public modes.
The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to 'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.
I haven't bothered to look at Russians' responses to Uber, but the whole idea must seem strange to any Russian. It has been normal in Russia since the fifties to flag down cars (i.e. everyday, private traffic) on the street and pay a driver for a lift. Usually the fare is cheaper than a taxi (I don't remember ever calling a taxi in Russia). The drawback is that not all drivers are headed in your direction, but then again, it's only a matter of time till someone who is comes along (this problem is further ameliorated by drivers who moonlight as gypsy cabs and will take you wherever for the right price).
My point is that the service that Uber provides is viable primarily due to largely baseless social conventions (i.e. middle-class paranoia). If the fare is all that matters to a given consumer, then any car/driver will do. If security matters more than fare, then taxis will do. Uber is operating in a gray area between these extremes and as soon as A) we cease fearing our neighbors (I believe that the decline of suburbia and renewed urbanization will eventually take us there) and B) taxi services will begin offering better technical solutions, Uber's service will become largely obsolete.
Came here to point out just this. This article is a great example of convoluted syntax and flagrant wordiness.
I mean, come on:
>All this had come rushing back because once upon a time, I had lived through it too, in my late, unlamented career as an online news executive in that labyrinth of high-octane managerial passive-aggression known as Yahoo News.
This is about as ugly as English journalese gets. And it is also stupid because the implication is that this person should have been interning as a copywriter instead of wending his way through that high-octane managerial labyrinth of passive-aggressive knowledge that once upon a time was Yahoo News, natch.
My takeaway is that Yahoo News failed because it was run by amateurs.
But there are many examples of goods that are not considered "normal." The state has always regulated such vital goods, usually ensuring supply. The Farm Bill is a perfect example. Housing is another.
And they don't do it semester after semester, which of course can be a bad thing or a good thing, but if anything surely hones an instructor's understanding of the student body.
right - that's sort of the point I was getting at, but not very well. There's a certain nuance to successful teaching that takes time to master, regardless of the subject material. Not everyone gets it, of course, but most of the instructors I've had who were really good at it were, in fact, older and more practiced instructors (across all disciplines). Using adjuncts to supplement gaps now and then is OK, but when a large portion of your staff is temp adjuncts, the quality of instruction has to be lower.
