Go back through the history of Apple's (and its many, many sycophantic fans) proclamations - such as apps on the phone, push notifications, multitasking - and there is a disturbing trend of Apple (and its followeres) making moral pontifications, stamping their feet, and then quietly and shamelessly backtracking when proven wrong.
Jobs is trying to undermine the competition because he fears that he made the wrong choice.
I makes total sense. Shall I reword it slightly for you?
Were Apple and Adobe to work together, as we are with a number of other partners, we feel confident that we could provide a terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch
There response was brilliant, and it is right on the money. Steve Jobs arguments are contradictory and largely asinine, and they aren't worth retort. Adobe has essentially wiped their hands and said "Whatever, troll" which is truly brilliant.
It is overwhelmingly driven by mobile web sites (which, humorously, usually call themselves "iPhone versions"), which I think is pretty fair to use as a comparison point.
> Andriod will be the cheaper but less polished product sold to the masses, while the iPhone will be a more upscale, more expensive product for the people with discriminating taste
Okay a lot of people have given you a pass for this (as Hacker's News, almost entirely as a reflection PG's spoken beliefs, is very Apple-fawning), but this is silly. You aren't special for buying a Mac, nor are your tastes better.
Everyone's anecdotes are different, but personally I equate owning an Apple PC with being very susceptible to marketing. The iPhone was a clear winner until maybe 6 months ago, however since then anyone choosing an iphone again is mostly a "Consumer" and not a discerning purchaser.
Wow, did the article say somewhere that Google and Amazon don't know what they're doing? I don't believe it did. In fact I think it quite specifically questioned some performance claims that aren't valid.
And you think this article started the holy war? I believe I just saw another article on his about how you should do SQL sorting in PHP until you graduate to MySQL, or so claims Digg's former architect.
So while SO runs on a minimal amount of closet-room hardware efficiently and without incident, Digg has heroics and clusters and scale-outs and all sorts of drama to handle just 10x the load? I'm not sure what angle you were coming from, but that makes Digg look like clowns.
>Digg did not release a benchmark, and trying to treat their findings as a repeatable benchmark is wrong.
Yet they released record counts, schema, and then performance numbers, and then used their results to demonstrate the failure of the RDBMS (which they led into by saying that it, as some given philosophy, optimizes writes at the cost of reads, hence their poor read performance).
Many of the comments in here are baffling. Digg specifically used the hammer of NoSQL to pound the nail of their database needs, replacing MySQL. They've made a big deal about this. So why the noise about "they're different, man?" And now the petty whines about benchmark methodology when Digg made concrete claims about RDBMS systems?
The original Digg entry specifically makes the entire point that Digg is willing to sacrifice write performance to improve read performance (which they did to a massive degree with Cassandra), and then demonstrated how absolutely horrendous their read performance was.
Digg couldn't do a rudimentary join. I'm sorry but if you can read their original entry and not picture an almost comical scene, that you are out of your league.
Now the Joe Plump or whatever guy is telling people that you should sort in PHP. That is the level of expertise of Digg.
Jobs is trying to undermine the competition because he fears that he made the wrong choice.