>Robotics is way too hard and they should look elsewhere IMHO.
>Software has this beautiful property of being magical: if you can imagine it, it can be written, given sufficient effort.
>The physical reality puts constraints that you often can't work around with decades-long, distributed research... which isn't really profitable or timely for a business to do.
I imagine plenty of people thought and said that about phones when Apple was rumored to be getting into that space. Certainly the Motorola ROKR partnership probably put most people off the idea of Apple and the phone space. Obviously prior success doesn't indicate future success, but at the same time Apple's biggest successes have often been in the space of building hardware that breaks though those physical constraints of reality in a way that is finally sufficient to push it towards mass market appeal.
No, because a phone is a pretty limited "physical reality". It exists in a little box. It doesn't really interact with the outside world. It's just a transporter of software in the physical reality, but it doesn't interact with it other than through light and sound.
>Software has this beautiful property of being magical: if you can imagine it, it can be written, given sufficient effort.
>The physical reality puts constraints that you often can't work around with decades-long, distributed research... which isn't really profitable or timely for a business to do.
I imagine plenty of people thought and said that about phones when Apple was rumored to be getting into that space. Certainly the Motorola ROKR partnership probably put most people off the idea of Apple and the phone space. Obviously prior success doesn't indicate future success, but at the same time Apple's biggest successes have often been in the space of building hardware that breaks though those physical constraints of reality in a way that is finally sufficient to push it towards mass market appeal.