I think it's less about clueless reporters and more about corporate PR. Google wants people to think the phone is in demand, and they pollenate various news outlets with the story. There are enough people in the world who have no idea what rooting an Android device is that this sounds like something interesting, when really it's not. At some point, they can score more points by issuing additional news releases stating the first ones are bogus and the phone was designed to act that way.

It's easy to understand why this sounds like news when you think about all the hype that existed around people trying to unlock the iPhone. That was an actual struggle, there were potential legal issues, there were risks involved in phones bricking, there were shady hackers from all over the world coming together to make things happen, etc. With an Android phone, there's really just a setting called Developer Mode and some company-supported terminal applications for doing what you need to do.

It's all a cycle... *sigh*

The fact the phone has been rooted is not news in the sense that this was a significant or difficult accomplishment. It is news in the sense that people are doing things with it, and this fact really just serves to build people's perceptions that the product is popular.

Let's face it, the majority of people who will hear this fact are not going to understand that this is a non-achievement, or that the phone was actually designed to allow people to do this. The small number of people who actually understand what rooting an Android device really means are not the target for a story like this, it aims to affect the opinions of people who are trying to decide if they want a Nexus. It makes them think the phone is in demand from others, which increases the perceived value of the device.

Take the story back a few years, substitute an iPhone and a company that wants their devices to operate strictly in a walled garden, and you have a real story to be told. This is just PR.

The sales numbers probably don't matter as much as the perception that everyone wants it. I know we all want to know these numbers, but they don't really matter when it comes to building demand around a product.

The market impact of scarcity is not strictly measured in terms of sales price, retail or otherwise. In device markets, scarcity is a driver in consumer decisions and perception, the reason you want your device to be hard to get is because people will want it more (since everyone else wants it). This is the reason businesses spend so much building PR around their products and finding ways to get people to talk about them.

Think about the HP Touchpad and WebOS for a moment. Technical issues aside, the reason it did not sell was that no one else was buying it. No one wanted a product where support night not exist in a couple years.

After HP was faced with a lack of market adoption, they killed the line, which just reinforced people's perceptions that it was not a good product to begin with. This also reinforced people's perceptions that the iPad was indomitable, as this was a big company making a big push to get a foothold in a new market.

Perception is a lot more important than number of devices sold when it comes to driving adoption in a market, which is what opens the door to achieving pricing power. Number of units sold is really useful as a number on sales calls and earnings reports, it shows how profitable a business is based on sales.

For that matter, if the cockroach engages in biomimicry, isn't it possible that people are simply not noticing it because of it's similarities to it's poisonous cousin?

Nature kind of happens, the fact is we don't always notice.

So... much... to... argue... with... there...

If you really want to argue who invented the smartphone market, it was Danger. Say all you want about Palm, but the Sidekick was the device that really proved the model for apps on mobile devices. I mean this in the sense of apps as opposed to applications, where you have over the air updates for the system. The market for smartphones would not be a tenth of what it is were that not the case. Had they not sold out to Microsoft, the smartphone world would be a very different place to day.

The OP does appear to understand what innovation is. Innovation !== features enhancements, however, which are often a natural product of ongoing R&D that make their way into a product. Apple using a retina display is a feature enhancement, Apple building one in the first place is innovation. As you said, this was Samsung.

In regards to the design of the iPad, Jonathan Ives did not have the original idea for it. There were prototype drawings from the 80s describing very similar devices. Just because Apple was able to make the push to actually build the thing and mass-market it does not really mean the company conceived of the device completely from scratch.

I mean, citing the iPad and iPhone as examples of innovation is all well and good, if we were talking about how innovative they were in 2007. It's 2012 now, where are the new products and ideas that are going to make the world more efficient and exciting than it was before? I know they have made bids to get involved in automobile manufacturing, televisions and other consumer electronics, and other verticals. Innovation in these areas would be magnificent to see.

Instead, there are no new products this year, and there is a lot of talk about reducing their line (there is still talk Mac Pros may be going away altogether in the next year or so). you look at Samsung, you see a company that is involved in every major area of consumer manufacturing. They have a strong defense business as well, and their semiconductor unit continues to keep creating new things all the time. Apple is a little too concerned about their stock price to try anything new anymore. I don't see them as capable of producing disruptive technology so long as the fundamentals of their business model discourage risk in their major product lines.

What we are seeing it not technology innovation, it's more like business model innovation.

I always marvel at the calm, reasoned tone ACs approach situations with, and the perspective their comments can lend an otherwise troubling issue.

You don't get to 500 million users without understanding the contents of every message. Text data mining is actually one of the simplest things to implement and can provide a wealth of attitudinal data about products and services.

My Facebook rep has gone into some of their programs for targeted display of ads. I haven't asked her too much about how it would work, but the message she keeps driving home with me is that they can target ads based on how much someone likes something. She says this is based on more than what someone clicks on.

I have a friend who worked as a contractor for NASDAQ and was in the same boat. He had written a network monitoring tool on his own time and used it as part of his job. He was clear with management this is something he had built on his own and that it belonged to him. He sold the application separately and brought in a token amount of revenue for his efforts.

After a few years, he (and most of the people from his team) were laid off unceremoniously, and he insisted that the custom software he had written needed to be removed from their system. They did not comply, and it ended up in court. He did earn an injunction and damages equal to his attorney's fees for all his effort. Rights to the network monitoring tool was later purchased by another firm for a small sum.

I got the sense, throughout all of this, that the time and dollars being spent were really a waste. There was no million dollar application coming out of these efforts, and building the application was really just a way to make his job easier.

Don't turn this into an Apple versus M$ you dolt, a man died today!

Oh wait...

See, even trolls can't overcome the remarkable sadness on the news of his passing. Beyond the hardware, he inspired a lot of debates here and elsewhere that will have a lasting impact on people. I can't believe how awful this is to hear.

When they took away my Linux on the PS3, I stopped buying games. It's just a very expensive DVD player at this point, and I don't buy too many DVDs.

This is slashdot, that's not going to happen

I agree with the IKEA affect, at some level, but believe people are wrong about what it means. Just because someone has worked on an open source project does not mean they have rose colored glasses and expect it will solve every problem more efficiently than another alternative. In my view, it means that they have a more sophisticated view of what the project actually can do, in part because it is open, and are ready to share that information.

I own an open source company that deals with Drupal and CiviCRM. It is not uncommon to be in a conversation where someone is telling me of course I think Drupal is the greatest thing out there, and assumes I am not well versed in anything else. I can go on about the virtues of Drupal all day long, but that is besides the point. I have an in-depth understanding of Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla (and it's predecessor Mambo), Plone, Xoops, and a number of other open source tools.

I have contributed to each of these platforms at one time or another and understand the way they work in great detail. Compared to Sharepoint, where I don't understand the internals, I am not going to have a lot to say. If you come to me asking what you should be using, I am going to talk about Drupal, but am also going to ask what you currently use.

There are parallels with the automotive industry that can help explain what is going on there.

My mechanic actually makes cars. He purchases transmissions, chassis, all the component parts you need to assemble them. He has a large lot, looks almost like a junkyard on the outside, and he keeps a fleet of jumkers around to restore them and sell them off. On the inside, his shop is a paradise of tools, diagnostic machines and the like.

His obsession with cars extends to his personal life. His house is filled with cardboard boxes that contain custom parts he picked up because he knows what he can do with them. He can explain them in terms of torque, output and a lot of other factors that go beyond my ability to appreciate a car and what it does.

My neighbor is also someone I would call a car guy and drives a german supercar. It was top of the line when he bought it. I mention the car to the mechanic, and he can tell me about every part in it and why it is good or bad. He has strong opinions about the car and why it is poorly designed, with several prognostications about parts that will die prematurely due to flaws.

When I speak to my neighbor about it, all he knows is he has an expensive car. that impresses people. He can talk about all the luxury lines and his knowledge of the component parts extends to the makeup of the interior, the warmth of the seats, the placement of cup holders, and the like. What he really cares about is not under the hood, it's how the car looks to other people.

If you put the question to both of these kind of people about what kind of car to drive, you are going to get very different answers because one understands how cars are built, the other understands what the car means to other people who see it. There is a qualitiative difference there people don't always appreciate between different types of afficinados.

That said, there are ideological zealots out there who will always tell you to use a platform for it's own sake. I don't always get the sense these people always know what they are talking about, and generally get the feeling they cling to one platform due to their ignorance of the benefits of others. They have a tendency to become very defensive when confronted and make very bold assertions in the absence of facts.

This later class of people generally don't have much to do with how the platform is built. They tend to be the ones who are proponents of the platform and have strong opinions based on their participation in the community. While they can be fun to spend time with, there are situations where you get sick of being around them. To be candid, there are a lot of people in open source communities who are like this, and I think that's where the confusion comes from.

But don't mistake them for the people who actually love open source and understand it's benefits and drawbacks in comparion to other platforms.