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Comment by zxcmx | Hacker News Reader

I feel like OS as a superapp is an underappreciated concept.

Like the idea that fish don't see water. On one side we have WeChat, but on the other side we have IOS, Android, and the browser.

And we're free... to install approved apps from approved sources. Free... to view stuff inside a browser window that works the way the platform owners want it to.

What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?

For example, true peer to peer networking would be nice. I don't think we'll ever see it from Apple or Google. It's a hard problem sure, but it's also not in anyone's interest to allow people to communicate directly without platforms intermediating.

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People don't WANT an unbundled OS. What does unbundled from the browser even mean? I can imagine my mom on day one with an unbundled OS ... "Well, first you need to download a browser, I recommended firefox but you have sooo many choices now that they are unbundled! What are those choices? Well, if you go www.browserchoicesexplaned.unbundled you'll ... oh, wait"

> What does unbundled from the browser even mean?

I'm guessing it would mean being able to install alternative browsers. Which is possible on most OS's, but not iOS.

That's a pretty useless definition of "bundling" though, since it only applies to ONE popular OS and, you CAN install alternative browsers (I use firefox), developers just have to use the iOS browser stack. You can share bookmarks, etc.etc. with their non iOS installations on other platforms.

It's a pretty important one. iOS's lack of support is the main thing that is preventing "PWA"'s from taking off. They're already pretty viable on Android. It's the iOS's browser stack that prevents them from being viable cross-platform, and locks everyone into the the 30% Apple tax.

People don't want shit browsers either. IE6 was a trainwreck and wasn't improved for years purely because Microsoft didn't have to - coz it was bundled.

Companies like to bundle products because they know that when they do that they can sell more mediocrity at a higher price.

>IE6 was a trainwreck and wasn't improved for years purely because Microsoft didn't have to

Remind me how that turned out for them.

They _thought_ they didn't have to. Bundling is a powerful strategy, but it isn't a magic wand that dispels competition. You still need to offer a compelling product.

Microsoft's failures as a monopoly helped write the book on how to keep your monopoly.

Apple learned that a monopoly is only illegal when it stifles competition, but if no competition is ever allowed then regulatory bodies completely overlook it.

Google learned that you don't have to stifle the competition, instead you overwhelm them with openness. You make everything you do an open or standardized and keep dumping it over the fence.

>...if no competition is ever allowed then regulatory bodies completely overlook it.

Regulators look at the market. When they looked at desktops in 2001 they saw Microsoft with 90%+ domination and were concerned that consumer choice might be compromised and was being abused. For mobile they don't look at the 'iOS market', they look at the smartphone market and see Apple with less that 50% of it in the US.

So if you're concerned about Apple's potential abuse of it's power over it's users, which is entirely fair, anti-trust simply isn't the way to look at it. You'd need to go to regular consumer protection legislation.

Apple is sh*t at stifling competition, they have less than 20% of the world smart phone market and a half dozen major competitors.

Google stifles competition by using their incredible ad revenue engine to fund products like Android and then giving them away for what amounts to "future consideration", effectively destroying the non-apple OS market as well as other markets.

I'm not really disagreeing with you, but I don't think it's because they're not good at it, I think they genuinely just don't care about stifling competition. They consciously target their products at the high end, professional and affluent customers. They're a premium brand. They have no more interest in chasing market share on the desktop or mobile than Gucci has in chasing market share in handbags.

They didn't! Their revenue is driven by enterprise, and enterprise businesses are still using IE11 and will be for years to come.

MS doesn't care about the browser; they care about the friction that sells Windows on PCs and USLs for Office 365/etc. Otherwise, they would have stamped out Chrome years ago. They care now because newer web frameworks have proliferated, and Microsoft has the means to shift customers from IE11 ActiveX apps or whatever to Azure-hosted services like PowerApps.

It's one of the shitty things about this era... nobody is motivated to care much about the computers that we all rely on to work. Windows 10 lacks a unifying vision, MacOS is sort of a hobby project in the company, and Linux desktop is a dumpster fire.

I've worked at several enterprise companies, two banks and an exchange, and all of them have Chrome and Firefox installed on all their desktops as standard. Everyone I know mostly uses Chrome.

Generally the IT department apps target IE as they are Windows shops, while all the line of business apps developed internally by the business technology teams (Trading, Risk, development tooling) primarily target Chrome and those teams prefer Linux as their back-end platform of choice.

MS have been trying really hard to compete with Chrome. Edge was a genuine, all-in effort to win back the desktop browser space on Windows. A primary reason it failed was precisely because so many enterprises had already had to put Chrome everywhere and developed scads of enterprise web apps that relied on Chrome and FF. It was too late. Our IT department tried really hard to push Edge when it came out, but everyone in the business technology teams just went "Meh, Sucks" and carried on using Chrome and Firefox as much as possible.

It seems to me that many people think in the short term. "They got away with it for years" is the same as "they got away with it" to them.

Microsoft is definitely paying for their hubris now... Or at least, they were. It seems that they've managed to offset that enough that people respect them again.

To me, they will always be that company that decided to just bulldoze everyone else and force their way on everyone. That doesn't mean I don't use their products. But it does mean I always look for alternatives.

Having said that, there are precious few companies out there that I don't feel that way about now. I'm struggling to come up with any that aren't game developers at the moment.

An unbundled OS is Linux basically.

Sort of. Most "consumer" Linux's come bundled with Gnome and a bunch of stuff too.

Those are linux distributions. They're bundle too. If you just run your own linux kernel, you wouldn't even need GNU toolchain, let alone Gnome.

What a fitting username - a bundle with Linux.

"What if we could unbundle the operating system? I wonder what innovations we're missing out on?"

I think the only one benefitting from that would be the middleman to test the various os:s against the zillion or so hardware platforms and combinations out there to provide at least some selection of OS that might or might not work on your device (instead of just bricking it right away).

A mobile device is not some standard hardware supporting a standard OS. A mobile device is an agglomeration standard or non-standard hardware components, and their hardware drivers, bundled with an OS that probably has been customized some way to facilitate the underlying platform.

You can't abstract the world away. OS is the level where the dirty nitty gritty details of running a hardware system are hidden away from the user.

You still need to have a platform where to install and run all the device drivers and so on..

Unbundling the OS is basically the Open Source model. So yes you can install a bare bones OS core and then slot in whatever tools, apps and services you want, but then your system is it's own special individual snowflake. The intersection of all the people using the same text editor, ftp client, mail client, desktop, window manager, browser, IM client, backup software and PDF viewer is, er, just you.

So what happens then is people come up with bundled solutions called Distros, but there are dozens of them.

On mobile the nearest equivalent are all the small time AOSP based OEMs, but even then end users are manipulated in certain ways by the default apps and app store that comes with the phone.

Docker would an example of unbundling apps from the OS. It's specific to the server audience though.

Some other examples in the consumer space would be React Native, Flutter, Electron, etc.

It’s not in VirnetX’s interests, certainly...

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