Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sounds | Hacker News Reader

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I think by 2021 most people will understand this simple reality:

Other than Apple, every other hardware company is _not_ a software company.

Yes, they write software. It is universally garbage. If there is anything well-done about the software, it will be because the hardware company licensed (or more likely, just ripped off) someone else's software.

Google (a software company) cannot make any of the hardware companies in the Android ecosystem produce anything but garbage. Samsung Bixby anybody?

And this should not surprise anyone, as the leadership at a hardware company does not care, at all, about the software. Once you plunked down your coins and bought the hardware, the leadership at the company only sees software as an endless cost center. They want you gone as fast as possible.

It's a classic race to the bottom, and this is the result.

It's also one of the most potent forces driving people to use OpenRGB and every other free/libre open source tool.

> Other than Apple, every other hardware company is _not_ a software company.

And even Apple is a pretty mediocre software company, compared to the others of their class.

Apple definitely is lacking in comparison to their (former) reputation, but it's saying something that they're leagues better than everyone else when it comes to creating an integrated hardware-software ecosystem.

Agreed. I think the transition to Apple Silicon has cemented that. Apple may not have their top minds working on the web version of iCloud, but holy smokes if the people writing the translation layers between x86 and ARM have it figured out. Maybe that's hardware(?) so I'm off the mark, but if it is, some of that genius must have trickled down to the software layer in macOS as well.

I was fully expecting M1 to be a shit show on the software front, but Rosetta 2 has made it a non-issue for all but a minuscule minority of applications. Now that we're well into the M1 lifecycle and more software is moving to native builds, it's just going to keep getting better from a compatibility standpoint.

Care to share an example of someone better?

Google, Microsoft, Netflix, probably Amazon

They don't need to be software companies, but instead use a simple open protocol for this so that anyone can write software for it.

I have spent my entire career working to produce this kind of outcome.

Here's why hardware companies refuse to participate:

1. CEO says, "You're eroding our business's moat. Let's just rip off linux, shove our garbage driver out the door, and refuse to provide the source code."

2. CFO says, "You're trying to set yourself up as the expert on the standard, creating a career for yourself in the standards body. Sorry, we're not paying for you to fly to conferences. Denied."

(This one is particularly ironic because a company with enough clout to define the standard for the whole industry, and employ the experts on it, would quickly become the industry leader with a modicum of effort.)

3. CTO says, "We use outsourced labor to implement our drivers. Shareholders demand it. As a result we don't own the license to the driver source code. Denied."

I see crowdfunded hardware as the next step in this evolution. It's the innovator's dilemma all over again.

Nvidia has always been known for the quality of its drivers. In fact, early Radeon GPUs were often better on paper but poor drivers dragged it down. It is also no wonder that Nvidia is protective while its competitors tend to play better with the open source community. Intel is also decent and AMD upped their game.

But when it comes to user experience, yes, hardware manufacturers tend to be terrible.

Apple is looks good because of its anti competitive monopolistic tendencies. Not because of their software, which honestly is crap.

> Other than Apple, every other hardware company is _not_ a software company.

DJI stands as a very notable exception. They are frequently Apple-level good on both hardware and device firmwares. It's a different style, but similar levels of polish.

I agree with you, DJI does have decent software, and not just what they stole or purchased from others.

Comparing them to Apple is not a very big a complement, however. Apple isn't well known for having the best software. Apple often has well-designed interfaces and has worked hard to improve human-computer interfaces (both the hardware and the software). To be clear, I do not consider that to be "best-in-class software" though.

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