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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

Insurpassable barrier to entry. Not a chance.

What about the barrier to entry is insurpassable? Apple hardware in about a decade went from being something every developer I know raved about and loved to being something everyone complains about and is generally unhappy about. Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. The more they expand into other consumer verticals (tablets, headphones, CARS), the more the computer products suffer.

Yet their computers are still massively popular with developers.

As for the barrier, it is in the software and app ecosystem.

I'd argue they're popular because no better alternative has been created (yet).

My point with the software is that most software people use to create software/apps is increasingly created with web technologies / electron apps, so the native app ecosystem on a desktop machine is increasingly weakening as a moat.

I'd say the #1 reason is that most developers (myself included) want the intersection of:

- Unix-like, developing on Windows is pure torture

- Don't waste my time with configurations, drivers and other crap, I want a machine that I can be productive with out of the box. Take my money if you have to, but I don't want to edit Xorg.conf ever again.

You can talk about polish all day, but no machine that doesn't satisfy both is even close to appealing for a majority of developers in my experience.

You are right about the native app ecosystem being less of a blocker, but that's in line with my point.

What are you talking about? Any large tech company could pull that off. The problem is those large companies are not interested in catering to a million developers, they are interested in catering to a billion people.

Remember windows phone?

I do. I remember Microsoft stores too. They went 20% of the way and stopped, and decided that extracting rent from Office and Azure was all the work they wanted to do, rather than continue investing in hardware and in person support. Same with Google and their devices, except they did not even bother with in person support.

>They went 20% of the way and stopped

For how much more would you siphon money into basically empty stores, to see it as having gone "100%" of the way?

Depends if I wanted to compete with Apple or not. I would have spent whatever it took. The board members at these companies obviously decided that cash now was more important than competing with Apple.

Maybe because they understand the sunk cost fallacy :-)

A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure.

Which is even more damning of Microsoft / Google management.

>A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure.

The sunk cost fallacy is not really about what the venture would actually do. One could be said to have fallen prey to it even if they double down and the venture eventually succeeds.

What's important is that at the time of the decision (a) the path doesn't seem to be working, and (b) they think "but I've spend too much to quit now".

This is more likely when one assumes it can still has a chance to succeed, than if they assume it will inevitably result in failure. Nobody that assumes inevitable failure would decide to continue.

I did not feel it needed to be specified since it is a trivial fact that nothing in life is certain. But Apple's product offering is a top to bottom customer experience involving in person help at stores around the country. Microsoft must have acknowledged that, since they went as far as opening stores and coming out with that line of non malware Windows products (as a side note, it is ridiculous that Microsoft even let their ecosystem get to that point). Which, yes, they might have had empty stores, but that is because they failed to continue investing in their mobile products, or even non mobile products. They would have had empty stores for 10+ years while they slowly build it all up, just like Apple had to.

All I know is at this point Microsoft had two options: continue investing into creating an alternative to Apple, or cancel their plans and sit back and let the Office/Azure revenue flow in.

Maybe it was a long shot, maybe they decided the size of Apple's customer base divided by two was not enough to satiate them, but whatever the case, they signaled that they do not have the talent/gumption/appetite for risk to pull it off. But if any company did have the opportunity to go for it, I would think Microsoft (and Google) with their income stream would have been in position to do it.

Both companies seem to dip their toes, but never follow through.

Yeah. No apps = no success. A developer-focused computer would obviously run Linux, so you'd have a large ecosystem right from the start.

Yet linux desktop is still where it has always been. A place for nerds who like to tinker.

I'm pretty sure it could have worked, their phones were getting traction in Europe, if they did not do the big framework screwup which destroyed their developer base, it would have worked.

It could've succeeded if they didn't reset the app ecosystem twice (they already didn't have many apps, but the resets definitely didn't help).

I loved the UI and the phone offerings from Nokia. I wish they would resurrect it - and I'm a dedicated MacOS/iOS user.

As a Mac guy I thought that the Windows Phone wasn't a bad device. My buddy had one and it had all sorts of great features but they all worked within the Windows/x-Box universe he was in.

I would have liked to see it succeed if only for there to be more competition.

It also had a great 'copy and paste' feature

Yep the phones were actually in terms of OS and hardware equal or better than iOS/Android. However even back then, the app ecosystem hurdle was already insurmountable.

This just proves it’s even harder. Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it.

>Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it.

This hits hard

>Any large tech company could pull that off.

The prerequisite of being a "large tech company" to pull it off is already a huge barrier to entry.

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