Herd Mentality
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
...so really, it's not so much about hardware vs software vs hardware+software. It's that the smart businessperson doesn't knowingly make a deal with a monopoly.
I see what you're saying, but hasn't nearly every Apple customer effectively done that? A datacentre could maybe rip out Xserves and replace them with equivalent 1U boxes running some generic Unix apps (e.g. Tomcat) but anyone who has developed on the Mac platform is beholden to Apple.
Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, and not that there is an economic way to stay completely platform agnostic, but it does contradict what you say.
Obviously, it's not guaranteed that you'll be that smart. Detroit should have been smart enough to take their expertise in developing for the petroleum market and transfer it to success in the alternative energy market. But it's still not as bad as having a key component of your product be supplied by a monopoly (just ask your local jeweler).
The author doesn't seem to think much of that.
Apple is an exception, an outlier, and a niche.
microsoft has demonstrated time and time again that, with windows, they value backward compatibility ahead of almost everything else. it still bears the mark of design decisions made in the eighties. that makes it pretty difficult to innovate in the windows space, even if microsoft wanted to, and they don't.
apple's macintosh is a viable competitor, but they're after a pretty clearly-defined market as well. they've got millions of customers they can't afford to upset.
three primary desktop operating systems is not enough. it retards the spread of new ideas. we are taking too long to get to whatever comes after the desktop gui metaphor, because any company that created such a thing today doesn't stand much of a chance of being able to sell it.
If Apple were to ever capture (and keep) more than 10% of the market, you'll see that they too will slave to maintain backwards compatibility. Their niche status affords them ability to make the sorts of changes you want.
I don't understand this intense desire for speedy change -- do we really need to replace the desktop metaphor as quickly as possible? Doesn't that just hurt, rather than help, adoption and understanding of computers? Everytime the GUI changes half the planet has to re-learn how to use their computers. If we had more than 3 primary desktop operating systems, all implementing new ideas, the learning curve for users would be impossibly high.
The fact that one operating system won is good for the industry.
you could have used all those same arguments to claim that guis are bad, let's just stick with ms-dos. back in the eighties, i remember many people making exactly that argument. heck, in the back of my mind, i was sort of thinking that myself! i had a great deal invested in the status quo. i'd spent years learning 8086 assembler and all the tricks necessary to write a dos tsr that wouldn't bring down the operating system. it was an ugly, stupid, convoluted system, but i was a master of it, and so i wanted things to remain the same.
apple is never going to stop throwing out old stuff and replacing it with new stuff, no matter how much of the market they get. not so long as steve jobs is alive, anyway. that's what makes the mac a healthy, thriving ecosystem. once an idea has outlived its usefulness, it's chucked for something better. the fact that the people in charge of windows are not willing to do that means that it is just a matter of time before the entire operating system is obsolete.
i'm not saying there shouldn't be a windows. it caters to a certain crowd that i am not a part of, thankfully, and i think that holds for most of us around here. but the idea that it has to be pretty close to the only operating system is a bad thing. fortunately, microsoft doesn't wield the kind of power that it once did, so there's a chance we'll get to see some real alternatives in the next decade or so.
On the other hand, the number of applications that Mac OS X must run to be accepted can be counted on the collective hands of the OS X engineers. They can almost afford to break whatever they want as long Photoshop runs. Microsoft does not have that luxury.
The command line vs. GUI argument doesn't hold water either. Instead we're comparing the desktop metaphor with some concept that doesn't exist yet. Operating system research is always on going and the really good ideas percolate up into all the current operating systems. You can't just radically change direction -- even Apple knows that. In fact, they've been removing features (like creator codes) that distinguished them from Windows and Linux basically because being compatible with the universe is more important than being innovative.
Sure, web apps and AJAXian techniques may be putting a dent in domains formerly owned entirely by standalone desktop GUI apps.
But your browser is not going to implement your hardware device drivers, I/O subsystems, network stacks, filesystems, and, well, ${insert very long list of other ways in which the OS interacts with the fundamentals of the machine}.
To say, "Ah, well who cares, it's all about the browser now anyway" is really, really missing the point. Maybe Google Docs displaces Microsoft Office, but do you really think you're going to XMLHttpRequest your SATA driver, process scheduler, or IP routing FIB (forwarding information base) away?
What is important is how the OS interacts with the user. This is where Apple shines. This is also where Google is looking to shine as well. If the user experience can be provided entirely within the browser, why not?
Because it is readily available in free form, it is no longer important, significantly or otherwise? Seriously?
Yes - it's become more commoditised. No, you can't just "replace" it with a browser. And yes, there is a qualitative distinction in degrees of hardware support and underlying engineering.
But you are right, you can't replace an operating system with browser. However, you can treat the OS as just another layer in the stack in between the network card and the browser. It's even an interchangeable component -- swap out Linux or Windows or OS X and you have still have something that can push bits onto the net and run a browser.
As far as the user experience goes, non-Windows systems are still handicapped by hardware and software compatibility issues which are decreasing in relevance, especially for a hardware vendor who can ensure that at least the hardware it ships is fully supported in their OS of choice.
The potential for innovation is there. It would be nice to see that happen on the PC. I hope that "someone else" shows up at some point. Better yet, I hope I can be a part of it. ;-)
It would also be a nightmare of complexity.
Every time I have to go back to using Windows I can't believe how many hoops you have to jump through to get anything done.
We have learned a lot since then, and we know how to address these problems: openly specified document formats and protocols. Programming languages with portable runtimes and libraries. Open source software. Web Applications.
The world is a much different place from when you felt trapped because your Visicalc files were on LDOS floppies that could only be read by a TRS-80 Model IV.
I suppose with all the downvotes I'll expand.
The conformity is what makes Apple stuff work. A small range of hardware for the chosen operating system. Running Linux or Windows on Apple hardware is hard.
Conformity also happens with the iPhone. Unless I bother to jailbreak my iPhone, I'm forced to use the functionality on my iPhone agreed by my carrier and Apple through the carrier updates.
edit to reply to edit:
"The conformity is what makes Apple stuff work."
To a degree, yes. Or rather what makes Apple stuff "Just work." It certainly wouldn't be past Apple technologically to make OS X run on commodity standard boxes, but it wouldn't be a very good business decision. They're a hardware company.
"Running Linux or Windows on Apple hardware is hard."
No, not even a little bit. Well, Windows on PPC would be impossible (unless we're talking about maybe one version of windows NT, I think?) but that's Microsoft's thing not Apple's, in only supporting Intel. Apple's OS these days comes with a utility that makes installing Windows dead easy if you want to, and even if you don't use that it isn't any harder than installing it on any standard PC.
Some of them appear to need to follow the underdog, conform but not conform, or are spoken to through the marketing.
> In any case, Gruber is talking about industry conformity, not consumer conformity, which is a whole 'nother pigeon.
The industry is conforming to follow Apple. HP through marketing. Dell through design. MS through marketing/Zune/Pink. Google through Android.
edit: You jump through additional hoops to get Linux working properly. Video drivers and sound drivers are poor, sound quality is poor. Getting used to the synaptics driver for the glass trackpad was hard. And you need the drivers from Apple for Windows, which they tend to take their time with.
Some of them, certainly. Are you honestly claiming that all or even most Apple users do so because of marketing if there's no quality product to back it up?
Edit: as per your post history/above, you appear to use Apple hardware. Just because of the marketing?
"HP through marketing."
Without a product behind it.
"Dell through design"
It is to laugh.
"MS through marketing/Zune/Pink."
Which might do something for them, as by all accounts the new Zune is decent, though with some of their typical tonedeaf touches (30-second ad plays before running an app? Puh-leease.), though their smartphone OS is still atrocious.
"Google through Android."
With their 7% marketshare to iPhone's 40% (numbers from AdMob, which is naturally not entirely representative of the smartphone market as a whole, but close enough for the purposes of argument.). And this despite Android's improved openess over iPhone OS and the wider variety of harder. Or possibly because of it... Only having one platform to develop for it certainly a massive competitive advantage for iPhone over virtually anything else out there.
"Video drivers and sound drivers are poor, sound quality is poor."
Considering that video/sound chips used by Apple are all (reasonably) commonly used hardware these days, Linux not having drivers for it is squarely the fault of the Linux community/hardware manufactures who don't provide drivers for them. Ditto goes for Windows, with the trackpad being the obvious exception there.
You said 'fanbois'. I replied to 'fanbois'. You took the 'fanboi' reply and blew it out.
> as per your post history/above, you appear to use Apple hardware. Just because of the marketing?
I bought Apple because OS X 10.1 looked like a way of running Linux while still having access to commercial apps should I need them. That was in 2001. I've not bought a non-apple computer since (5 laptops, 2 desktops, 2 iPhones).
As for the other comments...
Dell's Adamo was meant to be a competitor in design and functionality for the MacBook Air but is strangled by CPU and price. There is also a thin 16" laptop but it too is strangled by CPU. It looks like they inaccurately forecasted a 15" Macbook Air, designed and implemented a competitor without Apple coming to the game, which they should have.
You also have to remember that Zune/Pink and Android are late to the market in comparison to Apple. If Apple were showing Android's AdMob numbers this early you'd be talking up their chances. Because Apple are leading the market and their competitors are in their early stages of market entrance it's acceptable to look at their total numbers and go 'pah' rather than focusing on the growth.
"I've not bought a non-apple computer since"
Why not?
"Dell's Adamo was meant to be a competitor in design and functionality for the MacBook Air but is strangled by CPU and price."
And thus isn't. And part of Gruber's point is that better designed hardware is worthless with shit software, which will still be Dell's problem no matter what they do.
Edit:
"You said 'fanbois'. I replied to 'fanbois'"
Well, technically I replied to you saying "fanboi" in the first place. For that matter why do you think Gruber specifically is a "fanboi"? He certainly doesn't blindly agree with everything Apple does like many Apple fans, and has been very vocally critical of them at times.
Apple has followed a peculiar path that has allowed it to successfully accomplish this, but it is very difficult to imagine how Dell could successfully found their own operating system at present.
Moreover, I'm not convinced the recommendation to license their operating system is motivated by herd mentality. It's probably just that people did not believe Apple could get as big a market-share for its own machines as it appears to be getting. As for the recommendation to put Windows on their machines, that just seems, well, stupid, but perhaps I am missing something.
Reminds me of the Dvorak v. Qwerty keyboard layouts. The market has space for a single dominant keyboard type. Individuals can choose between Dvorak (and variants) or Qwerty, but since so many people use Qwerty, everything is designed based on that. If Dvorak reaches a tipping point, everyone would likely abandon Qwerty.
Does anyone thing the expansion of open source makes it more likely that the OS market is trending towards being a multi-power field?
Well, it is more subtle than that. If you are a large corporation, you might have 100,000 desktops, and since Windows came out you might have bought 0.5-1M licenses. That's an awful lot. Why would you do this? Because the software you absolutely depend on to run this business is written internally, and the cost of doing this in a Microsoft tool like VB (historically) is low enough to make it worthwhile. Microsoft has always cultivated its developer ecosystem well. Apple are good now, but I remember the dark days of the 90s when you never knew when a key Apple technology you depended on they would simply abandon (e.g. OpenDoc).
What makes the HP example sad is that it's a company that has recently been running on the vapors of it brilliant ideas, and is now stuck competing in commoditized markets, where you can really only compete on price. That's not to say HP couldn't survive, or even become more profitable; but for hackers who cherish the creation of brilliant things, it is a painful thing to witness.
On the other hand, this is progress. We have Microsoft's early PC OS monolopy to thank for the wonderful range of cheap, standardized PC hardware that makes linux boxes easy and macs/ipods/iphones mass-marketable.
The hardware giants used to be the likes of IBM, Sun, Digital, HP, Data General, Wang, Honeywell, and a few others I'm forgetting. The only ones left now are IBM (a services company) and HP (a commodity consumer hardware company). I'm not counting Sun because I expect the Oracle deal to go through.
So, you're saying that HP needs to follow the herd? The entire point of this article is that they don't and shouldn't. That's exactly why he needed to bash HP at the end.
Suggesting that HP should build its own OS is a pipe dream, and completely unrealistic. They will be running Windows for the foreseeable future. The question is: why do they have to run the same shitty old Windows that everyone else is running?
I just had the fortune of happening upon a decent Gateway desktop at a bargain-basement price, and the sheer lack of software integration is appalling to someone who's been using a Mac for the past 4 years.
Let me enumerate some concrete examples:
- Display settings are handled by vendor-specific utilities that have zero UI consistency between Windows and the actual computer manufacturer (Dell, HP, etc).
- Sound settings are handled by vendor-specific utilities and drivers that are also not configurable in a consistent way. On a HP machine practically nothing is badged "HP" except the box itself - and certainly the usability reflects this.
- Complete utter reliance on third party (both in brand and design) software that fails to integrate deeply into the OS. The whole experience feels very jarring - because it's really a bunch of code haphazardly stuck together without any thought or concern.
Imagine if you buy a Windows laptop from, say, Dell, and out of the box you get a nice Dell splashscreen, and a streamlined setup process that takes care of all your basic configs transparently (as opposed to default Windows, which loads a ton of setup upfront for clueless users)? How about the ability to use your hardware volume up/down buttons without terrible screen flickering (bad drivers)?
There are a bajillion ways that all of the standard PC manufacturers can use software to compete in the marketplace - they simply aren't doing so right now.
I'd say Microsoft has a thing or two to say about that.
> HP made news this week for unveiling a Windows 7 launch bundle at Best Buy that includes a desktop PC and two laptops, all for $1199. That might be great for Microsoft...
The OS vendor wins when computer hardware becomes a commodity. The implication is that HP (or a company like them, HP is just being used as an example here) should make their own OS. Actually, in the preceding paragraph, he more than implies that. He pretty much states it explicitly. We need more players willing to make desktop OSes to force the existing players to innovate more.
All of those computers companies made their own computers and OS's and a completely different stack of software and hardware peripherals. IBM getting into the game and creating a defacto standard with their hardware and software choices helped create a boom in the computer industry that we're still riding.
here's somebody else who thinks so as well: "[...] But I think that there will be a good long period of cheerful chaos, just as there was in the early days of microcomputers. That was a good time for startups. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things."
http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
as the micro situation "stabilized," with most of the competitors going out of business, the fun went with them. the darkest period in the days of high-tech was when microsoft so thoroughly dominated everything that they were stifling innovation.
I think this is rapidly becoming less true with the increasing utility of the browser + web. These days, what I value most in an OS is speed, stability, and staying out of my way.
They did until Steve Jobs killed it.
Edit: for those who don't recall. The clones were intended to speciate and fill all sorts of niches, but they mostly just built the Apple provided reference designs with maybe the odd extra bus slot or two. They then cannibalized the high end and low end of the market.
They got the high end because as Motorola was ramping up each faster chip, Apple would not release with it until they could ship in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand. The cloners had no such qualms and would happily take the piles of money off of the high paying 'must have the best crowd' with the trickle of fast chips at the front of the production runs, simultaneously robbing Apple of the lucrative consumer's business and delaying the time when Apple could get enough chips to launch their own.
The cloners ate the low end of the market, despite their disadvantage of scale, by making machines a little bit crummier than Apple wanted to build, but also by not paying a large enough licensing fee for the OS to cover their share of development.
The iPhone is a mobile device and lots other companies have produced their own mobile device and OS (or more likely heavily customized from another base). Microsoft itself have produced the Zune and Xbox. Palm has it's line. Nokia uses symbian, which it now owns.
Apple have made good hardware and software, but this is fanboy drivel.
As for the iPhone and mobile market, any number of manufacturers have built hardware and software for mobile market. Apple simply did this by far the best.
Microsoft XBox
Sony Playstation
Nintendo Wii
Apple iPhone
Palm Pre
RIM Blackberry
HP digital cameras
Because there aren't thousands of different types of PCs of every shape and size, tablet, netbook, professional laptop, gaming laptop, gaming desktop, small form factor desktop, workstation...
All of these computers could run OS X, but Apple doesn't want them to.
And lest we forget, Gruber's job is to talk up Apple('s stock price). Why anyone should take his opinion seriously is beyond me. He has a vested monetary interest in Apple fanboyism.