Why Are There So Few OS’s On Personal Computers?
My ‘track’ in graduate school while studying computer science was programming laguages and operating systems. And I learned dozens of languages — Lisp, C, C++, Pascal, and so on. I taught ‘History Of Programming Languages’ for a few semesters, too. I even invented my own version of C called Modular C.
Along the way, I also studied a roughly equal number of operating systems: IBM 370, Unix, Multics, Primos, VAX and many others.
The evolution of programming languages has continued, with new languages in wide use, like Java and Ruby, and now Go. But we seem to have stalled with operating systems.
The hegemony of Windows seems to have choked PC manufacturers in a deadly embrace. Only Apple has managed to stay clear of Microsoft’s tentacles. And now Google, with Chrome OS.
John Gruber wrote a few pieces on this last year that I only recently read, based on the announcement of the iPad, and the tech world’s teeth grinding about the iPad O/S being closed:
- John Gruber, Herd Mentality
But the one area where Microsoft still reigns supreme is in PC operating systems. PC hardware makers are crippled. They can’t stand apart from the herd even if they want to. Their OS choices are: (a) the same version of Windows that every other PC maker includes; or (b) the same open source Linux distributions that every other PC maker could include but which no customers want to buy.
Apple’s ability to produce innovative hardware is inextricably intertwined with its ability to produce innovative software. The iPhone is an even better example than the Mac.
It’s not just that Apple is different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even can be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS. Part of the industry-wide herd mentality is an assumption that no one else can make a computer OS — that anyone can make a computer but only Microsoft can make an OS. It should be embarrassing to companies like Dell and Sony, with deep pockets and strong brand names, that they’re stuck selling computers with the same copy of Windows installed as the no-name brands.
And then there’s HP, a company with one of the best names and proudest histories in the industry. Apple made news this week for the design and tech specs of its all-new iMacs, which start at $1199. 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, but how is it good for HP that their brand now stands for bargain basement prices?
Operating systems aren’t mere components like RAM or CPUs; they’re the single most important part of the computing experience. Other than Apple, there’s not a single PC maker that controls the most important aspect of its computers. Imagine how much better the industry would be if there were more than one computer maker trying to move the state of the art forward.
He continued this argument in a later post, mentioning the Litl that I have written about recently:
- John Gruber, The OS Opportunity
Supposedly, tomorrow Google is set to unveil the details of Chrome OS, but we already know one thing about it: it’s designed around the assumption that the Web is the most important software platform in the world today.
But last week came news of another, similar initiative, from a far smaller company than Google: the Litl — a $700 “webbook”. If you haven’t seen it, go check out their web site — the videos on their support page offer the best introduction to their UI. It’s fascinating and clever in several ways. It is refreshingly simple. And most importantly: it is truly new. I don’t know if Litl is going to be a success — $700 seems steep for this when you can get a MacBook for $999, and the easel mode strikes me as an awkward gimmick without a touchscreen — but everyone involved with the Litl deserves tremendous credit just for having the stones to do this, to say, Hey, maybe computers in 2010 can do better than a user experience that is fundamentally unchanged from the original Macintosh in 1984.
If a small startup can build the Litl, why couldn’t a big company like Dell or Sony? People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now? Inkjet printers?
If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers? The hard part of what Palm is doing with WebOS is getting acceptable performance out of a cell phone processor.
These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying.
Like Gruber, I give Litl a lot of credit for the innovation in their OS design: no files or folders, a true cloud-based presentation of information, and some nimble UX ideas. Whether the company can make a go of it now that Chrome OS and iPad are coming to market remains to be seen. But I agree that folks like HP, Sony, and other PC makers have been unusually timid in this arena, and give the lukewarm market reaction to Vista and Windows 7, it’s time for a change.
This sentiment is reinforced in this piece:
Personal computing — having a computer in your house (or your pocket) — as a whole is young. As we know it today, it’s less than a half-century old. It’s younger than TV, younger than radio, younger than cars and airplanes, younger than quite a few living people in fact.
In that really incredibly short space of time we’ve gone from punchcards-and-printers to interactive terminals with command lines to window-and-mouse interfaces, each a paradigm shift unto themselves. A lot of thoughtful people, many of whom are bloggers, look at this history and say, “Look at this march of progress! Surely the desktop + windows + mouse interface can’t be the end of the road? What’s next?”
Then “next” arrived and it was so unrecognizable to most of them (myself included) that we looked at it said, “What in the shit is this?”
The Old World
In the Old World, computers are general purpose, do-it-all machines. They can do hundreds of thousands of different things, sometimes all at the same time. We buy them for pennies, load them up to the gills with whatever we feel like, and then we pay for it with instability, performance degradation, viruses, and steep learning curves. Old World computers can do pretty much anything, but carry the burden of 30 years of rapid, unplanned change. Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X based computers all fall into this category.
The New World
In the New World, computers are task-centric. We are reading email, browsing the web, playing a game, but not all at once. Applications are sandboxed, then moats dug around the sandboxes, and then barbed wire placed around the moats. As a direct result, New World computers do not need virus scanners, their batteries last longer, and they rarely crash, but their users have lost a degree of freedom. New World computers have unprecedented ease of use, and benefit from decades of research into human-computer interaction. They are immediately understandable, fast, stable, and laser-focused on the 80% of the famous 80/20 rule.
Is the New World better than the Old World? Nothing’s ever simply black or white.
[…]
A Bet on the Future
Apple is calling the iPad a “third category” between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.
Just like with floppy disks, the rest of the industry is quite content to let Apple be the ones to stick their necks out on this. It’s a gamble to be sure. But if Apple wins the gamble (so far it’s going well), they are going to be years and years ahead of their competition. If Apple loses the gamble, well, they have no debt and are sitting on a Fort Knox-like pile of cash. It’s not going to sink them.
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
- has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
- completely hides the filesystem from the user
- favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
- favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
- lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps
All in all, it sounds like a pretty feasible outcome, and really not a bad one at that.
But we Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things we are used to are going away. Maybe not for a while, but they are.
I personally can’t wait to get away from files and folders — the whole desktop metaphor. But this has to be implemented at the OS layer, and somehow that also has to operate in a world of other, perhaps incompatible OS’s. So, while I would welcome a user experience in which an image is not managed (directly) as a file, I may need to export it as a file, so that my mother can manipulate it on her Mac.
But the legacy tail of now aging OS’s should not stop innovators from experimenting, like the folks at Apple, Google, and Litl. I just wish there were more experiments going on.
