[leej]

Classic Apple fanboy-ism at best with missing knowledge here and there. If OS does matter that much first Google couldn't be such a success and second Apple couldn't enjoy its current success because first 2 (even 3) Mac OS X releases were horribly slow and have very little app support!

[cubicle67]

Classic anti-Apple fanboy-ism at best with missing knowledge here and there. The OS mattering != everything else not mattering

[leej]

maybe downvoters didnt get my point and/or Gruber's point. i'm saying that OS does not matter as it used to be to be developed by other players such as HP or Dell. asking again what is wrong with this???

[pohl]

The original article makes an excellent point, and expresses it with a great deal of coherency: the reluctance of computer makers to engage in operating system development is based on an outmoded fear that was established in the days where interoperability was hard because we hadn't yet figured out things like open document formats, open network protocols, portable APIs, portable language runtimes, and virtual machines. A lot has changed since then, so why are they still so reluctant?

This is an excellent question.

Your response seems to have a very tenuous grasp on coherency. I'm trying to pull out what you're trying to say. It appears to hinge on the transitive verb "to matter", and I can find only one introductory paragraph where the author uses this verb, and he doesn't say anything objectionable the two times that he uses it:

He says that hardware and software both matter. I find that hard to refute. Then he goes on to say that if you asked him to say which matters more, he'd say software. I'm not surprised that he would say this, since he tends to be a "user experience" guy and I'm willing to grand him this premise for the rest of what he wrote.

Honestly I can't tell what counter-argument you're trying to make. Yes, Google has been successful. It certainly wasn't because of their hardware. Regardless, you're only responding to the setup of the thesis, not the thesis itself.

[balakk]

A lot has changed since then, so why are they still so reluctant?

It's this premise that I find inaccurate. Sure there's open everything, but writing an operating system from scratch to support all this is still hard. Hell, give me one commercial operating system written from scratch in the last decade.

The point is, why do it? Maintaining an operating system is big money. And you can't stop there - you've got to have a full-stack offering - business apps, fun apps, drivers, the whole set. Add to that support, interoperability with the world, backwards compatibility etc. It's a long-term commitment; you can't back out of it that easily.

The risk-to-reward ratio is pretty small; unless you have some earth-shaking innovation up your sleeve, and/or it reinforces/supports your business model significantly.

[cubicle67]

Why from scratch? If you remove that seemingly pointless requirement then there's quite a few examples, starting with the Litl OS which is based on Ubuntu

Heck, there's plenty of good solid starting points. What about BSD? Linux? Android?

[balakk]

Still doesn't matter. Unless you create an ecosystem around your software, I think it still isn't relevant in the larger scheme of things. For eg., can Maemo, Android, WebOS etc all share applications, APIs, drivers, and other infrastructure seamlessly?

The point is you need to end up creating an ecosystem around your offering, which is non-trivial. Even if you do, you may still end up as a niche player. Litl is nice; but how well do you think they'll do against traditional netbooks?

[leej]

i must say i'm puzzled by the downvotes. coming to the main debate articles' points are signs of the "word" i used which i shouldnt. even if i wrote without that intention but i sounded rude. sorry for that. thanks for pohl and mechanical_fish for the comments.

[leej]

can someone please tell me why it's downvoted? buy it or not these are my arguments against ones in the article and i DO think that OS does not have the same importance as had in 80s. what is wrong with this?

[mechanical_fish]

Your safest bet is to simply never use the word "fanboy" except to refer to yourself. It's name-calling, and is therefore both rude and a sign of bad rhetoric. (I would say ad hominem, but that's a cliche phrase on HN, so I do so with reluctance. ;)

As for the rest of your post, here is Gruber's thesis statement:

PC makers who want to succeed should create their own OSes

Your statement that "Google succeeds without an OS" does not belong in this argument. First, because Google's success has nothing to do with PC making: That's not their business. Google is an online advertising business. To the extent that the rest of their amorphous, cash-cow-supported business plan has any coherency, it seems to be about using various web and mobile apps to drive advertising traffic, although they also derive a certain amount of revenue from selling software subscriptions and licenses, and of course there's AppEngine. And probably some stuff I've forgotten.

Second, because where Google does have a strategy to venture into the hardware market -- with mobile PCs, marketed as "phones", and perhaps desktop/laptop PCs as well -- the plan seems to be to start out by building an OS, just as Gruber suggests. Google's phone venture is centered around Android. I'm not sure what Chrome OS is all about, but if Google releases a tablet or a laptop it will presumably run Chrome. To the extent that Android and Chrome are or will be successful, these will be points in favor of Gruber's argument.

Finally... Apple's first couple of OS X releases really weren't that successful. Apple survived that, of course, because they still had enough dedicated users of their previously successful OS -- Mac OS 9 -- to tide the business over. And of course that iPod thing didn't hurt -- that bought a lot of time. [1] The success of Mac OS X was a near thing, though. Mac fanboy that I was, I nevertheless abandoned the Mac myself for dual-boot XP/Ubuntu in the early 2000s, and didn't come back until OS X 10.3 or 10.4, and I don't think I was alone.

---

[1] The iPod, of course, is successful because of iTunes. Which isn't exactly an OS. But is certainly a software ecosystem, common to all Apple hardware, with a circumventable but nonetheless real form of lock-in, built around what was at the time a superior, unified interface for purchasing music, organizing it, and copying it to your devices. The success of the iPod derives mostly from Apple's custom software for the iPod. People have been cloning the hardware forever. Pundits famously didn't see the iPod coming because other companies had beaten Apple to market with apparently equivalent hardware.

[ugh]

“The iPod, of course, is successful because of iTunes.”

Really?! Now maybe. But five years ago? I have a very hard time believing that.

[blasdel]

You've got it backwards :)

Right now, with the iPhone and iPod Touch, you don't really need to connect them to a computer at all. When I bought my first iPod in 2003, that was absolutely the case, and all the existing PC software for organizing your music sucked ass. I had to use fucking Musicmatch Jukebox to sync my iPod, and the alternative library programs were even worse.

The release iTunes for Windows was a godsend to me -- sure it's pretty resource hungry and has only gotten moreso, but it's pretty fucking fantastic at just getting the basic library management stuff right. Being able to easily rip to AAC was gravy, as it meant that I no longer had to have some of my albums as lossless (MP3's psychoacoustics shit all over gravelly voices). I switched to a Mac a few years later.

[ugh]

See, iTunes never mattered that much to me when I first got a iPod. And I do actually like iTunes.

But everyone I know who ever got a iPod absolutely loathed iTunes. iTunes was not the reason, the hardware was. I have seen that change with the iPhone. Of course, no data, just anecdotes.