This had me smiling: ”...it employs Unix, an aging but powerful basic software system”.
At that time Unix was 20 years old, now it's 50 years old.
Well still be running Unix, or its clones for trademark purposes, in a hundred years. Maybe several hundred. I wonder what other operating systems are likely to have that sort of longevity.
No way will we use Unix in 100 years. Either we will have regressed back to stone age by then or we will have moved on to a stage we can barely imagine, quasi-stagnating for a whole century is just not how humanity rolls, i'm afraid.
To replace them we'd have to see a circumstance where it makes sense to start from scratch and rewrite everything vs. incrementally improve what's already there.
I can't predict the future, but the market forces needed for some kind of new OS to make sense would have to be tremendous. As time passes and we build more and more on top of existing OSs it becomes less and less likely that we'll switch away from them because it will become more and more costly.
Perhaps a state could create a unique OS as a hegemonic strategy. They could make people, companies and other states use it as a pre-condition of participating in their economic sphere. That could provide the incentive to use it even though it would take decades to catch up to existing OSs. China is the only one I can think of that could have a chance at this, though I still think the cost would be too high for them. North Korea would probably love to do it, but it seems unlikely they'd ever be in a position to influence other states to that degree.
Which is the biggest difference in the way the developed world works and what it's like to live in it. The difference between now and 1969, or the difference between 1969 and 1919? In both cases it's a 50 year delta.
I don't mind betting that the world of 2069 will look a lot more like 2019 than 2019 looks like 1969.
It's hard to quantify change. We keep hearing about the accelerating rate of change, but there are many dimensions along which change can occur. For example, for a long time the maximum speed of travel for us humans was that of a horse, or a horse-drawn carriage. Then all of the sudden we had a steady climb, with appearance of the train, then cars and planes, and that curve seems to mostly have flattened in the meanwhile. Similar for the maximum weight we can lift - see the Saturn V rocket.
But these are all brawn as oppesed to brain type capabilities. Which have to do with our physical aspect. It is normal that they plateau since the laws of physics set hard limits on these type of parameters. And they are also much more obvious since they directly impact the physical world all around us.
My feeling is these days change is tilted more and more towards the informational aspect of us humans and the world. The quantity of scientific data gathered, books written, new media types, information technology, the internet, genetic engineering, wikipedia all function at the much more subtle level which wouldn't be as immediately obvious to an outside observer, but they actually affect us much closer to our core, because what makes us distinctly human and the source of our power is all about this dimension - which the philosopher Teilhard de Chardain has called the noosphere.
Interesting. I don't think I would take that bet. Historically, it's always taken fewer and fewer years for really "radical shifts", for lack of a better word, to happen.
Imagine sending someone from the 1200's to the 1500's. They would probably have less of a shock than the guy sent from the 1900's to today, in terms of how much around them has changed, even though they have traveled more years ahead.
It's something I read in an article at some point, but couldn't find it just now from a quick google search. I feel like it makes sense though. With the pace we're inventing things at, Clarke's 3rd law will kick into effect more frequently: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I think most of the low hanging fruit from the rapid technological advances in the 20th century have now been picked. Jet aircraft, ground vehicles, helicopters, space rockets, computers. I don't see anything fundamentally revolutionising those in the next generation. Hand computers took their own sweet time to come, but now we have them. I think it's all incremental from now on.
Technological advances are never exponential forever. They always follow an S curve and all our technologies are at the top of the S and levelling off. Many of them actually started levelling off decades ago, such as air travel and ground vehicles. Electric cars are substitution not revolution. Reusable rockets are going to get pretty cool though.
Yes! I remember reading an article about the S-curve that each new paradigm brings with it. I would agree that we're closing in on the upper part of the S with regards to the internet and personal computing.
But in my opinion that in no way means we will stagnate now. Bar from anything devastating happening, I would assume one is right in looking at the past to assume future development, albeit in a field that's not yet quite apparent. There is no reason to assume there isn't the next S waiting for us at the end of this one, even if you and I cannot really picture it just yet.
That's exactly what could force us to rethink our technological architecture from the ground up. No way is what we have now even close to optimal in terms of using existing resources. But it's been good enough thanks in no small part to those predictable performance gains won at the hardware level.
Don't you find it a bit disappointing that in WSL2 they're basically walking back the Linux-userland-on-NT-kernel architecture? I found this way of doing it fairly impressive - I wonder whether they will get good FS integration and performance with WSL2.
I find it impressive that they didn't give in to the fallacy of sunk costs, and switched tech to something better. WSL was impressive, but WSL2 is in my experience better, and it's pretty cool that they can start Linux in a VM so rapidly, and give it access to as much of the host memory as it wants.
> ''If you look at it from the front, it's fantastic. If you look at it from the back, it stinks. Steve doesn't think systems at all . . . about connectivity, about the ability to link up to a larger world.''
INteresting quote from Alan Kay: 'If you look at it [and Apple] from the front, it's fantastic. If you look at it from the back, it stinks. Steve doesn't think systems at all . . . about connectivity, about the ability to link up to a larger world.'
Had the concept existed back then, that headline would be called clickbait.
Other than that, these were exciting times for computer users. One could expect good and interesting things from progress and only the sky seemed the limit.
> "to combine pre-existing sections of instructions, or ''objects,'' to create the programs they need - an innovative technique known in the industry as ''object-oriented programming.'' "
Not only this article is clickbait in its title, but also some serious marketing-all-way-down. Technical decisions being sold as consumer benefits, as if the end-consumers would deal directly with OOP.
Pity about the headline. There’s not a word in the text about revenge or about Jobs’ feelings about Sculley at all—though those are well detailed elsewhere.
Are there other stories of people who had one fortune and went on to make another? With $100M, it would be pretty tempting to go back to the fruit commune.
Jobs didn't have anything personal against Sculley most likely, but it was revenge on the takeover from product/engineering/creative people to sales/marketing/MBA control at Apple. [1]
Steve Jobs knew the problem when the product people get driven out from the decision making, the coup d'état from the value creators to the value extractors.
Well, looking at the history of Jobs in particular before he came back to Apple, I would say just the opposite.
The Lisa, Apple ///, original Mac, and the NeXT were all failures because they didn’t get the importance of actually creating products that people wanted. Engineers seldom understand the needs of the broader market. The “Engineers” also gave you great stuff in the mid 90s like PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, and other products that no one wanted.
As far as creative people - letting them take over gets you the trash can Mac Pro, iOS 7, and the MacBook keyboard.
Engineers are infamous for not wanting to deal with pesky things like customers and usually don’t care whether their designs can lead to products that can be produced at scale. Apple would still be floundering without the “MBA types” like Cook who got operations under control and Schiller who was over marketing.
Scully - the “sugar water salesman” - saved Apple the first time around after the missteps of Jobs.
Even today you can look at Google to see what happens when you have great engineers but no leadership. They are still an ad business despite years of trying to diversify.
Kind of an attempt of rewrite of history there. Sure Steve Jobs did many stupid things and had to temper himself. But let us not forget that after he left Apple was on a never ending downward slope. It was when Steve Jobs came back and put product designers in the drivers seat that Apple actually became one of the worlds most valuable companies.
I have seen this over and over again. Where I am from an Apple reseller was first started by enthusiasts and made it big until MBA types took over only caring about the short term bottom line. They killed the company because customers stopped having faith in the sales people having their interests at heart. It was all about selling you maximum amount of stuff.
They got kicked to the curb by a new upstart mac reseller where the owners really cared about the product and customers enjoying their Mac experience, not just getting money.
The problem with the MBA style guys is that don't really see the value of anything. They just see money. That can only take you so far.
Apple was not on a “continued downward slope” after 84. From 1986 - 1993. Apple was doing quite well financially and was more profitable than MS. As late as 1993 they were the number one or two computer seller. Going back and forth with HP.
There have been a few execution failures like the MacBook keyboards and the trash can Mac Pro. But Apple will still stick to something long term even if it isn’t an immediate success.
The AppleTV would have been cancelled years ago by any other company. For a tech company to invest billions on creating content like AppleTV+ is something that most non entertainment companies wouldn’t even try.
The Apple Watch has seen dramatic continuous improvement over years and the iPad didn’t come into own until 2015 with both the pro models and iOS improvements. It was just a big iPhone during the first three years.
I have no comment on your larger argument but this feels like a weird point to make:
> The AppleTV would have been cancelled years ago by any other company.
If the AppleTV didn't exist, what would that change? AppleTV+ (the service) does not need AppleTV (the hardware) in order to exist, nor do I think one benefits the other.
Apple is primarily using iPhones and iPads to push AppleTV+. The service is also available on non-Apple hardware, such as smart TV's.
> For a tech company to invest billions on creating content like AppleTV+ is something that most non entertainment companies wouldn’t even try.
Netflix was in the business of sending video to people’s home. Sending video electronically was a natural evolution. They didn’t have a choice but to create their own videos or they would both be beholden to studios and be a commodity.
The Apple TV was introduced in 2006. They kept pursuing it for over a decade and it still hasn’t gotten that much traction.
The difference is that all of the other hardware choices are slow, ad ridden (Roku has hard coded buttons on their remotes that go to the highest bidder) and privacy invasive.
They also have another avenue to push Apple Arcade. The AppleTV is much better integrated with Apple’s other offerings from the phone to the watch to the HomePods.
None of these are clearly indicative of short term thinking. The keyboard was simply a mistake of prioritizing thinness over reliability. AppleTV is a long term play to own home media (which may or may not work) and the massive investment into iPad software is indicative of long term planning to evolve it into a platform separate from iPhone.
Unfortunately, programming is the middle ground between engineering and art. It's a dancing architecture. Because of this value-extractors and their thinking is borderline asine as seen in the case of crappy products in the dotcom bust and the recent wework comedy.
NeXT was a big part of what Jobs oversaw/built while gone from Apple and that became the system to build the iPhone/iOS.
What is seen as a 'failure' by MBAs became the base of Apple's biggest product and a world revolution in mobile and smart phones.
To this day the Objective-C libraries still have "NS" prefix for NeXT Computer and NeXTSTEP OS [1][2].
All the other products you mentioned also had decent influence and were research and development to what we built and use today.
Just because the first iteration doesn't make money in droves doesn't mean it was a failure and there isn't gold in them there hills. Business guys fail to recognize that on the regular. Research and development with a holistic focus on product engineering and design is where value is created.
The point is all aspects of business are needed, product, engineering, creative, design, business, marketing, management, financial etc. When one group takes over unilaterally and the others lose position at the decision forums, it goes south. It is especially bad when people from one area start dictating what the others should do. When the business guys come up with the product and design, well, it would be like the engineers or designers coming up with the marketing or funding plan.
Product engineers and designers are more holistic in their approach that take into account all stakeholders and especially the customer [3].
People should be T-shaped employees but no matter what, if product/engineering/creative is removed from decision making and has less power in a company, that company is a dead man walking in short order when the built up research and development product engine momentum wears off, it is almost a law of markets at this point.
Just because business/management/financial controls the money does not mean they create the value. The value is created by product engineering and design, the value extraction is maximized at the right time by the business. The problem is the MBAs largely have your attitude writing off all historical iterations and steps to get to well research and developed value, which highlights the core lack of understanding between these disciplines.
Product development and design is like an engine, it takes time to rev up and get up to speed, MBAs get in the vehicle and press the gas and if it immediately isn't top speed and the fastest most successful vehicle every made, they throw up their hands.
The best leaders and product companies understand iterative development and the value of product research and development as well as the market and budget. They value the disciplines at the company and don't dictate to them but guide them. They understand the brand/product/culture and most important, the customer.
The Next operating system was the basis of everything that Apple does now. They were creating and trying to sell hardware. But don’t pretend that Jobs had some great vision that he would create an OS that would eventually power mobile. It’s nothing more than survivorship bias If Be had been willing to sell to Apple for less than they asked, Next would have been footnote.
The Apple /// wasn’t the “first iteration”, it was Jobs first idealized computer with no fans - something no customer asked for - it was a failure.
It’s not the MBA types. It’s simple business that a product needs to make a profit. Even Jobs saw that when he returned to Apple when he got rid of the Advanced Technology Grouo
Right now, you can see what happens when a company is customer focused vs engineering focused. How many failures have come out of Microsoft and Google’s “research” departments? While even the modern Apple isn’t perfect, you can tell that research, marketing, and operations are in alignment to create products that have a story to tell.
When Apple doesn’t have a story to tell. It’s very obvious - the first generation Apple Watch.
Sorry if I don't get the sarcasm but OpenDoc was the typical big entreprise sales/marketing driven project, with corporate partnership and architectural concepts having way more weights than engineering and usage realities. This was nowhere near the original Apple ADN and was more of a typical enterprise IBM services project. It's a no brainer it was shut down given Steve vision for Apple.
The initial OpenDoc architecture came out of ATG, but by mid-1992 it had been folded into the AIM Alliance, a shared Apple, IBM and Motorola group. IBM contributed SOM, which was architecturally very heavy/baroque. By 1996 OpenDoc was folded into the OMG umbrella and then it really became bogged down in design by multi-corporate consensus.
Jobs' personal falling out with Sculley is well-documented, not least in the Isaacson bio. Now I suspect there were also hard policy disagreements behind Jobs' departure which haven't got enough attention (I think that NeXT is probably very close to what Jobs had wanted to do as an initiative inside Apple, while the more conservative Macintosh II "Big Mac" is what Apple did instead) but the personal drama was quite real.
That's a hard hypothetical question, and the failure of NeXT to sell hardware doesn't give that much insight into the answer. What Apple (near-)ideally needed in the mid-to-late '80s was probably both a high-end Macintosh offering and an in-house NeXT: ideally on the same hardware like the early OS X-compatible Macs, though that was probably not a hard necessity in the early stages. Whether Jobs could have been made to go along with that mixed approach is unclear. However we do know that without Jobs Apple flailed around with Taligent/Pink for so long that it almost destroyed the company while NeXT shipped before 1989. (Why Apple didn't just choose to get serious about A/UX is another mystery.) What really seems to have hurt NeXT, at least as a Macintosh competitor or successor, was lack of support from the important Macintosh ISVs. An in-house Apple NeXT would have had a much better shot at charming or squeezing the ISVs into supporting the platform, though again there are questions such as when or if a never-fired late-'80s or early-'90s Jobs would have gone along with something like Carbon. Similarly the Apple branding and imprimatur would have helped to reassure purchasers who were leery of jumping ship to an independent NeXT. By contrast the high cost of NeXT hardware was probably not a critical problem, at least for the NeXT as a next Macintosh: Macintosh IIs cost about the same as equivalent NeXT systems. And in any case NeXT's cost problems seem to have been partly due to the expense of its own, gold-plated manufacturing operation, something even Jobs would not have replicated at an Apple-internal NeXT. The independent NeXT was also hindered by the legal agreements and legal actions between it and Apple. Finally, it also faced increasing pressure to turn a profit at a time when Apple was highly profitable and would have been able to treat an in-house NeXT as a vital strategic investment in its future.
Apple was very successful in the 80s and was more profitable than MS up until 1993. Teo things almost killed Apple in the mid 90s.
They didn’t focus enough on market share around 1988-1993. They focused on high margins. When Windows 3.1 came along, it was good enough. But even as late as 1992-1993, they were the number one or number geo computer seller.
Next was a high end product. Apple needed to be more mass market.
Apple did fall behind Windows technically from 1995 - 2003. But remarkably enough, they were able to sell enough Macs running pre OS X to become profitable.
And Kazaa before that, although I don't know how much he made out of it, then Rdio. All based on the same core P2P discovery, peering and negotiations protocols.
You could say Gates made 3 fortunes. The first was with BASIC on microcomputers, then it was DOS, and then 32 bit Windows.
While this was all with the same company, most microcomputer houses failed the transition to DOS, and the DOS powerhouses failed the transition to 32 bit machines.
Microsoft has since made another transition to the internet, one that many failed at.
Selling basic most likely didn't get them a fortune though. DOS was the real moneymaker, and Windows, had its success derived from DOS.
They did make a successful transition to Applications though, at a time when Lotus 1-2-3 was making a killing and Lotus was the biggest personal computer software company.
The cloud transformation too is likewise big, quite possibly securing Microsoft the company for the long run, but Gates is not involved in day to day any more for MSFT.
They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and while it did WYSIWYG layout like nobody's business, it wasn't really ready for any document-heavy work (legal, etc.). Approach wasn't half bad, though. WordPerfect offered Quattro Pro as a spreadsheet and Paradox as a database, but it was defintely a bunch of applications in a box rather than an office suite.
Word had the advantage of the move to Windows and WYSIWYG - WordPerfect for Windows (and WP6 for DOS in WYSIWYG mode) meant nearly as big a change as moving to Word did, so n o loss there. The Excel crew had gone way out of their way to make everything 1-2-3 compatible. And Access was less wacky than Paradox, so the dBase croud didn't miss Borland all that much. None of the Office apps were, by themselves, at the top of the game at the time, but they were all good enough... and they worked and felt as if they were all of a piece.
Microsoft made a lot of money from MS Basic back in the day, it was the standard Basic for most machines long before MS-DOS. This mattered because it effectively made software portable between machines regardless of what OS it ran on. An MS Basic program written on a Commodore machine would run fine on an Atari, a Superbrain, TRS-80, Apple II or later an MS-DOS machine. As a result Microsoft was a major player in the microcomputer software space years before MS-DOS.
Well...not so much that second to last sentence. Yes, they had the same MS-Basic core, but each manufacturer added additional features (and took away some as well), so that a BASIC program from a C64 couldn't run on an Atari or an Apple without some serious rewriting.
Those sorts of features mostly only mattered for games, but even at that time Microsoft was mainly aiming at business users and business programs, and licensing value added features such as the MS Basic compiler.
Note that Atari BASIC for the 8-bit computers wasn't made by Microsoft and is incompatible in some ways. Microsoft did port BASIC to the Atari computers, but not until 1981, and it was much less popular.
Yep, that was what finally made him a billionaire. Probably Apple phase 2 well surpassed that by the end, but I think the first fortune is the most important Apple 1. Millionaire by 21 I think.
Jim Jannard made a fortune on Oakley sunglasses and then later went on to found RED digital cinema cameras, almost singlehandedly destroying the film cinema camera business in the process.
The jury's still out on Musk. I wouldn't be surprised if incumbent automakers beat Tesla to dominate the electric car market or the space launch sector dries up, and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyperloop.
Which isn't to say he didn't show the world that you can build an electric car with Lithium ion batteries that looks better than an Prius.
Eh... how long does it take to call somebody a success? Everything can happen in the future.
The change Elon Musk brought to the EV industry and rocket launches is permanent. Doesn't matter what happens to his companies in the future. What he did has changed both industries permanently. Everybody is making an EV now and everybody is trying to make some sort of reusable rocket.
>and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyperloop.
One of the things to keep in mind about Musk's various projects is that every single one of them has a practical application for Mars colonization. Reusable rockets to get to Mars relatively cheaply, solar panels/grid-scale batteries to keep the colony powered, and mass quantities of phase-array networked commsats instead of laying thousands of kilometres of fiber are the obvious ones, and discussed at length everywhere. But the others are worth fleshing out.
The trick to colonizing Mars quickly is to deliver the most bang-for-the-kilogram in landed mass. If a single Starship can land enough material to build a few big oxygen and methane tanks, all you have is a few big oxygen and methane tanks. If it lands enough mass for a "The Martian" style Aries-type habitat, all you have is a habitat. But if a Starship lands a few fast, miniaturized, automated, and electric tunnel-boring systems and the spare parts to keep them maintained, you can build as many radiation-proof habitats and oxygen/methane storage tanks as you can - underground. I would bet good money on the very first Mars-landed Starships having at least one full tunnel-boring rig (with spare parts) on board each one - if not for immediate use under time-lagged remote control, then in preparation for direct operation by the first landed humans.
As for hyperloop, it's a heavy-cargo electric train designed to run in atmosphere that's 1% the thickness of Earth's. On Mars you wouldn't even need to enclose the rails. This is what you'd want a decade down the road for transporting mass quantities of ice to methalox production/storage sites. Of course it's far less practical on Earth than current alternatives, which is likely why Musk's total Hyperloop involvement is limited to a SpaceX-sponsored tech demo. And I think they're only doing even that minimal investment because they want to see how electric trains work at Martian atmospheric pressure.
> The jury's still out on Musk. I wouldn't be surprised if incumbent automakers beat Tesla to dominate the electric car market or the space launch sector dries up, and I'd be shocked if there's a viable company in either the Boring Company or hyper-loop.
I would consider it Tesla’s and Musk’s ultimate success if/when the whole auto industry moved away from internal combustion engine. iirc this is how musk defines his own success as well.
I also think the notion that Tesla is going to go away over night when Volkswagen “gets there” is nonsense.
Homework:
1. Use an infotainment system from an “old guard” car maker.
2. Use Android Auto, CarPlay or the Tesla dash.
3. Repeat 1.
So much of the experience of your car is terrible because it’s an afterthought to these companies. They hire people to tick a box at the least expense possible.
I drive a Nissan Leaf. The build quality is pretty good. The battery life isn’t spectacular but it wasn’t particularly expensive either, and it’s all I need...
Carmakers should just give up on the infotainment system and simply provide a docking bay for your phone.
Last week I rented a car. I gave up on the inscrutable infotainment system and just used my phone, with it flopping around the car because there was nowhere to fix it in place.
Edit: the phones are not just better, they are constantly being improved, and the car system stays static. The phones also cost next to nothing compared with replacing a broken system in your car.
Tesla car system gets continuous improvements, for sure much more than any android phone that after 2 years in the best case doesn’t get any more updates.
The infotainment System is also otherwise known as a radio and navigation system. VW does those well enough and it also integrates with car play and android auto.
Android Auto now works on a handset over bluetooth. Apple being Apple, you have to buy an entire new head unit or a new car with built-in Carplay to use it.
My Leaf’s functionality is so tied up in the dash unit that it can’t realistically be replaced without losing access to critical functions. Ironically, the very lowest end model is the only one that can have it’s head unit replaced - and I’d have bought one except it mandates leasing the battery which wasn’t for me.
Not everyone can replace their head unit and most used econoboxes do not have head units anywhere close to recent enough to support either platform.
> I would consider it Tesla’s and Musk’s ultimate success if/when the whole auto industry moved away from internal combustion engine. iirc this is how musk defines his own success as well.
That sounds like a pretext to call victory when faced with an unavoidable defeat, similar to the fox and the grapes fable. The auto industry was already moving to electric cars prior to Musk.
For example, the Toyota Prius was released to the general public in 1997, having won Car of the Year in 1998. Tesla was founded in 2003.
Arguably Musk's contribution was dispelling the notion that electric vehicles were just glorified golf carts made for flimsy Europeans, and in the process marketed a Veblen good that just so happened to be an electric car.
> For example, the Toyota Prius was released to the general public in 1997, having won Car of the Year in 1998. Tesla was founded in 2003.
But the Prius is not an electric car. It's a petrol-electric hybrid where the electric part is merely a clever way to optimise the petrol engine usage. You can't drive more than 1 or 2 km with the electric motors.
Indeed even now Toyota don't have any fully electric models and they are very much behind the other manufacturers in other than hybrid technology. So I can't say that Toyota is a good example for this.
At that time Unix was 20 years old, now it's 50 years old.
Well still be running Unix, or its clones for trademark purposes, in a hundred years. Maybe several hundred. I wonder what other operating systems are likely to have that sort of longevity.