Gruber: The OS Opportunity

Read this earlier. Dead on. Any company which cannot build decent software does not have a bright future. Not just in computers -- probably any field. Software is becoming a more pervasive part of life every year. The many who cannot adapt will be easily replaced by the few who can. And with software, it really is easy for one person or company to replace thousands in a single stroke.

For now, though, this effect is probably most visible in the tech field. There's a large and growing disparity in profits between companies which can produce good software, such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, and those which cannot. I suspect this disparity will more and more reflect how the economy functions for individuals. It wouldn't surprise me if the wealth gap further widens every year. I'm not sure if our politicians, society or culture are prepared to deal with it.

OS is more than a kernel and some drivers.

Unless you would consider Android, Palm's WebOS, Nokia's various OSs, Arch and Ubuntu to all be equivalent.

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?

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???

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.