There is a really key quote towards the end of this piece that really captures the spirit of this post, and that's from Satya Nadella. I'm including it in its entirety because I think it does a really good job at summarizing what Ben is writing about here:
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about."
The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way.
> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life".
> When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser.
> There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft.
In your example MS is the app, not the OS. The 'abstractions' that let apps run everywhere that matter nowadays are Unix (MacOS/Linux/Android/iOS), the JVM and the browser. And if we want to talk about an actual OS that runs everywhere, it's only Linux that's running truly everywhere: on servers, consumer devices and IoT devices. Or on the level above that, the browser.
You guys lost out on mobile years ago, now it's just Office, Azure and XBox; admittedly some big businesses there, but far from the layer of abstraction that "everything" runs on...
And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year, I’m not sure it was a bad thing that Microsoft loss and instead makes money by selling apps that run across all platforms.
Yes I realize tte citation is old. But Android was already just as dominant as it is now by 2016. I doubt the fundamentals have changed.
And no phone maker is making any real money except for Apple and Samsung and Samsung only makes money because it builds its own components.
> And ends up paying its major competitor $18 billion+ a year
How much more would they be paying if Android didn't exist? How tempting would it be for Apple - as an intermediary - to make its own search service that would immediately hit Google's top line? How much revenue would Google lose in that scenario? Sometimes it pays to take the smaller loss to avoid larger losses.
I can’t find it now. But someone actually did make a web interface for Apple’s search engine powered by “AppleBot”. It’s used in different parts of iOS. It’s horrible.
If you have ever tried to find anything in the App Store, you know that the last thing that the world wants is an Apple powered search engine. Most people would just go to Google anyway.
Apple maps was horrible...at first (and still is in parts of the world). A full-throttled attempt at Apple search would likely go the same way: not great in the long tail, but acceptable or even good for a decent proportion of users.
The only thing it took to improve maps was more data, acquiring companies and hiring experts. Directions are a hard problem. But at the end of the day it’s just programming.
Search at Google’s scale requires massive infrastructure investments, the top ML/AI experts and the constant feedback loop of users. Apple has demonstrated it sucks at everything that Google is good at. It’s an institutional problem.
Having its own mapping infrastructure was a core business need and really there are only two or three companies in the world that are good at it.
I didn't say Android or Linux make as much money for companies as MS does off, say, Office, only that it is the OS that runs the most devices and websites we interact with.
Winning looks like a race to the bottom because the abstraction layer matters less to consumers than apps.
Not only the Web, we are now doing at large scale what Xerox, Sun, Apple, IBM and Microsoft envisioned during the last century, distributed computing with RPCs.
The Web is only one form of exposing those RPC endpoints.
This ^ is spot on. While the general 'abstraction' argument is spot on, MS is in fact poorly placed to be the 'OS' that becomes that abstraction. In fact, arguably it doesn't even need to be an 'OS' level concept. An example is google docs or WhatsApp. I can work on documents seamlessly across different actual 'OS' because the application abstracts that away - and it is sufficient. If an OS were to abstract all of this, it would also involve numerous compromises, notably on the tightly integrated end-end experience (hardware to UX), which is Apple's entire strategy against the likes of Microsoft.
So no MS is not the best situated to be that 'OS'.
1. It is unclear if such an OS (with the benefits and trade-offs) will be preferred to a world where cross-OS applications can abstract away the OS.
2. Someone like Google (minus their execution woes that seem to get worse in recent years) is better positioned to abstract away the complexities for a regular consumer.
Paraphrasing Sun, the network is the computer, so it is a matter of who has more valuable distributed computing APIs and how they are exposed to the world.
Microsoft is simply making more money from more customers on it.
Google Workspace is the main competitor, but they're not the front runner, they're second place.
Things like Apple Pages and Keynote are only used by a small fraction of consumers. They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
> They're not taken seriously as an enterprise productivity solution by anyone.
Because anyone who can create a great presentation would never think of things as "enterprise productivity solutions". They'd just make an awesome presentation.
Right, that's exactly it. You can create a great presentation... but you can't collaborate on it online integrated with your office's directory of contacts, create todo items from within it that show up on people's calendars, embed live figures from your colleague's modeling spreadsheet, get signoff on it from colleagues as part of a standardized process, and so on.
If you're using Keynote to make an awesome presentation as a solo project, it's fantastic. If you're using it for enterprise productivity, it's a non-starter.
You're using the phrase "enterprise productivity" to describe what I think are some of the optional features of Office, and at least some of which are probably a bad idea.
Getting signoff from a standardised process aside of course; any tool can participate in that.
Apple Pages, Notes and Keynote on iPhone could do with more user-ability testing at the back of an Uber, Didi, train, taxi or bus. Make it easy to bullet point and page separate. Sometimes you feel the iPhone apps don't get dogfooded by the Apple developers and those apps are only there to fill in a tickbox for someone souless.
For sake of argument, not Apple because they are too close to the HW (specifically their own), and not Google because they are too far away from the HW (completely fractured).
MS is somewhat unusual in that they are, in some sense, "about" providing a platform but not really capable of consistently knocking it out of the park hardware-wise.
Apple is Apple only, and is an upmarket status signal. Not a good fit as a cross-device services layer, which is what Thompson is talking about there.
Google is moving in that direction (including hiring a former Office exec to run Workspace), in providing an integrated bundle. They're just behind, and have been fucking around with their chat, which is one of the cornerstones of the cloud platform.
As Thompson notes, Teams was built to be the "web OS" from the get go, not a Slack clone even though most thought it was one. In Thompson's view, the best players to try to be the web OS are chat providers (due to chat network effects) and cloud storage providers. You can already see Salesforce and Dropbox making moves in that direction.
To quote:
> This is what Slack — and Silicon Valley, generally — failed to understand about Microsoft’s competitive advantage: the company doesn’t win just because it bundles, or because it has a superior ground game. By virtue of doing everything, even if mediocrely, the company is providing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, particularly for the non-tech workers that are in fact most of the market. Slack may have infused its chat client with love, but chatting is a means to an end, and Microsoft often seems like the only enterprise company that understands that.
...
> Here’s the thing, though: Dropbox absolutely is better than OneDrive. Google Apps are better at collaboration than Microsoft’s Office apps. Asana is better than Planner. And, to be very clear, Slack is massively better than Teams at chat. Using all of them together, though, well, it sucks: the user experience that matters for me is not any one app but all of them at once, and for the way I want to work, having everything organized in one single place is simply better (and that’s even with the normal spate of maddening Microsoft UI oddities!). In this Teams is less a chat app than it is a file explorer for the cloud generally, and Stratechery LLC specifically.
(me again)
Google, in theory, has the pieces to do it. But they're just behind in many ways - compliance, Microsoft's MSP network and sales staff on the ground, management tools, stuff like that. And there's the other question of "do they have enough at least mediocre things integrated together well enough" to make the play. They might, but not yet.
You're not alone - I more or less bailed around the iPhone/iTunes start, once amazon gave me a way to 'own' my music outside of an OS/hardware dependent ecosystem, I left. Apple makes everything wonderful if you never leave their walled garden, but I operate linux servers, I support mac engineers, and I provide service to windows clients. The only OS that makes supporting all three harder is macOS.
Interestingly. Thats the main reason im still on an iPhone.
I dont use Apple Music or iTunes anymore, it has caused too many headaches.
But i DO use PlexAmp. And it works great, works with FLAC, will transcode, and allows you to selectively cache things.
Its not perfect. There are hiccups with transitioning to Carplay for example. But in general, if not for PlexAmp, i likely would have ditched iPhones after having them since roughly the 3gs (with a few google/Android phones smattered in between, namely the Nexus One and Galazy Nexus).
You can download all your itunes music onto your local HD for archiving, and in fact itunes will detect they have better versions of your current music (if you add it to the library) and download the better version.
Is there something specific you found unacceptable?
What were your issues? I prefer it because its unix based. It makes it a lot easier to work with open source software that assumes you are using a unix based system, and its easy to write a bash script to save you a lot of gui work.
Just wanna add that WSL(2) is one the best things Microsoft has ever done, and has opened up Windows as a true developer's OS. The universality is amazing, and now I feel like I can truly use almost any piece of software OR hardware I can dream of (short of MacOS exclusive software, which is mostly creative media stuff anyway).
I was recently blown away when I was using WSL and accidentally launched the GUI component of an ubuntu program. A native ubuntu UI popped open, fully maneuverable over my Windows desktop environment.
I'd counter that with the advent of apps and services (SaaS) is essentially the operating system now. The notion of "there's an app for that" and most mainstream apps are cross platform, so they are the thing that binds to our daily lives more than some HW abstraction OS.
I can use various SaaS to do everything and it doesn't matter if I'm running a device from Microsoft, Apple, Google or third-party Android device builders.
The OS doesn't matter at all for the majority of users.
For personal use, I'd mostly agree, but without a common identity over those SaaS services the user experience isn't as ideal as it could be. As a simple example, consider how you would share a file between two different identity systems - you can't - you effectively have to use the security by obscurity trick of "whoever has this link can {read|write} this file".
In enterprise use cases where the company pays for the service, you really want to integrate these SaaS services into a common shell and this is the role that Teams plays. You get single sign-on with enterprise credentials, a way to share data with those 3rd party services, and a way for multiple users in your organization to collaborate together with those 3rd party services.
This is the place where Microsoft is currently in a leadership position. Teams is increasingly viewed as being the "cloud OS shell" for enterprise users. Ben has written about this for quite some time - see this earlier piece from 2020: https://stratechery.com/2020/the-slack-social-network/
Agree. I think the so called "cloud" is _the_ abstraction layer for apps and even across apps. Anecdotal example that just happened to me, I'm reading a PDF on my iPad with an app called PDF Expert. When I highlight text in PDF Expert, I'm able to see the highlight in the native PDF Reader on iPad OS, and also when I open the file in the Kindle app, I get prompted to pick up from my last read location (from PDF Expert). All of that is possible because I store and read the same file from an iCloud drive.
The ability to share state between apps and in a format that they can consume and mutate is they key here, so the user does not think about what software OS is actually running underneath, or even which application. The latter still needs more work to allow interoperability based on standards, the missing ingredient there is motivation not technology.
I use a Linux laptop with my favourite applications (vim, vim-wiki, Firefox, pass). I don't try to integrate across devices, I just take it around with me.
I've found that so much of what I used to have centered around Google has moved over to Micrsoft for me. I don't pay for anything (or very little) Google wise but pay for Office monthly. If Microsoft had a GOOD Google voice competitor, well ...
I think, we used to called that cross-platform applications not Operating System. Honestly, it sounds trying to too hard to sound like sell a vision that already exits for a while. That's not a new idea IMO. Java wanted that, Adobe has been trying to do that with their CC stuff, Google has been on it for a while, Apple does that within its own ecosystem for all devices you would want to use (iCloud, handoff for applications, AirPods ...). I don't know why Microsoft is frontrunner with this. Microsoft probably can work with more platforms, but I'm not sure it goes deep enough with each other those compared to say Apple or maybe Google.
> The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes
Sadly I'm guessing the seamless interchange (we've seen the ads where people writing something in MS Word on their desktop continues on the sofa on a tablet) requires you to sign in to a cloud service. I'm still a cloud-skeptic (e.g. with Google randomly blocking access to files because of presumed hash-collisions), I guess if I really cared about the seamless integration I'd have to look into OwnCloud.
>
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life
What you are creating is then clearly not an OS, but an abstraction layer over operating systems. In other words: claiming that are creating an operating system this way is in all likelihood a blatant lie.
"An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." – Dan Ingalls, in an article in Byte Magazine, 1981
+1 What really matters are powerful experiences that allow people to get things done, easily. Eliminating workflows. Sorry that's overly simplistic but that's what it is.
This is precisely where I think MS failed miserably with Windows Phone. They had an incredible opportunity: Make a smart phone that is a full, natural, joined-at-the-hip extension of your desktop.
They did not. Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. They were playing "We too" when they should have been playing "Check this out!".
Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone. Add to that an open API for developers to be able to integrate desktop Windows Phone services into their applications and MS would have had the makings of an ecosystem that would have just exploded into the business community in a massive way.
Instead they wasted time and money with an offering that did exactly the same things as any other offering while trying to invent a new UI. The strategy was doomed to fail before the first phone was introduced. They tried to build an iPhone with a different UI when the business world would have energetically adopted a deeply integrated extension to desktops in the form of a smart phone.
To this day, I still think I would drop iPhone in a second if MS came out with a well thought out system along the lines I described above. The paradigm shift (or the twist in thinking) is that the phone is given life as an extension to the desktop experience rather than as an afterthought that behaves as a peripheral. It would be like a sci-fi movie where the person grabs an application from the screen, it materializes as a physical device in their hand and they walk away. When they get to the office they push it into their display and it melds into that system instantly. Sci-fi aside, that feeling and utility would be incredibly useful.
>"Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone."
I feel like the hardware limitations of ~2005-2012 would have made this nigh impossible. I know a few ultra-portable devices were trying to do something like this around that time, but even then they were still well above the size of smartphones. Cellular data and bandwidth was also extremely limited at that time as well, so cloud style/thin client file access would also be impractical.
I can understand wanting to make a new OS/UI because the pocket PC experience was quite clunky and those devices did not have widespread adoption. There was also the novelty factor of using touch and gestures instead of a stylus. Anything resembling the windows/desktop paradigm would have been seen as antiquated. I'm sure Steve Jobs would have exploited that as strongly as he possibly could.
All in all, I like the concept you have presented. I just don't think that it would have been viable at the time and I can forgive Microsoft for making the choices they made back then.
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications, including browsers, would have been a huge step forward and a massive selling point for Windows Phone
What would be amazing about this? I have one subscription to Office365 and I can start working on a document on my Mac and then work on the sabe document on my iPhone, iPad or on the web. I can take calls from my Mac from my iPhone, copy and paste between them, bookmarks are shared, I can send a text message from my Mac, my AirPods seamlessly switch, my iPad works as a second display or I can use my keyboard and mouse to control both.
I'll cut-and-paste the relevant portion of another comment:
"I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference."
That, in the context of that time, would have been amazing.
I paired my AirPods to my phone and they were automatically paired to my Watch, iPad, Mac, and two AppleTVs.
When I put the AirPods in my ear, whether I am on my Mac, iPad or iPhone, sound is automatically redirected.
If I am on my iPad watching a video, and I take a call or start watching something on my phone, the AirPods automatically switch to my phone and the video pauses on my iPad.
When I walk out the house for a run with just my cellular Apple Watch, I start listening to music on my Watch and it switches.
Switching isn’t automatic for an AppleTV since that would be irritating for a shared device. But it will display a pop up and ask do you want to switch.
I've always been a huge fan of how integrated Apple products are. I don't own a mac and only a single phone at a time, but even the integration between itunes on windows and that phone is surprisingly good.
I have 1st gen airpods. I've read bad things about the newer gens (malfunctions and the like). any experience with them?
My AirPod Pros 1st gen did get the buzzing problem after they were out of warranty. I just went into the local Apple Store and they replaced them for free.
> "Instead, they made a separate device. This was, from the perspective of desktop integration, 100% indistinguishable from any of the other offerings out there. "
They made a device which was worse than all of the existing devices. The initial version didn't have TCP /IP support, only HTTP. The app store was full of scams, etc.
There's a valid question about how much usage patterns differ on different form factors.
It feels like the last two points you make contradict each other: there's a huge difference between "extension to desktop" and "pick up desktop stuff and go".
Obviously, for a myriad of hardware and UI reasons, we're not doing the latter typically. The people demented enough to want desktop software in their pocket buy a GPD Win or the like.
The real issue is behaviour patterns, though. Give me the performance of my desktop in a six-inch pocketable device with two day battery life, and I'm still going to use it very differently.
Where do many of us spend most of our workdays? In an IDE or office suite. No matter what you do, you're not going to be able to shrink those down and be usable for anything but the most trivial tweaks on a six inch screen with a glass keyboard. We sort of saw this attempted in the early days of Windows CE/Pocket PC with its silly little Portable Office apps. A docking station might make it usable when I get BACK to a desk, but at that point, I may as well just be using the phone as an expensive flash drive for sneakernet.
Okay, maybe gaming? Potentially, if done right. Genshin Impact making 82 bazillion dollars out of a game that scales from phones to desktops is the poster child. But as anyone with a Steam Deck can demonstrate, you have to pick stuff that was designed to work well with the form factor. That undermines the dream of "the entire universe of cool stuff your desktop has to offer".
Media consumption? Even that's different. People may prefer local storage to streaming due to unreliable/slow/expensive mobile data, and the media they consume is often different too. I don't want to binge 90-minute episodes of anything on a phone.
So we've basically tossed out most of the obvious answers for "seamless desktop extension". This means one of two things:
1) We're drilling in the wrong place. The desktop extensions we need are such paradigm shifts nobody has even given us a good demo
2) The things that define the mobile ecosystem currently-- for example, apps that lean heavily on "it has GPS and cameras", lightweight games, low-commitment consumption of media-- shape the market because they're the best use cases we've found for the form factor.
I liked Windows Phone. I still have three of them in my box of bad mobile device decisions (somewhere I think there's a Palm Pre too) What I liked about it was that it seemed to have a clear and cohesive design language, and it was reliably snappy on cheap hardware. We've basically given up on the former, but Android has managed to close the gap somewhat on the latter, probably mostly through surfing on Moore's Law.
Microsoft could have had one other chance, but I think they've already blew it: as privacy is becoming a selling point (see Apple and DuckDuckGo marketing), positioning themselves as "we have a business model that's not 96% ad-dependent, so we're not going to sell out your personal life for a quick nickel" could have made them the trustworthy choice, but they've burnt through any credibility they had on that front in the last few years.
> Something as conceptually simple as a docking station that instantly brings your phone into your desktop as a first class integrated app, able to interact with other applications
What the hell are you talking about? What does this actually mean in real terms?
Right now Windows already desperately tries to do exactly what you're saying.[1] Do you want a PalmPilot-style sync app? iPad/Mac-style "Universal Control"?
Well, as you can clearly see, it did not. Sometimes --not always-- the right thing to do is to highlight such things.
I am perfectly satisfied with @Firmwarrior's response, which led to posting an explanation of my position. In other words, we had a conversation. Had things derailed into name calling you'd have a point. I did not appreciate you scolding me, but we are all big boys. I'll live.
Ah, sorry man. In my defense, you went on this long exposition that assumed implicitly that everyone at Microsoft has no idea what they're doing. I can appreciate that sentiment, but I got really frustrated trying to parse your "conceptually simple" idea.
Anyway, didn't mean to start a flame war, I was just hoping to make sense of what you were trying to say
I think the bit you missed before your reaction is that this comment was about the decisions MS made back then. Not now. Not today. In fact quite a few of the replies to my comment are from a current frame of reference. Even the link to the current Samsung/Windows integration misses the point (all you have to do is read the ridiculously complex installation and setup instructions to understand).
MS, back then, missed a golden opportunity to create a truly useful differentiated product that, in my opinion, would have had a very high probability of success. The bar wasn’t as high as it is today. Slick, seamless integration between phone and desktop would have been an amazing feature. No, that did not mean running CAD on your phone. Again, the context is 2010, not today. I think that was iPhone 3 era. Something as simple as being able to seamlessly make and receive calls, send and receive SMS and do the same with email with either device, desktop or phone, would have been magical back then. Take a call in the car while you arrive at the office, once you get to your desk you put on your headset and the call continues through your computer. You can send text or links from your PC via SMS to the other person. Record the conversation if needed (with legal provisions in place). Etc. Again, don’t think 2022, think 2010.
Everything is conceptually simple. It is easy to talk about ideas, quite another matter to actually implement them and do it well. Concepts are usually simple; reality is difficult.
It isn’t that MS was full of unintelligent people who don’t know what they are doing. Not at all. The history of business is full of stories of intelligent and very capable people completely missing the mark or failing to recognize a shift in their industry. There’s a great book about this very subject: The Innovators Dilemma. In fact, the author makes the argument that some of these bad decisions are the result of good management.
BTW, I used “seamless” to describe something that is intimately integrated to the system. No installation. Think of good USB peripherals that just work.
Everything you listed requires integration between the hardware and the software running in lockstep. By 2010, Apple had 4 years worth of experience releasing operating systems that shared features between the phone, computer and the iPad.
Apple has also started designing its own processors by then for the iPad and the iPhone 4.
Even the idea of taking a call from your phone and transferring to your computer using the same headset took a specialized processor and micro operating system on the headset to work on AirPods. Microsoft didn’t have tte hardware expertise then and still doesn’t.
Even today in 2022, the ARM processors that MS uses in their laptops are so bad that you can run x86 Windows programs running Windows ARM in a VM on a Mac faster than a Microsoft laptop.
As far as the Innovators Dilemma, the author was completely wrong about the iPhone.
Everything I listed was more than possible in 2010. I have been developing hardware/software products for 40 years. I have absolutely no doubt about that at all. The company that controlled the OS and hardware (MS) had all the freedom, smarts and capability to make that happen. All they lacked --conjecture on my part-- was the vision.
> As far as the Innovators Dilemma, the author was completely wrong about the iPhone.
Have you actually read the book? His iPhone predictions had nothing whatsoever to do with the core ideas, excellent historical perspective and analysis provided in Innovators Dilemma.
Quoting from the very link you provided (emphasis mine):
"It is Christensen’s second theory of disruption – low-end disruption – that I believe is flawed. Christensen first described this theory in Disruption, Disintegration and the dissipation of differentiability, and expanded on it in The Innovator’s Solution. It is this theory that is at the basis of Christensen’s critique of Apple quoted above."
> Everything I listed was more than possible in 2010
Microsoft could have designed a processor like what was in the AirPods in 2010? Five years before Apple?
Besides, by 2010, Apple was already the best in the business at supply chain management and was manufacturing more high end devices than anyone in the world.
What high performance hardware was Microsoft shipping in 2010? The state of the art mobile hardware in 2010 was Apple’s ARM A4 - a 32 bit single core processor that ran from 800Mhz - 1Ghz. It could barely run Safari by 2011 let alone a full office suite.
> Have you actually read the book? His iPhone predictions had nothing whatsoever to do with the core ideas, excellent historical perspective and analysis provided in Innovators Dilemma.
He tried to apply his “low end disruption theory” from the 60s and he was completely wrong about Apple.
> Microsoft could have designed a processor like what was in the AirPods in 2010? Five years before Apple?
The features that would have been ground-breaking at the time did not require the kinds of advanced processors we have today. Not even close. This stuff isn't all that complex. Yes, it would have taken time and effort to implement, yet none of it was anywhere close to impossible for 2010.
Perhaps you are not a hardware engineer? Like I said, none of what I mentioned was impossible or challenging in 2010. Hard work? Yes, of course.
> by 2010, Apple was already the best in the business at supply chain management
No, not really. Excellent, without a doubt, of course.
> It could barely run Safari by 2011 let alone a full office suite.
Again, context is important here. What would have been disruptive in 2010 had nothing to do with running a full office suite or CAD on your phone in 2010. I had both an iPhone and Windows Phone back then. MS could have provided what I would call next-generation integration with the desktop using the hardware of the day. More than capable.
It wasn't an issue of 2010 technology not being adequate for the implementation of such integration. It was a matter of vision, direction or both. Someone, for whatever reason, simply did not make that decision. The decision MS seemed to make at the time was to try to go head-to-head with the iPhone with a product that, in my opinion, did not offer an attractive-enough value proposition. As a result, it was doomed to go nowhere almost from inception.
> He tried to apply his “low end disruption theory” from the 60s and he was completely wrong about Apple.
I think you missed my point. This is not part of "Innovators Dilema". The erroneous prediction you correctly noted was part of different work by the same author.
> No, not really. Excellent, without a doubt, of course.
By 2010, Apple was shipping 50 million iPhones a year and had just started shipping iPads. Under Tim Cook, Apple had been buying up the majority of flash storage for years between the iPods and the iPhone.
Also, while you “appeal to authority”. It’s not like you can’t find information on the web about how far ahead Apple was already starting to become by 2010. In 2013, they shipped a 64 bit mobile CPU years before every one else.
It’s hard to manufacture hardware at scale especially when you can’t just be a piece assembly like Dell and you have to design everything yourself and get third party hardware manufacturers to cooperate.
> I think you missed my point. This is not part of "Innovators Dilema". The erroneous prediction you correctly noted was part of different work by the same author.
How do automated birthing pods and human biomass recyclers affect user identity verification compliance and lifecycle testing requirements? I don't think your plan is well thought out.
"Sometimes I think the new OS is not going to start from the hardware, because the classic OS definition, that Tanenbaum, one of the guys who wrote the book on Operating Systems that I read when I went to school was: “It does two things, it abstracts hardware, and it creates an app model”. Right now the abstraction of hardware has to start by abstracting all of the hardware in your life, so the notion that this is one device is interesting and important, it doesn’t mean the kernel that boots your device just goes away, it still exists, but the point of real relevance I think in our lives is “hey, what’s that abstraction of all the hardware in my life that I use?” – some of it is shared, some of it is personal. And then, what’s the app model for it? How do I write an experience that transcends all of that hardware? And that’s really what our pursuit of Microsoft 365 is all about."
The key part is "abstracting all of the hardware in your life". I use a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an iPhone interchangeably in my life. When I switch between them pretty much nothing changes - I have access to the same core apps: Office, Obsidian, 1Password, web browser. If there were a new device, say some kind of headset, I suspect that would plug right into my existing ecosystem of hardware and software. There needs to be an "OS" that manages all of that, and right now the frontrunner here is Microsoft. That could change of course, but there are so many interesting problems to solve along the way.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft.