Charlie Stross recently wrote up a much-mentioned article which is nominally about why Steve Jobs hates Flash, but actually about what he believes to be Apple’s overall long-term strategy. In it he predicts the death of the Mac and OS X as we know it.
When I read the article, I tweeted:
Indie Mac devs, I recommend you read this: http://bit.ly/9ZJ8Fq I have this thrilling-slash-terrifying feeling it might be true.
My friend Chad Sellers, the indie developer behind the fabulous application Pear Note, responded:
@Chris_Ashworth While bits of that post may be true, most of it sounds like dumb predictions from 10 years ago (e.g. SaaS kills the desktop)
And this morning Chad followed up with a blog post that expands on this position, arguing that “premium computers are not dying off”, and that Stross’s arguments are tired old lines we’ve heard before, and make as much sense now as they did then, which is to say: not much sense at all.
Chad’s a smart guy, and his argument made me take a second look at Stross’s article, trying to figure out why I had felt such a visceral reaction when I read it the first time.
I think I’ve figured it out.
But first, a summary of the story so far.
I believe Stross’s argument may be fairly boiled down to the following:
- “PCs are becoming commodity items” with very little profit. Even premium hardware is vulnerable to this trend.
- Simultaneously, software and data is moving out onto the Internet. The more we see ubiquitous wireless broadband, the less digital stuff will be stored inside the physical computers we personally own.
- To survive the hardware profitability apocalypse, Apple must transform from a company that primarily makes money on the hardware to a company that primarily makes money on the software.
- Conclusion: Apple is trying to build the software of the future (the AppStore ecosystem) and buying up cloud computing companies (Lala.com) which will define what software means in the next era of computing and over which they have total control. That way they don’t have to make money on the hardware, ’cause they’ll own the channel for the software.
Chad’s response is, essentially:
- Don’t be silly. Premium hardware doesn’t die. And everything Apple does is to sell premium hardware.
(Note I say that’s his response, rather than his argument. If you want the argument, read the original.)
My take. FWIW.
You know what? Chad is correct. Stross’s argument doesn’t make a lick of sense. In addition to all the reasons Chad cites, I’ll add one more:
If we’re entering the age of “software as a service”, what the heck is Apple doing building a software channel that is tied to their specific hardware? “Software as a service” does not mean “software compiled for iPhone/iPad/iWhateverTheHellAppleIntroducesNextMonth.” “Software as a service” is hosted on the web. Using the open web standards that Apple supports. In fact, using the web standards that Apple supports so well, that they use them as an argument for why they’re willing to kill Flash. If Apple is trying to own the software sales channel, they’ve left a hole in their plans the size of the Internet. Which I hear is big.
So why did I feel so nervous when I originally read Stross?
Well, mostly I was just being stupid. I didn’t think about his argument carefully.
But another part of it was that I was focusing on small nuggets inside the larger piece. Nuggets that are keeping me up at night. Nuggets like:
- “The PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die.”
- “My take on the iPhone OS, and the iPad, [is] that they’re the start of a whole new range of Apple computers that have a user interface as radically different from their predecessors as the original Macintosh was from previous command-line PCs.”
- “This year, for the first time, the Apple Design Awards at WWDC’10 are only open to iPhone and iPad apps.”
- “I’ve got a theory, and it’s this: Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market.”
Why would I focus on these? They’re mostly just conclusions that, as I mentioned, he fails to back up with good arguments.
But they’re conclusions I have been stumbling toward before reading Stross’s piece. Which painted them in big red blinking letters between the pale gray glow of the arguments around them.
My bad.
FWIW part 2.
So here’s the thing. I actually do think that the cloud computing revolution is happening right now. Yes, people have been predicting it for a long time, but, you know, “the information superhighway” got that silly name way before it actually deserved it. Sometimes the end game takes a lot less time to see than it does to implement.
Back when Jesse Kriss and I were first building QLab, we had the wondrous experience of discovering what a truly beautiful programming ecosystem felt like. We’d need to solve tricky—but boring—problems, and Apple had already solved them. Just a quick search through the documentation and we’d find the Cocoa framework we needed. It felt like magic.
Well, Jesse and I just started building a new product, except this time, yes, the product is on the web. And that magic feeling? It’s happening again. “Gosh, it would be really handy to use HTML 5 web sockets to push update notifications.” “Have you seen PusherApp?” “Gosh, in this spot all we need to do is send a lot of email, and be sure it all just works.” “Golly, those MailChimp guys already do this really, really well.” “What about multi-state load balanced servers that abstract away nearly all the system administration tasks for getting our application up and running and robust?” “Helloooooo, Heroku.”
Jesse likes to say (and I like to agree with him), that we are entering the Golden Age of Internet Development.
And none of this matters.
None of this has anything to do with whether Apple might be planning the demise of Macs as we know them.
After all, Macs are as good a way as any to reach out into that magic cloud of computers in the sky, right?
Actually, that might be the problem.
Computers suck. And it has nothing to do with cloud computing. And Apple knows it.
Here was my response, in three parts to the announcement of the iPad:
Starting to see the critiques roll by: lack of feature X, high price tag Y. First off: folks, remember the iPod & iPhone? Yeah, same deal.
Second: Interaction design. Third: Interaction design. Fourth: Interaction design.
You cannot separate an application from the way you interact with it. It’s just that this part was never a differentiator before. Now it is.
There is a revolution happening here that is relevant to the argument at hand, but it’s not cloud computing or “software as a service”. Those things are good. Those things will happen. Those things don’t matter.
What matters is that computers suck. They just suck. They’ve sucked for a long, long time, and they’re not really getting any better. It’s hard for us to remember how bad they suck, because almost all of us have gotten used to it.
It’s hard to remember how complicated and non-obvious a computer really is. It’s hard to remember how many layers upon layers of mental models and abstractions we have built up in order to let us manipulate the electrons inside this box. And I mean all of us. Not just your grandpa who has no mental model, but has memorized the precise series of button presses that allow him to write and send an email. Not just the mildly geeky computer user who is generally savvy but doesn’t really understand directory structures very well. I’m talking about those of us who program the damn things. Yes, I know some basics of what is happening to the electrons down inside that chip, but to really follow the story of one electron up and down every layer of abstraction until it comes out my printer as my airplane boarding pass? That shit is real, bro.
I am telling you I have watched my mother-in-law, who has chosen not to use computers, try to use a mouse. And I am telling you that she watched her hand move the mouse, and then she looked up to try to find where the arrow had gone. And I am telling you that this makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
I am telling you that .
And not only does Apple know it, but
Apple is doing something about it.
This, friends, is what thrills and terrifies me.
If you’ve used an iPad, you know that this is a different way of connecting your brain to a computer. It’s a better way. And if you haven’t used an iPad, you just have to watch a 2-year-old doing it, and you can take the hint.
“Better way? Don’t be an idiot! Have you tried typing on those things?!”
Stay with me buddy, staaaaay with me.
Yes, I know. The iPad is not the pinnacle of human/computer interaction. Typing on them without a physical keyboard stinks. And, well, it turns out it’s actually pretty handy to be able to type words into your computer easily.
I’m not saying the iPad is perfect. I’m not saying that everything the tech industry made up until now was garbage. Yes, computers basically suck, but there’s a reason we use them. Once you get over the suck hump they’re actually pretty handy. And some of the ways we interact with them today are not completely terrible.
But a new day is dawning. And Apple is basically doing it single-handedly. They are redefining what it means for a human to manipulate the electrons in the box, and they are making it better. Significantly better. Paradigm-shiftingly better.
And here, speaking as an independent developer who runs a small software company based on Mac OS X, is where things get… interesting.
When the paradigm shifts, something will be left behind.
In his rebuttal, Chad rightly points to Apple’s most recent earnings report.
Check out that last graph. Down there at the bottom. The one of total revenue. iPhone and iPod? Whupping. Mac’s. Ass.
Simple computers with the world’s best interaction design have, almost overnight, become Apple’s single biggest moneymaker.
[Interjection: DEAR PRODUCT TEAMS THAT STILL THINK INTERACTION DESIGN IS NOT THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE ON YOUR FEATURE LIST—HOW ARE YOU MISSING THIS?]
Apple is not just creating a new kind of computer. Apple is not just creating a new market. Apple is creating a new era of computing — the era of friendly machines. And for those of us who work in this field, this is awesome — in the original sense of that word, where admiration and apprehension mix in equal measure.
But you’ll always need a Mac to run Photoshop
Photoshop? You think Photoshop, or a whole line-up of high-powered desktop apps, can stop this?
Maybe. It’s possible. But as far as I can tell, your Photoshop may not save you.
Look at that graph again. Think about the complexity of the desktop environment. Think about how much it costs to earn that Mac-based revenue. Look at that iPhone and iPod revenue. Think about the comparative simplicity of that ecosystem. Think about how much more money they’re going to make on those devices in the future. It’s not like the iPhone/iPad revenue is flatlining.
Apple is not shy about killing off a successful product to replace it with a new, more successful product. (Hello, iPod Nano.)
Would Apple kill the Mac and OS X ecosystem to focus on the 80 percent of computing activity that works great on the new devices?
No? How much would you be willing to bet? Would you bet the company?
I’ll say this. I definitely don’t know the answer. But I also definitely will not bet the company that the answer is “no”.
Edited May 9 to add: On reflection, and on the observations made in the comments, I’m inclined to refine my outlook on this to the following: Apple may be able to throw out a bunch of desktop software that requires the old style of computer, but the one thing they can’t afford to throw out are the developers, who (currently) still need Macs to write software. So if Photoshop doesn’t save you, XCode may.
Tommy Howells once said:
Truth wanting to lead a quiet life often settles between the extremes.
And that’s probably not a bad bet on this one either. In the mental roadmap I’m trying to form for my company, I’m settling most comfortably near the prediction that Macs will become more of a niche, rather than disappear completely.
But it sure is interesting to imagine what a Mac-less future might look like. And if Apple eventually moves the development environment for iPads on to the iPad? Watch out.
8 Comments
Well said.
As far as Apple ending the Mac to focus on touch devices, I don’t know the answer either. I will say that Mac sales are still a lot Apple’s revenue, and it’s a lot easier to market to a current customer than a new one. Macs sell well to lots of groups (e.g. designers, photographers, filmmakers, students, developers, etc.). I don’t think the Mac will go away until Apple has a story to tell those groups about how a touch device will work just as well for them. I think the Mac is safe for a couple years, but I’ll certainly pay attention to Apple marketing for the first signs a change.
That said, my advice to fellow indie devs is to not worry too much about it. Remember, we’re nimble. Platform changes can really benefit us, as we can move much more quickly than the big guys. One of my biggest competitors on the Mac is actually Microsoft Word in notebook mode. I’m not at all worried about having Microsoft as a competitor on the iPad, as they move way too slowly.
ummm… eeek…
While I used to be a serious programmer (I could trace Chris’ electron to the boarding pass quite handily about 20 years ago) the software development paradigm has completely changed. I saw it coming with the birth of the Internet (yes… I’m that old…) and ran screaming from the industry back to my real passion – live Theatre. However, I’m a very capable end used and it always amuses me when I run into an A+ Certified individual who doesn’t know what a linked list is :-)
But I digress…
The user interface has long been a primary consideration in program development. Mess that up and you might as well try to sell a car with the steering wheel mounted on the trunk. There might be incredibly good reasons for putting it there, but who wants to drive sitting on the rear bumper? The interesting thing is interface design (interaction design these days I guess) is what changed the software paradigm. As Chris points out, miles of tedious code are now solved by a single call to a library – very handy. And rather treacherous. While I joke about the A+ not getting basic data structures, I also worry about their ability to really remain viable in computers. It’s all becoming very specialized and the more specialized a lifeform becomes , the less time it has left to exist. What happens when we altogether forget the underpinnings of the libraries we use to make our lives easier? Or better yet, and this happens often, what have we lost by programmers who don’t understand the basis of the abstraction? Efficiency tends to die when we get lazy – we rely on the easiest way to do something more than the most efficient and the code starts to suck. Hell – I ran a Mac SE with 4MB of ram and 40MB of hard drive for years quite happily. Now code is bloating and I couldn’t even think about running such a machine. Code Bloat rather than feature enhancement is really what’s driving the need for Bigger! Faster! More! More! More!
Having overstated that… One of the reasons I prefer Macs over Windows is the op system just feels cleaner. It feels like, despite the slick interface and whizmos they stuff in, the code is streamlined and efficient. Well, except for Leopard, but they seem to have fixed that in Snow Leopard. That’s also why I always appreciate people like Chris and other folks. They take the time to keep the code moving smoothly and efficiently. Therefore, I’ve set up just ridiculously complicated designs on Mac Minis which had no business even playing back one of my monolithic sound files, but they work. The efficiency of Qlab makes it so. Kudos all around there and thank you, thank you, thank you!
OK – the iPad. It’s fascinating, though I’m less interested in it than some. My fascination is in the way Apple has re-defined user interaction again beginning with the iPhone (and iPod Touch). They did it before when they stole Team Xerox’s ideas for the Macintosh. Oh they may have stolen this idea somewhere as well, but they make it sexy and desirable. And most importantly they make it work! The very idea you could have a touch screen with a fluid user interface back in my programming days would have been a airgot induced iconoclastic hallucination. Yeah, right! And the world is round too… (guffaw) It’s just scary how impressive that achievement is, whoever you want to credit. And it’s scary in what it means to the progress of computing. Apps are legion for these products, I have many on my Touch myself. But quality of the apps? A crapshoot. Some developers are relying on the easy solutions and you can just _feel_ the dirty bloated code in them. That’s the trend I fear. I don’t fear the iPad’s change in the operational paradigm, I fear what it could do to the developer pool. Otherwise, we’ll be back in the same cycle of Bigger! Faster! More! More! More! and haven’t really learned anything.
1/2 diatribe, 1/2 philosophy, 1/2 rant. My usual.
I scored in the low 60s for mathematics on the GRE :-)
@Chad: Well said yourself. I agree that the Mac is safe for at least a couple of years, if not longer. If eliminating Macs is just too crazy, maybe they’d reduce the numbers and categories, and simplify it down to an even smaller selection of machines. Who knows (other than Apple)? Perhaps it’s best to just not worry about it. As you say, we smaller shops can move faster than big companies. They’ll push us in the direction they want us. They can’t sell hardware without someone making it do cool stuff.
Here we go…
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100504/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_apple_antitrust_inquiry;_ylt=AvluXpzBfg_v74BqZs.nAfKs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFoczVwOG84BHBvcwMxMzEEc2VjA2FjY29yZGlvbl90ZWNobm9sb2d5BHNsawNmZWRzdG9sb29rYXQ-
I think your read on Stross’s argument is incorrect.
He’s not saying “PC’s are being commoditized, therefore the play is to make money on the software and not the hardware.” He is actually saying, “PC’s are being commoditized, therefore we need to quickly differentiate ourselves into a company that makes money on the computing experience and the ecosystem that empowers it.” Done right, that means making premium margins on both the hardware *and* the software.
Regarding your assessment that computers suck? You’re spot on. They absolutely do. Everything we take for granted about the computing experience is provisional and a hack. There are definitely better ways to do things.
Photoshop? Logic Pro? Get serious. Those are niche tools used by a small priesthood of practitioners. How about painting with iPad on a virtual 60′ x 60′ canvas? How about letting creative but tool-challenged commuters unlock their potential to compose original music using an iPad-based sequencer? That is a glimpse of the future. And the folks talking about Photoshop and the like are gonna seem as crazy as people defending the printing press do right now.
Apple’s not dumb. They’re not gonna kill off the Mac, the same way they’ve not killed off the iPod Classic. And you’ll need Macs to make iPad apps for a long time to come. But I wouldn’t expect many new Mac-specific innovations in Mac OS. They can add new frameworks that can be leveraged on iPad/iPhone OS *and* Mac OS, and I’d expect to see a LOT of that activity.
But make no mistake, the Mac is going to be relegated to becoming an “authoring tool” for the much wider, much broader iPhone OS-powered ecosystem which is where Apple is betting its future and will make its real money.
@Dave: Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I come to the view that “Macs will be around, they’ll just become a niche tool, while most of the innovation and forward trajectory happens elsewhere”. Which is fine by me.
And at some point the network really will be technologically capable of stepping in where the dedicated hardware once lived. There will be a point when even applications like QLab, that require extremely tight integration with the hardware, will no longer require that integration in the same way. 20 years down the line? When network access is as fast as access to the local SSD drive? Seems like just about any application on my machine today could transform into a hosted application at that point. Which would be fabulous.
Computers don’t suck.
Keyboard + mouse is the best interface for a stationary device. A lot of people tried to reinvent the interface but nothing beats this combination of highly precise pointing device + ability to easily type.
Mobile device creators come up with really ingenious replacements, but no one managed to bring any mobile device to the level of usability of a desktop. You can do EVERYTHING with a desktop. With mobile devices, you are always limited in some ways and it creates that irritating feeling of being in a cage and trying to break through.
Desktop computers becoming a niche tool? Well… if seen that way, computers were always a niche product compared to phones, TVs, toasters and other home appliances. iPad may make a revolution in that area, but aside from being mobile, it doesn’t offer anything to replace a desktop computer.
With iPad etc, people are just going to have more intelligent “radios” and that kind of devices. Pads may kill newspapers and lure away people who have no real use for their computers. But most people do not just “consume information” and I don’t think parents are going to stop buying real computers for their children.
While a keyboard and a mouse are the most common combination for a desktop computer, are they really the ‘best?’ We have a whole generation of carpal tunnel victims that might disagree. Furthermore, the mouse isn’t really a very precise device. When they first came out, an artist was given one to play with and said that drawing with a mouse was like drawing with a potato. Don’t get me wrong, I manipulate graphic information constantly and am pretty facile with my mouse and trackpad. I just don’t think they’re necessarily the ‘best’ solution. I don’t think we’ve found that yet.
But we are pretty set in our ways about these things though, which is worrisome. Anyone remember the Dvorak Keyboard? The tale is the QWERTY keyboard was developed to _slow down_ typists who were faster than the mechanics of a typewriter could handle. The Dvorak was supposed to be a much more efficient layout of the keys. But when it was brought out as the next best thing, it was firmly swatted back to the sidelines as a niche tool. People were used to QWERTY and didn’t want an improvement. So much for innovation – or even just an upgrade…
Then there’s the ‘how does your brain work’ viewpoint. I totally suck at video games that use handheld controllers – input devices that were specifically designed to provide maximum flexibility and control of a virtual experience. Any 8 year old can kick my butt without even looking at the screen – unless I have a keyboard interface. Then it’s ON. For whatever reason, I simply do much better with a keyboard interface. That’s not to say the 8 year old can’t still school me, but he’d at least have to pay attention :-) Often we try to make standardize devices when we as an organism are far from standard in how we operate. Why not have options?
I don’t know that a touch screen is the next best step since it really doesn’t change much in how information is gathered, but it _is_ a step and I find it very important to explore. Hell, without exploring technology, Albert Turing wouldn’t have created his machine and started this whole mess in the first place. The market will tell you pretty quickly what does and does not work. In the case of the touch screen interfaces, we obviously have something that works even if it’s just for novelty’s sake. Maybe that’s a good avenue to explore? Might open up something else creative and interesting.
I do agree that computers (as in desktops) don’t necessarily suck, though. I think they’re simply a part in a path of evolution which is always an exciting time.