Herd Mentality

http://daringfireball.net/2009/10/herd_mentality

by atestu • 17 years ago

108 80 17 years ago

mrfish• 17 years ago

The only equalizer will be applications online. Right now running web os apps suck compared to PC equivilents, but when they don't and people start using them instead of Office, or other programs, then who gives a rats ass what OS we use. We'll all be on dumb terminals and we won't give a shit. That will be Microsofts fall.....or will it? I heard somewhere that their office online product was way better than googles. I don't know.

omouse2• 17 years ago

Hey, it sounds like the late 80s or early 90s! Dumb terminals are coming back in style! Nice, turns up the Nirvana

jballanc2• 17 years ago

Gruber doesn't quite go all the way here, but it's important to note that no company can operate in a vacuum. However, what's important, vitally important, is that you don't operate such that one of your key suppliers is a monopoly! Just look at Apple's suppliers: Intel? They better keep up with AMD or else Apple will do to them what they did to IBM. Flash memory providers? Apple plays so many of them off each other that you can tell when a new Apple product is about to launch just by watching the market price of Flash. Graphics? Apple's been bouncing between nVidia and ATI like nobody's business...

...so really, it's not so much about hardware vs software vs hardware+software. It's that the smart businessperson doesn't knowingly make a deal with a monopoly.

gaius4• 17 years ago

It's that the smart businessperson doesn't knowingly make a deal with a monopoly.

I see what you're saying, but hasn't nearly every Apple customer effectively done that? A datacentre could maybe rip out Xserves and replace them with equivalent 1U boxes running some generic Unix apps (e.g. Tomcat) but anyone who has developed on the Mac platform is beholden to Apple.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, and not that there is an economic way to stay completely platform agnostic, but it does contradict what you say.

euccastro2• 17 years ago

It doesn't contradict it. He talks about Apple, you talk about Apple's customers. Thinking of it from the company's position, other's monopolies are bad for you, not necessarily your monopolistic advantages.

JoeAltmaier2• 17 years ago

Its fun to talk about "breaking free" of your OS vendor. As a foundation for software, and about the cheapest software on the machine, I'm not sure I know what the benefit is supposed to be. "Less unhappy"? With a platform that by definition hosts incompatible apps?

buugs2• 17 years ago

I don't know why he had to bash hp at the end; of course hp is going to be making bargain PCs they need to compete with other producers, apple is about the only one that does not offer full computers for ~$500 but they are most definitely not their rival the rest of the industry is.

mrshoe4• 17 years ago

> I don't know why he had to bash hp at the end; of course hp is going to be making bargain PCs they need to compete with other producers

So, you're saying that HP needs to follow the herd? The entire point of this article is that they don't and shouldn't. That's exactly why he needed to bash HP at the end.

buugs2• 17 years ago

Well neither you or he offered any useful alternatives for what hp should do and I offered reasoning on why they need to sell cheaper PCs

mrshoe4• 17 years ago

If Apple had to compete with someone else innovating on the PC, it would force them to break even further away from the herd. Macs are great, but they still resemble PARC's Alto from 36 years ago far too closely. The times have changed quite a bit. The iPhone is a much bigger leap as a personal computer (smaller leap as a phone, really).

The potential for innovation is there. It would be nice to see that happen on the PC. I hope that "someone else" shows up at some point. Better yet, I hope I can be a part of it. ;-)

Raphael_Amiard• 17 years ago

"Imagine how much better the industry would be if there were more than one computer maker trying to move the state of the art forward."

It would also be a nightmare of complexity.

mrshoe4• 17 years ago

Not necessarily. Web standards could be a great foundation. The web is open and anyone is free to push the state of the art forward. Yet the result has often been more interoperability, not less.

vorador3• 17 years ago

Do you seriously believe that webapps would eventually replace desktop apps ?

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

Because things are so simple on the Windows platform right now?

Every time I have to go back to using Windows I can't believe how many hoops you have to jump through to get anything done.

raintrees• 17 years ago

I agree. Ask someone who was involved with developing Borland's Turbo Pascal. When I used to help duplicate it (think digital Kinko's) we had what seemed like 50 masters to dupe from: DEC Rainbow, Heath/Zenith, HP, ACT Apricot, NorthStar, CP/M, Eagle, Pixy, many, many others. Oh, and MS-DOS and IBM DOS.

pohl• 17 years ago

That was absolutely true way back when the industry was new and there were myriad system vendors with their own operating systems.

We have learned a lot since then, and we know how to address these problems: openly specified document formats and protocols. Programming languages with portable runtimes and libraries. Open source software. Web Applications.

The world is a much different place from when you felt trapped because your Visicalc files were on LDOS floppies that could only be read by a TRS-80 Model IV.

GeneralMaximus3• 17 years ago

I think the benefits of having a diverse OS landscape are much greater than the cost of a little increased complexity. We already have languages that run on virtual machines, and we have the POSIX standard. Software portability shouldn't be a problem.

jodrellblank2• 17 years ago

It should be a problem, otherwise the new OS would be so similar there would be little point in it existing...

shimon• 17 years ago

There are companies that do well by making brilliant things, and there are companies that do well by making commodities cheaply. It's nice when a commodity company, like Acer, makes something that seems brilliant, like a good netbook. And it's nice when a company holds a streak of brilliance for many years, like Apple has.

What makes the HP example sad is that it's a company that has recently been running on the vapors of it brilliant ideas, and is now stuck competing in commoditized markets, where you can really only compete on price. That's not to say HP couldn't survive, or even become more profitable; but for hackers who cherish the creation of brilliant things, it is a painful thing to witness.

On the other hand, this is progress. We have Microsoft's early PC OS monolopy to thank for the wonderful range of cheap, standardized PC hardware that makes linux boxes easy and macs/ipods/iphones mass-marketable.

keltex• 17 years ago

The thing about HP, is they have always made commodity crappy consumer systems as long as I can remember. Compaq, which they devoured, was the quality system maker.

mosburger• 17 years ago

I suspect you're a bit younger than the people who remember HP's greatness, especially their scientific instruments and engineering tools. They also used to be good at making big iron servers (I'm thinking pre HP-UX). Also, one of the companies HP devoured was Digital, who ruled the world with their VAX systems.

The hardware giants used to be the likes of IBM, Sun, Digital, HP, Data General, Wang, Honeywell, and a few others I'm forgetting. The only ones left now are IBM (a services company) and HP (a commodity consumer hardware company). I'm not counting Sun because I expect the Oracle deal to go through.

beamso3• 17 years ago

The irony of an Apple fanboi discussing conformity like this is deafening. Buying Apple is buying conformity.

I suppose with all the downvotes I'll expand.

The conformity is what makes Apple stuff work. A small range of hardware for the chosen operating system. Running Linux or Windows on Apple hardware is hard.

Conformity also happens with the iPhone. Unless I bother to jailbreak my iPhone, I'm forced to use the functionality on my iPhone agreed by my carrier and Apple through the carrier updates.

ptomato4• 17 years ago

Did you ever stop to consider why Apple "fanbois" are? And why, for example, there aren't such people for other hardware or software manufacturers? (Microsoft has a good few, actually, and Linux certainly has some, but the numbers of fanatics for both combined are easily dwarfed by Apple. And no PC hardware company has anything like it.) Certainly many people will buy Apple just because it comes from Apple, but the point is that there was something about Apple that attracted them in the first place; hardware and software coming from a company that actually cares about good design and isn't as tonedeaf as Microsoft's attempts at it have been. There was & is actually koolaid to drink. In any case, Gruber is talking about industry conformity, not consumer conformity, which is a whole 'nother pigeon.

edit to reply to edit:

"The conformity is what makes Apple stuff work."

To a degree, yes. Or rather what makes Apple stuff "Just work." It certainly wouldn't be past Apple technologically to make OS X run on commodity standard boxes, but it wouldn't be a very good business decision. They're a hardware company.

"Running Linux or Windows on Apple hardware is hard."

No, not even a little bit. Well, Windows on PPC would be impossible (unless we're talking about maybe one version of windows NT, I think?) but that's Microsoft's thing not Apple's, in only supporting Intel. Apple's OS these days comes with a utility that makes installing Windows dead easy if you want to, and even if you don't use that it isn't any harder than installing it on any standard PC.

beamso3• 17 years ago

> Did you ever stop to consider why Apple "fanbois" are?

Some of them appear to need to follow the underdog, conform but not conform, or are spoken to through the marketing.

> In any case, Gruber is talking about industry conformity, not consumer conformity, which is a whole 'nother pigeon.

The industry is conforming to follow Apple. HP through marketing. Dell through design. MS through marketing/Zune/Pink. Google through Android.

edit: You jump through additional hoops to get Linux working properly. Video drivers and sound drivers are poor, sound quality is poor. Getting used to the synaptics driver for the glass trackpad was hard. And you need the drivers from Apple for Windows, which they tend to take their time with.

madair• 17 years ago

Totally with you on this. And the herd votes you down (maybe me now too).

rimantas• 17 years ago

How is running Windows on Apple hardware hard?

johnrob• 17 years ago

"Operating systems aren’t mere components like RAM or CPUs; they’re the single most important part of the computing experience"

I think this is rapidly becoming less true with the increasing utility of the browser + web. These days, what I value most in an OS is speed, stability, and staying out of my way.

greendestiny3• 17 years ago

This is a really misleading article. I think people wanted to Apple to license it's hardware in the days of Macs. Then Apple stopped producing original hardware for the desktop/laptop and people wanted them to license their OS for the nearly identical hardware that other manufacturers were making.

The iPhone is a mobile device and lots other companies have produced their own mobile device and OS (or more likely heavily customized from another base). Microsoft itself have produced the Zune and Xbox. Palm has it's line. Nokia uses symbian, which it now owns.

Apple have made good hardware and software, but this is fanboy drivel.

greendestiny3• 17 years ago

Let me put it another way. Apple has stopped making unique hardware for the PC. Yes it sells PCs, but it doesn't innovate on the PC hardware anymore. It innovates on the cases and configurations, but these systems could all run windows or linux. Essentially Apple did start making its operating system for PCs, it just makes it a requirement that you buy the PC from them.

As for the iPhone and mobile market, any number of manufacturers have built hardware and software for mobile market. Apple simply did this by far the best.

ptomato4• 17 years ago

Well, assuming by cases you include things like the magsafe power cord, which is undeniably brilliant and which I hope all laptop manufactures manage to miniskirt around the probable patents for. Or battery life for laptops which unless I'm missed something absolutely puts to shame all similarly-specced generic manufactures.

joecode• 17 years ago

He seems to be neglecting the most difficult aspect of releasing your own OS: getting most developers to port/write software for it.

Apple has followed a peculiar path that has allowed it to successfully accomplish this, but it is very difficult to imagine how Dell could successfully found their own operating system at present.

Moreover, I'm not convinced the recommendation to license their operating system is motivated by herd mentality. It's probably just that people did not believe Apple could get as big a market-share for its own machines as it appears to be getting. As for the recommendation to put Windows on their machines, that just seems, well, stupid, but perhaps I am missing something.

HistoryInAction• 17 years ago

That's kind of the key idea behind Microsoft's building of its monopoly: paying developers to produce software for its OS. Eventually you could get everything for Windows and software at random for another OS. The equilibrium here seems to be a for a single dominant OS maker.

Reminds me of the Dvorak v. Qwerty keyboard layouts. The market has space for a single dominant keyboard type. Individuals can choose between Dvorak (and variants) or Qwerty, but since so many people use Qwerty, everything is designed based on that. If Dvorak reaches a tipping point, everyone would likely abandon Qwerty.

Does anyone thing the expansion of open source makes it more likely that the OS market is trending towards being a multi-power field?

gaius4• 17 years ago

That's kind of the key idea behind Microsoft's building of its monopoly: paying developers to produce software for its OS.

Well, it is more subtle than that. If you are a large corporation, you might have 100,000 desktops, and since Windows came out you might have bought 0.5-1M licenses. That's an awful lot. Why would you do this? Because the software you absolutely depend on to run this business is written internally, and the cost of doing this in a Microsoft tool like VB (historically) is low enough to make it worthwhile. Microsoft has always cultivated its developer ecosystem well. Apple are good now, but I remember the dark days of the 90s when you never knew when a key Apple technology you depended on they would simply abandon (e.g. OpenDoc).

iamelgringo• 17 years ago

Something tells me that the author was never around for the rats nest of incompatible micro computers that arrived in the early 80's: kaypro, osbourne, pet, commodore, texas instuments, ibm, apple, atari, coleco...

All of those computers companies made their own computers and OS's and a completely different stack of software and hardware peripherals. IBM getting into the game and creating a defacto standard with their hardware and software choices helped create a boom in the computer industry that we're still riding.

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

oh man, do i ever not agree with that. i was around for the birth of the microcomputer, and those were very interesting days indeed.

here's somebody else who thinks so as well: "[...] But I think that there will be a good long period of cheerful chaos, just as there was in the early days of microcomputers. That was a good time for startups. Lots of small companies flourished, and did it by making cool things."

http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

as the micro situation "stabilized," with most of the competitors going out of business, the fun went with them. the darkest period in the days of high-tech was when microsoft so thoroughly dominated everything that they were stifling innovation.

sfnhltb• 17 years ago

Less fun, but it meant computers went from being a novelty to the core of the vast majority of businesses. This was not a coincidence.

JoeAltmaier2• 17 years ago

The web is just another OS, with an enormous API and constantly-changing revisions of everything. OSs are not even what most folks mean when they mention Windows etc. They mean the execution environment (runtime,libraries,shells). And the trend is to develop portable environments - JBOSS, .NET, whatever. We are at the beginning of the end of proprietary OS wars - OS will be no more important a decision than your editor or drive vendor, eventually.

anon-e-moose• 17 years ago

What a fucking joke!

Because there aren't thousands of different types of PCs of every shape and size, tablet, netbook, professional laptop, gaming laptop, gaming desktop, small form factor desktop, workstation...

All of these computers could run OS X, but Apple doesn't want them to.

And lest we forget, Gruber's job is to talk up Apple('s stock price). Why anyone should take his opinion seriously is beyond me. He has a vested monetary interest in Apple fanboyism.

jsz0• 17 years ago

Without competition you have one company telling you what a product is. With competition you have consumers telling you what a product should be.

omouse2• 17 years ago

It was at the root of long-standing punditry holding that Apple should license the Mac OS to other PC makers

They did until Steve Jobs killed it.

jws• 17 years ago

It was self defense. No jury will convict him.

Edit: for those who don't recall. The clones were intended to speciate and fill all sorts of niches, but they mostly just built the Apple provided reference designs with maybe the odd extra bus slot or two. They then cannibalized the high end and low end of the market.

They got the high end because as Motorola was ramping up each faster chip, Apple would not release with it until they could ship in sufficient quantity to satisfy demand. The cloners had no such qualms and would happily take the piles of money off of the high paying 'must have the best crowd' with the trickle of fast chips at the front of the production runs, simultaneously robbing Apple of the lucrative consumer's business and delaying the time when Apple could get enough chips to launch their own.

The cloners ate the low end of the market, despite their disadvantage of scale, by making machines a little bit crummier than Apple wanted to build, but also by not paying a large enough licensing fee for the OS to cover their share of development.

abalashov2• 17 years ago

I don't know where the folks responding to this statement by downplaying the significance of the OS by pointing to the increasing importance of the browser and the web in applications are getting this line of reasoning. It's a complete non sequitur.

Sure, web apps and AJAXian techniques may be putting a dent in domains formerly owned entirely by standalone desktop GUI apps.

But your browser is not going to implement your hardware device drivers, I/O subsystems, network stacks, filesystems, and, well, ${insert very long list of other ways in which the OS interacts with the fundamentals of the machine}.

To say, "Ah, well who cares, it's all about the browser now anyway" is really, really missing the point. Maybe Google Docs displaces Microsoft Office, but do you really think you're going to XMLHttpRequest your SATA driver, process scheduler, or IP routing FIB (forwarding information base) away?

patio11• 17 years ago

I'm also confused -- we're going to rip out an entire OS only to replace it with a web browser which is, by design, unobtrusive and supposed to operate like pretty much every other web browser. If you're going to do that, what is the point of developing the OS? You'd be much better advised to just ship Ubuntu and Firefox with a custom theme and the metaphorical serial numbers filed off. (Its a bad idea, but it strictly dominates the worse idea of writing your own OS and your own browser.)

wvenable6• 17 years ago

The low-level aspects of an operating system are now available, for free, to whatever company wants them in the form of Linux. Both of Google's operating systems (Android and Chrome OS) are based on Linux. The Palm Pre is based on Linux. The fact is that even the device drivers, I/O subsystems, network stacks, file systems, and the X number of ways the an OS interacts with the machine are no longer significantly important.

What is important is how the OS interacts with the user. This is where Apple shines. This is also where Google is looking to shine as well. If the user experience can be provided entirely within the browser, why not?

abalashov2• 17 years ago

The fact is that even the device drivers, I/O subsystems, network stacks, file systems, and the X number of ways the an OS interacts with the machine are no longer significantly important.

Because it is readily available in free form, it is no longer important, significantly or otherwise? Seriously?

Yes - it's become more commoditised. No, you can't just "replace" it with a browser. And yes, there is a qualitative distinction in degrees of hardware support and underlying engineering.

wvenable6• 17 years ago

I think a lot of people take Windows for granted. It's amazing that we have one operating system that can smoothly run on the most expensive and advanced PC hardware and run on a netbook that costs less than a really good dinner out. Hardware manufacturers can put other own drivers as easily as anyone can put out software. And the same software runs on PC models from dozens of manufacturers and whatever Frankenstein-PC you can build yourself. Developers can target one API for all that hardware.

The author doesn't seem to think much of that.

Apple is an exception, an outlier, and a niche.

oconnor02• 17 years ago

I agree with everything you say except that "Apple is an exception, an outlier, and a niche." 10 years ago I'd have agreed with you, but I don't think you can say that anymore. Their market share continues to grow, their products continue to improve, & their customers are the most consistently fanatical I've ever seen.

wvenable6• 17 years ago

You misunderstood me. They are very successful (and very profitable) but they're still an exception and a niche. If every PC manufacturer went the same route as Apple, they'd probably all fail.

allenbrunson3• 17 years ago

operating systems are a natural monopoly, due to network effects. it's no surprise that one of them 'won' and captured most of the market. that doesn't mean it's good for the industry, though.

microsoft has demonstrated time and time again that, with windows, they value backward compatibility ahead of almost everything else. it still bears the mark of design decisions made in the eighties. that makes it pretty difficult to innovate in the windows space, even if microsoft wanted to, and they don't.

apple's macintosh is a viable competitor, but they're after a pretty clearly-defined market as well. they've got millions of customers they can't afford to upset.

three primary desktop operating systems is not enough. it retards the spread of new ideas. we are taking too long to get to whatever comes after the desktop gui metaphor, because any company that created such a thing today doesn't stand much of a chance of being able to sell it.

wvenable6• 17 years ago

Microsoft values backwards compatibility ahead of everything else because that's what both users and developers want. Because Apple has never been in the business market, their is very little custom software written for it. They can toss out backwards compatibility every few years and someone will write a new zip utility or port a web browsers. If Microsoft broke backwards compatibility, zip utilities and browsers would be ported too. But companies that have invested literally millions of dollars in their software don't have the time or money to do that.

If Apple were to ever capture (and keep) more than 10% of the market, you'll see that they too will slave to maintain backwards compatibility. Their niche status affords them ability to make the sorts of changes you want.

I don't understand this intense desire for speedy change -- do we really need to replace the desktop metaphor as quickly as possible? Doesn't that just hurt, rather than help, adoption and understanding of computers? Everytime the GUI changes half the planet has to re-learn how to use their computers. If we had more than 3 primary desktop operating systems, all implementing new ideas, the learning curve for users would be impossibly high.

The fact that one operating system won is good for the industry.

mmphosis• 17 years ago

This is a short list of the computers and their makers who have broken from the herd:

Microsoft XBox

Sony Playstation

Nintendo Wii

Apple iPhone

Palm Pre

RIM Blackberry

HP digital cameras

Herd Mentality

Related Stories