- Right off the bat, #1 prediction is a slew of new Apple products, most of which I think are no-brainers, except "...two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too." WTF?? I cannot see Apple releasing a product with those specs. I agree with the concept, however - a touch-screen Mac that's meant as a media center might find an audience, but a) they would not do plasma, LCD or some flavor of digital, at costs lower than anyone has previously managed to negotiate, and b) they would not be marketed as TVs. If my read on Steve is correct, he doesn't think the living room is going to sprout a computer, he thinks the computer room is going to sprout a TV, which may then find a spot in the living room. In other words, convergence is going to happen from the motherboard, not the cable box. Not sure I buy that, but I certainly don't believe that Apple is going to release a big-screen, Intel-based plasma display. Bollocks.
- Number 3: Apple will offer limited support, via the web and hosted user communities, of OS X on any Intel hardware. I'm on the fence about this. Of course they'd profit a bit from selling the OS to curious/frustrated PC hardware owners, but would they risk cannibalizing their hardware business this way? Feature-by-feature cost comparisons of the Apple and Dell offerings may be favorable, but let's be honest - you can get a stripped down PC, or even build one yourself, for much less than the cheapest Mac models. It's going to be a tough choice for the cash-strapped Mac faithful to turn away from Apple's hardware but not their software, but it won't be a choice at all for the PC crowd. It feels like a move to support OS X on all Intel (and AMD??) hardware would forever doom the Apple hardware to it's tiny market share.
- Number 13: "Google WON'T go head-to-head with Microsoft for a desktop operating system or a cheap PC." Why not? I mean, the obvious reasons are that Google has no OS experience, no hardware-building experience, and MS is still far and away the market gorilla despite stumbling with Vista's delivery and feature set and taking huge hits on the security front. But all monopolies have to end at some point, and why not start now? Obviously my loyalties are with Apple when it comes to taking market share away, but Google certainly has some bright and innovative programmers on staff who could take the desktop in exciting new directions. When I put it that way, it would seem that Apple has something to fear from Google, perhaps close to as much as they have to fear from Vista stealing all their best interface and feature ideas. Google should grab a toehold by offering a very-low-cost PC with an incredibly basic OS that depends on the Internet for many applications. Windows Live, but done correctly, without subscription profits as its raison d'etre. Geeks would review it poorly for lacking "key" features like the ability to run all downloadable software or create indexes in word processing docs, but geeks always overestimate the number of features the average user actually uses. If Google is smart enough to include only the most popular features in their Google OS, they'll capture some users. Not many, but it would be a start.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Cringely's 2006 Predictions
Cringely, as always, offers thoughtful and interesting predictions that anyone interested in the business of technology should read. I take issue with a couple of things though:
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6 comments:
I agree with that first one. Why would Apple bolt commodity hardware (i.e. a plasma TV) onto one of their boxes when they will just get slaughtered by Sony in the TV department anyway? The Tivo model clearly works! Why not just copy that?
By way of addressing #3, let me introduce Dr. Funke's Postulate: we tolerate Apple software so that we can use Apple hardware. Their OS is nice and everything, but it feels really sluggish and all the necessary software is written for Windows. Plus, news flash, running OSX on vanilla Intel boxes will not make it fast all of a sudden!
So, why would anyone want to jump through hoops to run a sluggish, esoteric OS on a non-Apple box? (Ubergeeks are an obvious exception to that question.) Further, why would Apple do anything to encourage it?
Here's a more plausible situation IMHO: Apple or Apple + Microsoft optimize Virtual PC (or equivalent) to run Windows within OSX at near native speeds. Plus, they build in all kinds of "safety" features like software install rollbacks, instant reimaging, etc. Then the state of the art becomes "run your necessary-but-buggy OS (Windows) within your rock-solid-but-niche OS (X) and get the best of both worlds!" Who wins? Apple, because there is one less barrier to people buying their boxes. Who else? Microsoft, because the Windows experience can now be had on Apple hardware. Who loses? Dell, big time, and other Wintel vendors.
Imagine a world where you can do your fun stuff, web surfing, email, media stuff, etc. from OSX and instantly jump out to Windows to handle work stuff, gaming, programming, etc. I'd pay a decent premium for that. Apple cannot go head-to-head with MS in the OS category! Do they finally realize that?
#13, Google, I agree. Google is showing signs of being a big stupid company like all the ones they are not supposed to be like. Did you hear that gmail account names can have a dot in them, like tobias.funke, but that that account gets confused with tobiasfunke on the back end? Rookie mistake.
Thing is, Google has their desktop search thingy sitting on a million desktops already (which is actually a tiny local web server). That looks like a Trojan horse to me. They don't need to create a full-blown OS when they have their code running everywhere already. I don't know why they haven't done more with that so far. Anyway, their ergonomics expertise is clearly lacking so I don't think Microsoft (or especially Apple) needs to worry any time soon.
See, obviously I disagree about "tolerating" the software. I go back and forth between Mac OS and Windows all day long at work, and I'm about to throw Windows through a wall, especially on the server side. Macs never seem to be as ornery or difficult to configure, and that saves me, as an admin, a hell of a lot of time. I agree that the interface feels sluggish without a dual-G5 and a beefed-up graphics card, but I hardly notice that when the intuitiveness of it all makes the OS get out of the way. Windows is *always* in my way. And its own.
Why can't there just be two instances of an OS booted in a box at one time? Screw the Virtual/emulated stuff, just give me a virtual KVM where it's all running on the same box. Who ever said that booting couldn't do simultaneous OS's? If I could switch to a fully-functional Windows box for gaming with an alt-keystroke, I'd be all over that.
I think of emulation as basically dual-boot without the reboot. The "virtual" part is important though, because you need to make sure misbehavin' Windows is completely firewalled off from the host system; read: a virus on the hosted Windows OS can't do anything to the hosting OS.
Maybe I should have written: "we tolerate the lack of Apple software so that we can use Apple hardware." Their stuff's ok, but that's just it--most of the good stuff is actually made by Apple. They consistently squash any innovation by promptly coming up with a competing app. Their reward for this policy is a still-tiny ecosystem of unique 3rd party applications. I think it holds them back.
I think I've probably been living in the world of MacOS for so long that I don't know what a real pool of 3rd-party apps feels like. Apart from some video codecs, I've not felt like there was important shareware/freeware that I was missing out on. But perhaps I just don't know what a developer community looks like?
I'm also a newbie about emulation, but basically my understanding is that the OS doing the piggybacking, i.e. Windows in the case of Virtual PC, is still running atop the MacOS kernel, which necessarily takes away CPU cycles, memory space, and whatnot. Therefore *all* emulation is going to be slower than running the OS at boot level, no? My question is why can't the OS's somehow relinquish *all* system resources and still both be on at the same time? Would this require a fundamental hardware redesign? I guess it would mean developing a near-instantaneous boot cycle, or memory swap routines, plus BIOS modifications. In any event, in my "design" the firewalling would be complete save for anything that infects the BIOS proper, because there would be no simultaneous resource sharing between kernels.
I think some megabox mainframes have a way to completely segregate various instances of the OS onto completely separate parts of the hardware. I think I remember once hearing about an IBM RS6000 running 100 instances of Linux at once or something. Anyway, not a big deal to anyone in the real world. Emulation would definitely be slower, but the real slowdown in the past has always been the Intel->PPC translation, which will be gone on the new Macs. I find that the most significant slowdown in Virtual PC is disk access, but maybe flash memory will offer a way out there.
Anyway, the idea of running a "disposable" copy of Windows on top of a "permanent" copy of OSX is cool to me, especially if it all happens on Mac hardware.
Good comment thread on Slashdot about booting XP on an Intel iMac.
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