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Well the article talks about responsiveness: BeOS on 10time less powerful HW was more responsive that what we have today, it still failed.

The Microsoft's monopoly reduce competition..

Well... BeOS was very responsive doing nothing.

No apps, no market. Simple as that...

When going against a giant like Microsoft. You better bring a clear value proposition to the table. And as much as I liked BeOS, they did a piss poor job in identifying a clear initial market that would secure at leas some revenue stream.

Of course, MS's anti competitive practice of forcing every OEM to have an MS OS installed by default did not help either. But Be was aware of that from the get go.

One reason is competition. When a dozen different companies compete to sell you a half dozen different solutions, interoperability will go out the window. For something like this to work one company has to supply the whole software stack from the OS (or even the hardware) on up.

As long as your presentation software comes from Microsoft, your illustrating software from Adobe and your video conferencing software is from Skype, you'll never have that level interop. Of course there a plenty of good reasons why competition in software is a good things, but it is not without its costs.

The idea that we need monopolies for interoperability is nonsense. Healthy competition is best for consumers. It encourages portable open standards. Companies are more inclined to obey independent standards if consumers demand it and their rivals supply it.

Perhaps in theory it's nonsense, but reality seems to point that way.


Here I fully agree with you.


Standards are very hard to write, and even harder to follow (see w3c as an example). Look at Microsoft Office as a counter example. Say what you want about the quality of the software (I know I have), but the interoperability between all the different components is pretty amazing and could never have happened if each component came from a different vendor.

I still hold that truly seamless integration can only come if one vendor supplies the whole stack. Now we can get pretty good and perfectly usable integration with multiple vendors, and there are plenty of other obvious advantages with having multiple vendors. In fact I'd say that the advantage multiple vendors (trying to) follow a set standard far outweighs the cost of less than perfect integration, but it is still a cost.

Basically, because around that time everyone thought that a HAL 9000 was just around the corner and people came up with all sorts of new, and as it turned out great, ideas about what could be done. Sadly, all of the background stuff that was required to achieve such a thing turned out to be far more complicated and needed far more processing power then was on offer. Doing a presentation is one thing, but making it a reality is something different.

Over the years we then saw the evolution of the software market and individual software companies doing their own thing where compatibility went out of the window as they kept their source code secret. The only way to get something like NLS is to let open source software become dominant, let people have a clean sheet of paper with no preconceived ideas, let the software evolve and converge into compatibility and come back in a few decades.

Many people, including Microsoft, will say that if you have one platform then that can be made a reality. Alas, running Windows on everything as a lowest denominator is never going to come to fruition. Ironically, all that 'one operating system' brain washing has taken us further away from what we want to have happen - everything working with everything else. We just haven't got the foggiest how we would go about doing it now other than to say "Use this", and that's the saddest thing.

A large part of the problem is that document-centrism has almost completely fallen "out of vogue" in favour of application-centrism. The other part is the mindset that you need an all-encompassing, end-to-end solution for every imaginable task.

Mix in the prevailing economic/business "wisdom" (aka, "make as much money as possible in as short a time as possible - and to hell with any long-term consequences") and you have the current situation. With those factors, over-engineered software & constant re-invention of the wheel is an inevitability.

The thing I find most amusing is that - as a result - it's often more pleasant/less of a pain in the ass to use software that was created by developers with fewer resources. In words, software created by developers who didn't have the resources and/or incentive to reinvent the wheel.

Edited 2008-12-11 18:12 UTC

Yeah, but not really computer visionaries. They're more along the lines of business visionaries.

Fair enough.