The Operating System Is Dead
If you were on a desert island and you could only take the following two machines:
1. A MacPro with all apps installed with no internet connection
or
2. A Windows box with an internet connection, Firefox, IM, etc.
Which one would you take? me thinks even the most diehard Mac fan would take option 2.
Why? Because the operating system doesn’t matter anymore.
Before you all start screaming and cursing look back at my original question. And be honest.
Why is this? Well, as I said, because the operating system doesn’t matter anymore.
Or, another way of putting this is that the internet is the operating system.
Sure, it doesn’t boot out computers (although it can) but it does run our lives. How much of our computer time is spent on the web, using our email, using applications that require an internet connection, and using IM? More and more with each passing day. And, when we think of enjoying our computers, yes we think of the incredible things we can design and create with our applications (which, by the way, can increasingly run on either platform,) but we also think of surfing the web and emailing friends.
So what does this mean for the Mac? Well, first of all it means that Apple should be doing everything it can to focus on product development that leverages the internet. In many ways it is already doing this. The .Mac product line and isync is a good example. But a better example is iTunes, Apple’s most used application (note, released on Windows too) that happens to have the internet at the heart of its raison d’etre. After all, iTunes really is an internet client for the music store, podcasting, and a CDDB server for your collection.
Apple needs to think about its operating system and where the internet can fit in much more aggressively. And it needs to prepare for the day when the OS is simply a dumb terminal for a series of web services. Word processor? Gone. Mail App (oh yeah, already gone)? Gone. Need to rotate an image? Do it in Flickr not iPhoto. Heck, need to manage a photo collection and share it with others? Flickr again.
Apple needs to think iPhoto, and think about an OS and applications that leverage the internet at their core.
Otherwise, 20 years from now, Apple will just be an operating system, that funny thing that we used to need but no longer do.
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Comments
As a matter of fact it’s interesting that you wrecked your brain until you came up with a situation so desperate (being stranded on a deserted island) that you could make someone choose a Win over a Mac.
Wow. Y’know the desert island hypothetical is about the most common cliched one there is. “If you were stuck on a desert island, what album/movie/super model would you take if you could only choose just one.”
Only in the Apple-labotomized brain could such a common question be perceived as “desperate.”
Again, the seemingly incomprehensible question that is throwing our beloved Mac-bots into dilerium is the VERY simple question, which is more important: the OS or the internet. That the answer is anything but “APPLE APPLE APPLE” causing such consternation is quite amusing.
Score another for Hadley.
Ask this question to a group of Windows-bots:
“If you were on a desert island and you could only take the following two machines:
1. A loaded Windows PC with all apps installed with no internet connection
or
2. A Mac with an internet connection, Firefox, IM, etc.
Which one would you take?”
And see just how many “ZOMG MAC IS TEH SUXXORZ LOL!!!” comments show up. Idiocy knows no bounds.
The reason why the operating system matters. Security. People want to own there stuff.
As cool as Web 2.0 applications are, I am glad to be able to run my own apps, my own servers. Even though it might be possible to do all my home finances with a new Google app, I probably won’t for fear of it getting hacked or misused.
Idiocy knows no bounds.
So you agree that all of these responses so far are idiotic.
This was a great article. I’m surprised so many people aren’t getting it. maybe it’s a reaction to Sun’s motto and Larry Ellison’s diatribes last decade.
A rather “interesting” commentary filled with opinions that are wrong.
First, no OS: no internet, no IM, no nothing just a quietly humming machine.
Second, not everyone attributes the internet to running our lives; at least not those who have “a life [tm]”!
And, finally, though by no means the exhaustion of criticism for his piece of trash-prose, is that somehow the internet is evolving into a dumb-terminal environment. Hell would have to freeze over before the majority of people would relinquish the “personal computer” for the “internet computer”. Don’t understand? Then subsititute “internet computer” with “time-sharing computer”. Yep, the very thing that made owning a personal computer such a buzz is going to disappear? No way. If Apple headed down that route they would die in an instant. Thank goodness Hadley Stern is not steering the Apple ship!
I really think you should look at where the idea of the internet as OS came from. As I recall, it came from Bill Gates and the M$ inspired model of subscription computing. This was in remarks he made a number of years ago, not long before M$ came out with their current licensing model.
No thanks, I do NOT want to subscribe to my OS online. I really do a lot of work offline, and don’t want to be dependant on my ISP being up in order to tweak a few pictures. Flickr may be great, but there are other models that work, too.
I’ve felt that empty feeling you get when you log in, try the Internet or other web-based app, and get that error message that your internet connection is gone. I DON’T want to get that when I just try to boot!
And don’t get me started on the idea of having to pay a periodic subscription just to keep my Mac booting! I’ll gladly pay what Apple asks for in order the buy my OS license up front, thankyouverymuch.
Sorry, you can take your PC, your Internet connection, and that desert island and put ‘em where the sun don’t shine!
Expanding on my earlier comment, I think the subscription model could work, as long as the subscription is free. This is where Google comes in. Because they make their money off of search (basically advertising) they could offer the hardware and software (Linux or Unix w/ Google Web Browser GUI, all apps online) free. I would assume this model would use a very small internal HD or Flashdrive and rely on the user to purchase flash drives for any additional external storage.
It is interesting to ponder if Mr. and Mrs. Joe Public would subscribe to the idea of a Google PC if the hardware and software (productivity and internet) were free but ad supported ie. ads come up in email, websearch, bottom of word processor etc. just like they do now for many Google apps. It they would and I think this would take a huge bite out of M$ consumer profits and would be a hard act for M$ to follow because they aren’t really in the search business (MSN has a fraction of the market share of Google) and haven’t been traditionally good at transitioning. Even more interesting, Google could sell maintanence plans for the “GPCs” which would probably more than pay for their costs that “Mr./Mrs. Joe Public” would eat up.
you could take the PC with internet connection and download some hacked OSX for x86. and there you are, having the best thing of both.
This is like saying would if you were on a desert island (with roads) would you rather have a brand-new Porsche - or - a used Hyundai with a supply of gas. Of course you’d take the car with the gas. The PC is given an unfair advantage because the Internet is such a standard thing these days and is really needed for most things you would do with your computer.
Hadley Stern is joking. Right?
Well the windows machine would turn into a doorstop because of spyware, worms, and viruses with in a week making the mac a clear choice.
What an idiotic article, I’ll save you the bandwidth of yanking you out of my RSS feed.
I actually think (with the exception of Beeblebrox who apparently could analyze his way out of a paper bag) that the Mac people in this forum have succinctly pointed out the flaw in Hadley’s “argument.” Yes, the internet is an important thing. But just because it has become a vital tool for most people, DOESN’T mean it becomes the only important thing. The internet doesn’t control the aspects of how we interrelate with our computer. If someday it conceivably could, then we can revisit this debate. Even if it ever does, we are nowhere close to that point now. Anyone who has ever studied even basic logic will tell you that this argument was flawed in its concept.
BTW… I am both a Windows and Mac user, and while at times I do find that Mac people can be a little fanatical, I don’t see it in this thread.
Wow. Slow news day Hadley? Or did you need the page hits to trigger the ad revenue check?
Leaving aside the sheer stupidity of the question and the inevitable answer, if you can bear the searing pain on the retina to read the whole article (not that it’s War & Peace), the point you’re trying to make is what..? That Apple should concentrate on integrated apps that play well with the internet..?
Are you serious? What do you think they’ve been doing since iTools was a free suite? Have you heard of iPhoto? Maybe you’ve tried ordering a photo album with it. It’s easy. It uses the internet. Perhaps you’ve heard of iTunes. This even goes beyond the computer and it’s OS and connects to a small computer called an iPod that can play music that you can buy from, you’ve guessed it, the internet.
The point is not to say how important the internet is, but to say that Apple apps that use it, just seem to work the way you’d expect them to and have done for years. That’s because of the OS they’re built on. The OS is even more important now than it was before the home computer was connected 24/7 to the internet. Ever heard of Windows viruses..? Just using Firefox won’t save you from them.
And talking of Firefox and the OS, again Apple apps (Safari) just work more intuitively. In Firefox on the Mac, if you open a link in a new tab, the focus goes to that tab. In Safari, the tab opens in the background. Obviously, this is the correct behavior - if I’d wanted to look at the contents of that link right away, I’d have just clicked it to open in my current tab. The fact that I’m opening it in a new tab means I want to have it around to look at later.
The OS matters, it really does.
The internet doesn’t control the aspects of how we interrelate with our computer. If someday it conceivably could, then we can revisit this debate. Even if it ever does, we are nowhere close to that point now. Anyone who has ever studied even basic logic will tell you that this argument was flawed in its concept.
Talk about over-analysis. What a lot of words just to NOT answer the basic question. If you had to choose between internet access on Windows or non-access on OS X, which would you pick?
I do disagree with the notion that the OS is “dead,” but I don’t think that is meant literally (even a dumb terminal would require some kind of OS).
It simply underscores the fact that when the majority of your time on the computer is spent in the browser, the OS becomes less and less important. This is a REALITY, and the choice of these Applematters readers despite their sputtering rage illustrates it perfectly.
And while an XP box with Firefox can still be used to do other things, like Word or Excel or your taxes or Photoshop, an OS X box without internet is much less useful. The issue of virii and all that other stuff is IRRELEVANT. ALL of you would still pick the internet over OS X despite trojans, virii, and spyware.