Pavlos's Thoughts

It’s time to have one operating system, and it will be Android. Yes, on everything. Google’s world domination will succeed.

There are two sets of things an OS does. It’s a user interface, app sandbox, and hardware abstraction. Android does these really, really well. It’s a fresh UI for fingers rather than mice. It’s the first to offer proper sandboxed security, so we can install apps written by random strangers, like we wanted to do since the 80s. It runs on everything and it’s free.

The other job of an OS is to be a deployment target for apps. A few years ago, the bulk and complexity of these APIs ensured the dominance of Windows. Now, the lock is breaking. Software is becoming a service. You don’t buy software, you download the app to access the service, or it’s just a Web page. Legacy software like Microsoft Office can run in VMs, or in the cloud.

I use a Mac today. Right now, it’s a better UI and sandbox than Windows. Last week in Japan I saw an ASUS two-piece Android laptop, where the screen detaches to be a tablet. As soon as Android gets a good form-factor and matures enough to run Windows VMs painlessly I’m switching to it, and so is everyone else!

Microsoft is sort of failing at the OS game. It holds business users and hardcore gamers, the two groups who use heavyweight apps, but the average customer has no reason to want a Windows PC. Apple could do all that Android does, but it decided to have no more than 10% share if the PC market – to get more it has to license the OS.

The new lock-in is not the CPU, since Intel won that one, and it’s not the bulk of the API either. Customers won’t invest in apps any more, only service providers will. The new lock is user identity – your Google account. Google fought that battle brilliantly and won.

Apple marketing
Hey, we understand you. You want a laptop to do these five or six things, right? Here, we’ve built one for you that’s very attractive and well-made and does the things that you want really, really well.

Microsoft marketing
You don’t really know what you want from your PC, and neither do we. We’re all in the same boat! So we made this software that has a whole bunch of features. Put it in your PC and it’ll do things. By the way your friends all have it, so if you go with the flow you’ll be able to share stuff.

Open Source marketing
User! You have no idea what you need and we’re not even going to attempt to tell you. Behind this link is our latest software, which we’re very proud of. If you use it, maybe you will see…

Guess who wins… [...]

Pavlos’s Thoughts – Episode 1 – The Apple tablet and what they should have built instead

Talking post (podcast). Click to open as MP3.

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Have you been to a movie recently? Do you get subjected to these industry warnings against unauthorised copying? Well, don’t know about you but they really put me off going to the cinema. These warning ads say to me “Go and watch free content on YouTube”. I get the same reaction when I hear about some industry lawsuit against a random citizen who was sharing music (or their kid was sharing music). The clear message is “Stay away from the recording industry and its products for the time being”.

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I posted this on USENET in March 1994. Edited here for brevity and to remove the references to ancient games nobody has heard of. I still think the list holds, 15 years later.

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