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… [...]

When it comes to performance there are two personality types. We’ll call them achievement focused and risk focused. These two types of people approach success and failure in almost opposite ways and it’s good to realize this and know which type you are, as well as recognize these categories in the other stakeholders of your projects.

Risk focused people see success as a bar that they have to reach.

The best example of a risk focused professional is an airline pilot. The pilot has to get the plane and the passengers to the destination airport, safely. That’s a complete success. Nobody is going to thank the pilot for flying further, higher, faster, visiting a new city on the way, or doing acrobatics. Rather, the pilot has to look out for everything that can go wrong during the flight and avoid or recover from that situation. They’re risk focused in the sense that they are constantly looking at risk, or potential failure, and try to avoid it.

Other examples of risk focused people are accountants, business managers of stable organizations, project managers, film producers, civil engineers, security and military officers, criminals, surgeons, mountaineers, and unfortunately many parents.

Achievement focused people assume a baseline level of success and strive to maximize value from there.

The purest achievement focused person is an artist. Every artist, once competent, will succeed in applying paint to canvas, delivering a song, or remembering their lines. Artists are not concerned with reaching this baseline but with how far they can go from there. Is it new? Is it inspiring? Is the audience ecstatic? Can it be better? Can the work or the artist push new boundaries? Artists are always focused on achievement, and by definition this focus always has to be ahead of what they can at any time reach.

Other examples of achievement focused roles are entrepreneurs, other growth-oriented managers, scientists, product managers, film directors, architects, most doctors, misfits and agitators, athletes, and all kids.

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Posted on LJ in April 2006, not edited.

Developing software is most like painting a picture.

You start with a vague idea of what you want to accomplish and roughly how to begin. But your mind’s eye can’t really see the whole picture with any accuracy of form, or the details of the picture with any precision. Thus the picture emerges as you paint. At each point during the work, what is already on the canvas lets you anchor your imagination and see a little bit further. As you try to paint this you encounter an imperfection or an aspect of reality, and have to adjust, until you have converged, by this cycle of imagination and recording, onto a picture that is whole enough.

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