A year ago I would have labeled this as deliberate evilness.
Today, after having spent a year in a company that is 97% focused on hardware (I'm part of the other 3%) - I could quite easily see this happen just out of ignorance/lack of focus.
My conclusion is that in companies like this:
- By default they think of the final delivery as a piece of electronics, not a system of hardware and software.
- They either consciously or inadvertedly think less of software than of hardware. Software is an afterthought you add to make the hardware function.
I don't really like Apple's philosophy all the time, but they get this right at least, that both the hardware and software matter, and it's enough of a win that I basically use their devices+software in any category they are present.
The CEO of a hardware company has often risen there from being a junior HW engineer or researcher. Same story for managers 1-2 steps down. They are often not competent to hire competent software people on their own. So how could they begin to change their company, even if they wanted to?
I think it's asymmetric though:
1. Software people realize and accept that hardware construction is complex.
2. Many hardware people actually do seem to think that software construction is trivial in comparison to the what they do themselves.
Especially in SV I also sense a sort of resentment from HW engineers that SW people nowadays often get paid a lot better. ("For creating dating apps.")
(One difference between software and hardware is that hardware people often have much "higher" academic credentials - quite a lot of them have PhD's. Great software people often don't even graduate from university. I could see how this could make the hardware people think less of the software people.)
This reminds me of the last chapter in "The Autistic Brain" by Temple Grandin. She spends a chapter or so describing three different 'types' of people when it comes to way in which they think. Part of the reason she does this is to argue that we should stop (primarily) thinking about 'autism' as a label/deficiency and instead look at the specific strengths and weaknesses of such a mind, and the variations even within autism.
But she also argues that this might be a good way of looking at things in general:
> “Reading an interview with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.” What? The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985?
> He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter—the first laser printer ever—he thought, There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box. He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was. But he also knew that the public wasn’t going to care about what was inside the box. Only the product was going to matter—the beautiful fonts that he made sure were part of the Apple aesthetic. This was the lesson he applied to Pixar: You can use all sorts of new computer software to create a new kind of animation, but the public isn’t going to care about anything except what’s on the screen.”
> “He was right—obviously. While he didn’t use the terms picture thinker and pattern thinker, that’s what he was talking about. In that moment in 1985, he realized that you needed pattern thinkers to engineer the miracles inside the box and picture thinkers to make what comes out of the box beautiful.”
> “This is where the three ways of thinking—picture, pattern, and word-fact—come in handy.”
> “What all these examples tell me is that in society, the three kinds of minds naturally complement one another. Society puts them together without anybody thinking about it. But what if we did think about it? What if we recognized these categories consciously and tried to make the various pairings work to our advantage?”
While I believe the term 'beautiful' doesn't quite capture what design entails, I do think that the problem you describe might very well have to do with an overabundance of one 'type' of thinking (however in-progress our understanding of these types might be).
> Software is an afterthought you add to make the hardware function.
For PC OEMs, it's even worse than that. Software isn't even an afterthought. Software is literally somebody else's problem -- namely, Microsoft's.
When you realize that they've made huge amounts of money for 20+ years by thinking of in those terms, it becomes clearer why they have so much trouble taking responsibility
for the complete stack today.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 9.9 ms ] threadToday, after having spent a year in a company that is 97% focused on hardware (I'm part of the other 3%) - I could quite easily see this happen just out of ignorance/lack of focus.
My conclusion is that in companies like this:
- By default they think of the final delivery as a piece of electronics, not a system of hardware and software.
- They either consciously or inadvertedly think less of software than of hardware. Software is an afterthought you add to make the hardware function.
What is keeping everyone from figuring this out?
The CEO of a hardware company has often risen there from being a junior HW engineer or researcher. Same story for managers 1-2 steps down. They are often not competent to hire competent software people on their own. So how could they begin to change their company, even if they wanted to?
I think it's asymmetric though:
1. Software people realize and accept that hardware construction is complex.
2. Many hardware people actually do seem to think that software construction is trivial in comparison to the what they do themselves.
Especially in SV I also sense a sort of resentment from HW engineers that SW people nowadays often get paid a lot better. ("For creating dating apps.")
(One difference between software and hardware is that hardware people often have much "higher" academic credentials - quite a lot of them have PhD's. Great software people often don't even graduate from university. I could see how this could make the hardware people think less of the software people.)
But she also argues that this might be a good way of looking at things in general:
> “Reading an interview with Steve Jobs, I came across this quote: “The thing I love about Pixar is that it’s exactly like the LaserWriter.” What? The most successful animation studio in recent memory is “exactly like” a piece of technology from 1985?
> He explained that when he saw the first page come out of Apple’s LaserWriter—the first laser printer ever—he thought, There’s awesome amounts of technology in this box. He knew what all the technology was, and he knew all the work that went into creating it, and he knew how innovative it was. But he also knew that the public wasn’t going to care about what was inside the box. Only the product was going to matter—the beautiful fonts that he made sure were part of the Apple aesthetic. This was the lesson he applied to Pixar: You can use all sorts of new computer software to create a new kind of animation, but the public isn’t going to care about anything except what’s on the screen.”
> “He was right—obviously. While he didn’t use the terms picture thinker and pattern thinker, that’s what he was talking about. In that moment in 1985, he realized that you needed pattern thinkers to engineer the miracles inside the box and picture thinkers to make what comes out of the box beautiful.”
> “This is where the three ways of thinking—picture, pattern, and word-fact—come in handy.”
> “What all these examples tell me is that in society, the three kinds of minds naturally complement one another. Society puts them together without anybody thinking about it. But what if we did think about it? What if we recognized these categories consciously and tried to make the various pairings work to our advantage?”
While I believe the term 'beautiful' doesn't quite capture what design entails, I do think that the problem you describe might very well have to do with an overabundance of one 'type' of thinking (however in-progress our understanding of these types might be).
For PC OEMs, it's even worse than that. Software isn't even an afterthought. Software is literally somebody else's problem -- namely, Microsoft's.
When you realize that they've made huge amounts of money for 20+ years by thinking of in those terms, it becomes clearer why they have so much trouble taking responsibility for the complete stack today.