No doubt the 286 architecture peaked back then. I guess his assumption of no backward compatibility is where it went wrong. Intel kept piling on new architectures while keeping the old for application compatibility.
This is exactly it. Also the reason why IA64 failed, and we're using amd's x86-64 instead.
In more recent times, the argument is less relevant because the compatibility layer is software-side, see the mostly painless x86 -> ARM transition by Apple.
Well this was before Windows 3.0, at that time Windows was dire and it still wasn't clear whether we would be adopting graphical user interfaces on a large scale.
If you think of the PC as running MS-DOS it was spot on.
It is actually a foresaw of the apple store (apps). Because, if compatibility (software compatibility) it's broken between devices, apps can't be profited as when the system is software "stable".
Not because he was right, obviously with hindsight we know x86 is still going strong.
Instead how much Mr. Jobs adopted his vision to match his financial incentives. He talks about Mac and IBM in this presentation, but the we he refers to is his NEXT OS. The one he started after getting kicked out of Apple. Yet listening to him here you'd think he left a sinking ship.
He wasn’t talking about x86 when he said ‘PC’, he was talking really about DOS. That’s clear because he said OS/2 and Presentation Manager could be a new curve. Of course then Windows came out, which he couldn’t have foreseen, and that proved to be the next curve but he was still right. The Windows 3.x/95 architecture had its own successful decade long run.
He was also right about the Mac (OS) architecture of the time peaking, and going into a glide slope in the 90s. That’s exactly what happened and it was running into the ground by the late 90s when he came back to Apple.
What he didn’t anticipate was that advanced pre-emptive multitasking, multi-user OSes with virtual memory, multi-threading, process isolation and all that good stuff would escape the glide slope model. Still, being pretty much spot on for a whole decade into the future at that time is pretty impressive.
Except 16bit 286 code is dead as a doornail. The platform he's talking about (16 bit DOS) really did die on schedule. You'll have trouble running anything from that era on modern Windows. And if it ran, it wouldn't integrate with anything else (networking, printing, character encoding, etc.)
The jump from highmem to win98 was very disruptive and had many winners and losers (e.g. Wordperfect). The next jump to 64bit was less painful, but still disruptive.
x86 is a marketing term used to paper over 1-2 extinction events and create an illusion of historical continuity despite users having had to throw out their software twice (at least), and developers having had to rewrite their software several times.
Yup, that's what Jobs always did, force the environment into his narrative.
NeXTSTEP was a great operating systems, for the time, but for most developers too expensive to build up the application base. I was at a company building a paperless system for hospitals on NeXTSTEP and it was pain because we had to build everything from scratch due to the lack of applications available.
I think the gliding slope pattern has more than one reason to exist. One is the inability to innovate due to backward compatibility requirements. In fact this pattern repeats itself in smaller software not just platforms. Look at Adobe Photoshop, and now it's Sketch's time to glide while infinitely approaching the ground.
But I think there's another reason: not only inability to innovate but also unwillingness to do so. Companies on a gliding slope trajectory can attract a special kind of management people who like just that: to be in a gliding flight that can give enough material reward for a sufficient period of time. Why innovate then?
I can think of maybe 2 or 3 exceptions of durable technologies that have survived decades and are still thriving because they don't belong to anyone. Unix for one, maybe SQL too. Ownership (or lack thereof) is the key here it seems.
I think a really important factor is a well engineered extensible architecture. As you say, the incredible longevity of Unix, compared to any of its contemporaries. Windows finally got there with NT, though iterating on that had been painful I think that just down to Microsoft’s approach to product development projects.
When we look at the compatibility story of Unix, it doesn't hold up well at all except as a ship-of-Theseus exercise. The original system design gradually became usurped by GNU tools, Linux kernels, and X11 window management. Sometimes you might be able to compile old stuff, but guess what, the C standard changed too. And every one of those things is in turn being challenged - "rewrite it in Rust" has produced new, similar, sometimes compatible but still different programs from the original inspirations. sysvinit was replaced with systemd. X11 became Xorg plus various extensions. Linux was eschewed as the kernel for OSX decades ago, and it's typical for software to need an "OSX build".
There is old Unix software that can run on modern Unixes, but it depends heavily on not doing much I/O. Once you introduce an I/O requirement, failure is imminent - the protocols change, hardware gets accessed with a new method. You end up needing some kind of emulation. The same was basically true of DOS apps running natively on Windows - it would probably run your old Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect in a window, but not games. Windows itself has had plenty of API churn(albeit with an unusually strong compatibility story), but a large share of new Windows apps are actually Electron wrappers.
The glide slope theory isn't perfect because the life cycles do seem to depend on what you look at specifically, and there may have been a slowing of the curve with greater reliance on open-source and Internet technology. However it does seem to be predictable in describing the limits of software platform economics.
A ship of Theseus is fine as long as, at any given time, you have a seaworthy ship. MacOS deprecated 32 bit applications just a few years ago, that's a chunk of dead wood that got stripped out, some people are sticking with the older OS so we're in a transition period on that right now.
A series of small incremental steps is vastly superior to a complete rewrite, or massive re-engineering project from the ground up every 10 years.
The part where he is wrong is the premisses that every new computer must more or less gives up all the software of the previous one in order to reach a new trajectory.
This used to be more or less true with early 80's computers, such as Apple II or C64, but that's exactly what changed with the PC. 32-bit arrived, and kept compatibility with 16-bit alive. Windows arrived, but (initially) kept compatibility with DOS. etc. Fast forward today, and the Mac M1 arrives, and can still count of Rosetta to continue running x64 applications.
This is a key change, and a necessary one, as rewriting everything for a new system is just a killing blow.
Unfortunately for him, this mistaken analysis is exactly what lead Jobs to the NeXt, a new computer re-invented from scratch, dropping everything that existed prior to rebuild it. This costed too much time and energy, and the NeXt was late, expensive, incomplete, a commercial failure. Jobs was lucky to be bought by Apple before going under.
And arguably, that's a lesson he learned well. Immediately after, while taking command of Apple, he states basically the opposite : re-use everything that can be re-used, especially open source. Only redevelop what you think you can do better.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 58.8 ms ] threadIn more recent times, the argument is less relevant because the compatibility layer is software-side, see the mostly painless x86 -> ARM transition by Apple.
The timing and IBM part were inaccurate to say the least.
If you think of the PC as running MS-DOS it was spot on.
That may be general. Sounds like what the Buddhists mean by attachment that should be avoided?
Not because he was right, obviously with hindsight we know x86 is still going strong.
Instead how much Mr. Jobs adopted his vision to match his financial incentives. He talks about Mac and IBM in this presentation, but the we he refers to is his NEXT OS. The one he started after getting kicked out of Apple. Yet listening to him here you'd think he left a sinking ship.
He was also right about the Mac (OS) architecture of the time peaking, and going into a glide slope in the 90s. That’s exactly what happened and it was running into the ground by the late 90s when he came back to Apple.
What he didn’t anticipate was that advanced pre-emptive multitasking, multi-user OSes with virtual memory, multi-threading, process isolation and all that good stuff would escape the glide slope model. Still, being pretty much spot on for a whole decade into the future at that time is pretty impressive.
x86 is a marketing term used to paper over 1-2 extinction events and create an illusion of historical continuity despite users having had to throw out their software twice (at least), and developers having had to rewrite their software several times.
NeXTSTEP was a great operating systems, for the time, but for most developers too expensive to build up the application base. I was at a company building a paperless system for hospitals on NeXTSTEP and it was pain because we had to build everything from scratch due to the lack of applications available.
But I think there's another reason: not only inability to innovate but also unwillingness to do so. Companies on a gliding slope trajectory can attract a special kind of management people who like just that: to be in a gliding flight that can give enough material reward for a sufficient period of time. Why innovate then?
I can think of maybe 2 or 3 exceptions of durable technologies that have survived decades and are still thriving because they don't belong to anyone. Unix for one, maybe SQL too. Ownership (or lack thereof) is the key here it seems.
Alone x32 to x64.
Lots of dependency resolution going in under the hood of it as well.
There is old Unix software that can run on modern Unixes, but it depends heavily on not doing much I/O. Once you introduce an I/O requirement, failure is imminent - the protocols change, hardware gets accessed with a new method. You end up needing some kind of emulation. The same was basically true of DOS apps running natively on Windows - it would probably run your old Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect in a window, but not games. Windows itself has had plenty of API churn(albeit with an unusually strong compatibility story), but a large share of new Windows apps are actually Electron wrappers.
The glide slope theory isn't perfect because the life cycles do seem to depend on what you look at specifically, and there may have been a slowing of the curve with greater reliance on open-source and Internet technology. However it does seem to be predictable in describing the limits of software platform economics.
A series of small incremental steps is vastly superior to a complete rewrite, or massive re-engineering project from the ground up every 10 years.
I think Microsoft would agree with that point. I'm sure they would love to ditch Win32 and move on.
This is a key change, and a necessary one, as rewriting everything for a new system is just a killing blow.
Unfortunately for him, this mistaken analysis is exactly what lead Jobs to the NeXt, a new computer re-invented from scratch, dropping everything that existed prior to rebuild it. This costed too much time and energy, and the NeXt was late, expensive, incomplete, a commercial failure. Jobs was lucky to be bought by Apple before going under.
And arguably, that's a lesson he learned well. Immediately after, while taking command of Apple, he states basically the opposite : re-use everything that can be re-used, especially open source. Only redevelop what you think you can do better.