Seth's Blog: Hardware is Sexy, But It's Software that Matters (typepad.com)

American author and entrepreneur Seth Godin argues that though hardware is nice and dandy, it is the software that matters. And not just software that runs on a computer, "but the metaphorical idea of rules and algorithms designed to solve problems and connect people," he writes. Godin has used the piece to note how Apple has increasingly grown focused on hardware, and as a result, it's not putting much effort to fixing its software. He writes, "Automator, a buggy piece of software with no support, and because it's free, no competitors. Keynote, a presentation program that hasn't been improved in years. iOS 10, which replaces useful with pretty. iTunes, which is now years behind useful tools like Roon. No significant steps forward in word processing, spreadsheets, video editing, file sharing, internet tools, conferencing, etc. Apple contributed mightily to a software revolution a decade ago, but they've stopped. Think about how many leaps forward Slack, Dropbox, Zapier and others have made in popular software over the last few decades. But it requires a significant commitment to keep it moving forward. It means upending the status quo and creating something new." From the article: Software can change faster than hardware, which means that in changing markets, bet on software. It's tempting to treat the user interface as a piece of fashion, some bling, a sort of jewelry. It's not. It's the way your user controls the tool you build. Change it when it stops working, not when you're bored with it. Every time you change the interface, you better have a really good reason.John Gruber disagrees. He writes: Software, in general, is much better than it used to be. Unlike 1995, we don't lose data due to bugs very often. (For me personally, I can't even remember the last time I lost data.) But our hardware is so much better than our software, the contrast is jarring. An iPhone is a nearly perfect object. Sleek, attractive, simple. The hardware is completely knowable -- there are only five buttons, each of them easily understood. iOS, however, is effectively infinite. The deeper our software gets, the less we know and understand it. It's unsettling.

Comments

Re:Who is Gruber?

[Anonymous Coward]

That user interface is written in SOFTWARE.

The software, in this case, is an afterthought because the UI was designed by hardware guys. What mattered to the VCR designers was to keep the number of buttons low and therefore cutting costs.

Seth Godin is spot on with this one.

[Qbertino]

He is, IMHO, 100% correct with his analysis, including the critisism of the quality of what made Apple great. Apple abandoned their opinion leaders (us) about the time they started requireing a sign-up to get the devtools. Slowly but surely their Unix isn't quite that attractive as it used to be and the quality of their utility software has been in steady decline ever since. The last few versions of Preview can't even render PDFs correctly anymore.

Meanwhile the open web, pushed by Google, is taking over. Devices and web environments are steeply growing in power, and the line between website, service, VMed and native app is blurring faster than we can follow.

I've been seeing it ever since I finally understood ChromeOS.
Remember when it came out? Everyone, including me, was like "WTF?".

But now we understand. Chromebooks are the poor mans and the developing worlds (80% of all potential users globally) MacBook Air. They're dirt cheap, boot nigh instantly and run for a day on one charge. And Google takes care of you all along the way.

Today it's blatantly obvious that Google, of all megacorps, has the best long-term strategy and thus is pushing a standards based open web. It's the only plattform they can win with and it is more and more becoming the plattform with which people can develop safely and be guraranteed some sort of userbase, no matter the underlying OS or device. The Pixel comes as a premium phone - an unusual thing from Google - but everyone knows it's just an upgraded iPhone knock-off hardware wise. The real deal is with Google Assistant and the unlimited storage they offer.

As for the web being the plattform that is evolving the fastest - yes, of course it is. Updates are as close as refreshing a pageview and storage and AI are dropping in prices and power in huge leaps as we speak. I've been torn to and fro about wether I should leave the web for some 'real' programming and environment ever since I switched my career into it 16 years ago, but I have to say that it never has been as interesting as it is now to stick with it, sit back, and quietly watch as the toy language JavaScript takes over fields no one ever even dreamt of 10 years ago.

My 2 cents.