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

Dude does a bong hit...

[swb]

...ruminates on how it's not the bong that matters, but the weed that goes into it.

Stays up late writing blog post on same idea, but extrapolated to hardware & software.

Re:Dude does a bong hit...

[zlives]

what is software without hardware to run it on?

i think all he is just saying our grasp of hardware is way better than software because software has less control.

Meh

[fubarrr]

An incompetent VC idiot who lost a quarter of fund's portfolio value in five years tells everybody how to make money... hahaha

Re:Meh

[lucm]

An incompetent VC idiot who lost a quarter of fund's portfolio value in five years tells everybody how to make money... hahaha

VC was all about hardware lately. Fitbits, VR, IoT/DDOS thermostats. Money was not made and startups went down in flames, so now we have experts saying it's all about software.

It's just like in finance. Stocks, bonds, PE. Stocks, bonds, PE. According to the wheel of fortune we're heading in stocks territory.

Re:Meh

[MachineShedFred]

I just love how the examples of amazing software innovation given are Slack and Dropbox - Web 2.0 versions of IRC and anonymous FTP.

How about an original idea? Do those even exist anymore?

Re:Who is Gruber?

[freeze128]

Your VCR is blinking 12:00 because the USER INTERFACE sucks, and it's too troublesome to set the correct time. Guess what? That user interface is written in SOFTWARE.
Sure, the VCR could implement internet connectivity to retrieve the time from an NTP server, or get the time from the broadcast stations, but no matter how much code you put into your firmware, without that hardware implementation, IT WON'T HAPPEN.

O RLY?

[Gravis Zero]

The hardware is completely knowable -- there are only five buttons, each of them easily understood.

If he knew about the hardware, he would know the action of every button is software defined!

Neither of these fools understand hardware or software beyond a superficial measure.

Re:O RLY?

[Zero__Kelvin]

"If he knew about the hardware, he would know the action of every button is software defined!"

... and if he knew anything about the hardware he would also know it gets just us subtle, and in fact a lot of hardware has microcode, which is of course software, but encapsulated in a hardware interface.

Re:O RLY?

[Gravis Zero]

... and if he knew anything about the hardware he would also know it gets just us subtle, and in fact a lot of hardware has microcode, which is of course software, but encapsulated in a hardware interface.

I think you mean firmware. microcode is different because it actually changes the behavior of the IC in a similar fashion to an FPGA. microcode is used by very few ICs.

Re: O RLY?

[Zero__Kelvin]

No. I said and meant microcode. Much firmware is microcode, but few people know about it, or give at much consideration. Most people know about firmware, but it is indeed a further example of my point.

Hardware is so much better?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

When I was a kid and turned on a BBC Micro, it was ready to use instantly. Same with the old TV I had. And I could watch anything I wanted to watch on that TV, whether it was from the aerial or the computer or the VCR. And on that VCR, I could just fast forward through any initial stuff on the tape I wanted to skip. And some of those devices worked for a decade.

Today's world of hardware that costs hundreds or thousands but fails within a few years, if it even gets that far, is not an improvement. Today's world where hardware can't be serviced or repaired is not an improvement. Today's world where it takes a minute for my PVR to show me a picture, and seconds to switch to the next TV channel, is not an improvement. Today's world where I can't watch content I've paid for on a device I've paid for, or can't run software I've paid for on a computer I've paid for, or can't listen to music from my iPhone because the headphones don't fit any more, because of artificial barriers to connectivity, is not an improvement.

Hardware got faster and bigger, but thinking that makes it better when all this other stuff is getting needlessly broken is spectacularly missing the point. And the user who buys these devices doesn't much care whether it's the hardware or the protocol on the wire between two devices or the firmware that is causing the problem. They just want the stuff they bought to do what they bought it for, and in many respects today's equipment is very much worse at that than the equipment we made a decade or two ago.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[0100010001010011]

> Today's world of hardware that costs hundreds or thousands but fails within a few years, if it even gets that far, is not an improvement.

With the right software hardware from a decade ago is still running. Stop buying the cheapest hardware you can find. Look for embedded systems for industrial environments. They might be a bit slower than what you're used to but they'll run for the next few decades just fine.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[drinkypoo]

When I was a kid and turned on a BBC Micro, it was ready to use instantly.

And for its time, it was awesome. And today, a pocket calculator makes that BBC Micro its bitch. But the truth is that most of us never turn our computers all the way off, so it doesn't matter much what the power-on-to-usefulness time is unless we're experiencing a lot of crashes.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[epyT-R]

Sounds less like a problem with technology and more a problem with cultural attitudes of those who had it engineered. The 80s/90s had the last bits of pro-empowerment (real empowerment, not socjus 'empowerment' as it's typically defined today). The whole idea that computers are there to be useful, powerful tools controlled by the user got turned on its head. Now it's all about corralling the user into online 'portals' and charging monthly fees. This way, 'unauthorized' actions can't be taken on 'unauthorized' data, and slowly people are getting used to the idea that the internet is (and should be) just cable TV 2.0. Capabilities are similarly curtailed. One powerful software is being replaced by fisher price equivalents meant for braindead idiots who will never produce much of anything with it anyway. It's a foolish race to the bottom as well as a power-grab from the top.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I don't typically turn my TV or PVR all the way off during the day either, but they still take forever to start showing me programmes.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Dutch Gun]

I think you're suffering from a bit of rose-colored nostalgia.

I remember cars not starting on winter mornings because they were temperamental as hell, and breaking down much more often, requiring costly servicing or repairs. By contrast, today's cars run far more reliably than they used to. I've heard people complain about all the electronics packed into them, but it's all those electronics, among other factors, that keeps the car running in good condition and warns you when anything goes wrong. Many modern cars can last 250K miles if you take good care of them, which used to be almost unheard of several decades ago, when 100K miles was often pushing things.

I'm not quite as certain modern electronic hardware fails quite as frequently as you think either. Many of my current electronics (like my current computers) are five or six years old and running just fine - I'm betting they'll both last quite a few more years, easy. My last TV lasted a dozen years, and my microwave lasted over twenty years. I guess we'll have to see if my new ones do as well, but they're doing fine so far after several years.

You can greatly improve your chances finding quality hardware by doing a bit of due diligence beforehand to find which devices are the most reliable (and avoiding the temptation to rush out and buy the latest, greatest whatever). Of course, sometimes you're bound to get a lemon. For instance, I've had somewhat spotty luck with routers/wireless hubs until my current one. But overall, I'm not sure I buy the argument that everything of yesteryear was somehow better made - at least at equivalent prices.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm afraid we might just have to agree to disagree on some of this.

Certainly you're right that modern cars are more reliable, and the better built-in diagnostics are a part of that. But the flip side is that you used to be able to buy a repair manual for any major model of car and take care of it yourself, and if you did then many popular models could last almost forever. Today it's barely possible to change a light bulb or diagnose the cause of a simple warning light in many new models without going to see your dealer, a term for the official representatives of the car manufacturers with other connotations that also seem all too appropriate these days.

As for the modern electronics you speak of, I fear you're suffering from much the same perception bias you think I have. A lot of devices made the best part of a decade ago were pretty reliable, but standards have dropped sharply even as recently as the past 5 years. My previous washing machine also lasted about a decade with a couple of minor repairs along the way. Talking to a surprisingly honest salesman when buying the new one, he said only certain prestige brands would expect that sort of longevity today, and with most of the mid-range models you'd be doing well if it was still economic to maintain them beyond 5 years. I never had a PC fail on me before being retired after many years of use until about 2010. I haven't had a single PC, at home or work, of any spec, last beyond about 3-4 years without at least one serious hardware failure since then. My previous DVD player lasted many years. My current Blu-Ray player, a relatively expensive model at purchase, is already starting to fail after maybe three years. Printers. Phones and tablets. TVs. PVRs. Headphones. Networking gear. Almost no technology is built to last these days, except perhaps for some of the high-end prestige brands, and many of the electronic devices in my home and office come with some element of built-in obsolescence that is entirely artificial, often due to legal controls on replacement parts and interoperability, or to dependencies on software or online services that aren't supported for very long.

I'm certainly not saying that everything we made yesterday was better made in every way than what we produce today, but junk that fails after what used to be considered a very short lifetime, often for entirely deliberate and artificial reasons, and with limited or no prospect of servicing or repair to restore it to use, is mostly a very modern and very unwelcome trend.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[silentcoder]

What you are describing is called "forced obsolescence" and it's nothing new, hell it predates (personal) computers. G.M. invented it as a businessmodel back in the 1960s. The computer world copied it by the early 1990s. Remember when the i486 was the flagship intel CPU ... for over a decade ?!

From the Pentium onwards they were bringing out new models almost every year with the previous year's model basically unusable within 3 years (partly because software requirements would chase the latest and greatest).

There actually seems to have been a slight shift to reduce that since about 2010 - at least in the PC market. I suspect the reason is the rise of tablets, smartphones, next-gen consoles and dedicated-use set-top boxes. All these things have reduced the market for PCs - people simply don't buy as many as they used to. So that gave the PC hardware companies a problem - if your PC fails after 2 years now - there's a very real risk you won't buy another. They have a better chance of selling you one if your last one has been going for 5 years.
So suddenly interfaces are backwards compatible - you can plug a PCIe3 card into a PCIe2 slot with almost no noticeable performance loss. I am about to upgrade to the new nvidia GTX 1050TI - my current card is a GTX550, and it has served me well until now. It's only in the last year or so that I started feeling a real need to upgrade it.
My 2013 model core-I5 CPU is still running everything I throw at it well, is overclocked and running at a stable temperature without hassle. I've expanded parts on this PC since I bought it in 2013 (like increasing the ram to 16Gb) but I've not yet replaced anything except one hard disk, which had been moved over from the PC before this one and was close to 5 years old when it failed.

Forced obsolescence as a business model only works if there isn't something else people will buy every year which can replace 90% of what you do and costs less. So PC's are actually becoming more stable and the companies are actually trying to maintain a perception of slowing change. Intel isn't even rebranding their next-gen chips anymore. You can buy a Core-I5 (same name as my computer has) right now - but it's a different chip, they haven't made mine since 2013. They are actually keeping the model names - while replacing the chips, to increase the apparent longevity of their products (not just in how long it's working but how long the company is supporting it).

It's a far cry from when the best chip in the world was the i486 for 10 bloody years, but it's a helluva lot better than it was circa 2005.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[serviscope_minor]

Yes to most of what you said.

The only thing is that the new stuff is way, way cheaper. If you buy a premium brand now, the cost will maybe be the same as a normal brand in previous decades. Back then the cheap low end didn't exist.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm sure you're right and that's part of it. My worry is that we'll go so far that you can no longer buy decent quality products at any price, even if you want to.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[hairyfeet]

Blame the environmentalists, its the shitty solder. Got a customer who is an engineer, I fix his PCs, he fixes my electronics and you have no idea how many times he has popped the back off a device of mine just to find tin whiskers.

So IMHO its a perfect example of how the "we have to DO something!" mentality nearly always leads to failure, as they got rid of lead in solder to "protect the environment!"....only to end up creating fricking mountains of e-waste because gear that before would easily last a decade is now lucky if it lasts 3 years thanks to all the shit solder shorting everything out.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Indeed. Don't forget how important it is to seal up things like phones as well, so it's extra-difficult to extract and recycle any rare elements inside.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Dutch Gun]

Well, I still have to disagree, at least to some extent. And not with a -1 mod (I hate that too, btw).

I think the biggest difference is in whether you buy bottom of the barrel priced and quality stuff or not, even with computers. For example:

I purchase my computers from a custom PC boutique dealer and probably pay half again as much as a comparable brand from a box store, maybe even more. But these guys analyze each component for failure rates out in the field, and only sell the highest-rated parts in terms of reliability. They also do more extensive burn in tests, thermal and airflow analysis, etc. Yes, they're the same components everyone else uses, but there are many differences in quality among those common components, and even in how carefully a PC is built, and how stable a system is without a bunch of crapware installed. So, generally speaking, the computers I buy tend to last a long time, and that includes the PC I purchased earlier this year as well (a Linux dev machine).

By contrast, do you remember Packard Bell computers, popular a few decades ago? Those were absolute pieces of crap, and I'll bet few of them managed to last five years. Relatives that bought those computers seemed to have nothing but problems with them.

As far as early failures go, yes, you're going to have some failures at the relatively low prices we pay for electronics these days, but I'm not sure it's any grand conspiracy to deliberately make things more fragile. I just think that failures are more likely to occur as our devices push technological boundaries and get more complex, meaning they simply have more potential points of failure, while at the same time dropping dramatically in price from what we used to pay for these items. And yes, occasionally, you find a brand that is just badly designed - junk from the outset. A bit of research helps to avoid most of those issues.

Smartphones are a different matter - I agree there's some planned obsolescence forced on us, simply because the carriers and manufacturers stop supporting perfectly good hardware with updates. But that's not really a technological matter, but a policy issue. My three year old phone was top of the line when I bought it, but now is apparently "obsolete", which is ridiculous. It still can run nearly any app or OS version just fine, only it's no longer being updated.

Re:Hardware is so much better?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I wish my experience were similar, because I'm also the kind of person who doesn't buy cheap tat and does do his research. I only buy from reputable sources. I typically buy mid-range products at minimum, and often towards the higher end. And I have still encountered dramatically more failures generally but also dramatically more deliberate crippling of products in recent years.

I do agree that there is some element of modern technology simply being more complex and/or working on smaller scales and so inherently having less margin for error. Whether I really need a more vulnerable 4TB hard drive instead of a more robust 1TB drive if I only have a few hundred GB of data to store anyway is a different question, of course, but bigger numbers presumably shift more boxes so that's what everyone supplies.

There is probably also an element of dumb luck in my personal anecdotes. I had an amazing lack of failures for many years, with not so much as a hard drive giving out on me during its working lifetime across many different machines. Statistically, I was well into the long tail for that period, and what I've seen more recently may in part just be reverting to the mean.

But that doesn't excuse things like printers that decide your ink/toner has run out after a fixed number of pages when you can see there's plenty of supply left, or tablets that get security patches for barely a year or two before some OS update designed for newer hardware leaves them barely able to run any more, or cars where diagnosing a warning light on the dash means an expensive visit to a dealer but adding a simple report of the underlying fault code to the already pathetically bad onboard UI would mean owners could fix the problem and the clear the error in five minutes themselves without paying. These kinds of trends are rampant in their respective industries, even among big name brands and high-end products, and they are nothing but customer-hostile cash grabs.

Money drives innovation

[DidgetMaster]

Let's see...users are willing to fork out a few hundred dollars every few years for the latest tech trinket, yet they want all their software for free. They balk at even a modest charge of $10 or $20 for something really useful. Gee...I wonder why bugs go years without anyone looking at them or features remain on the backlog for decades? If we want innovation in software, we have to be willing to pay something for it.

Re:Money drives innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

InB4 the typical /. response that "software replication cost = $0. Therefore, software should be FREE!" Never mind that hardware replication cost in not very high, either. The R&D cost is very high in both s/w and h/w.

Re:Money drives innovation

[drinkypoo]

If we want innovation in software, we have to be willing to pay something for it.

I couldn't give a toss for innovation. They can blow their innovation right out their arseholes. What I want is iteration. I want them to go back over their work and fix their mistakes. I am willing to pay far more for a bugfixed OS than I am for a new scheduling API for example. And I won't pay anything for the developer to add spyware to the system.

Re:Money drives innovation

[MachineShedFred]

People will fork out a few hundred every few years because the last trinket they bought has been obsoleted by the manufacturer prematurely, either by making the latest software run like shit (Apple, Google Nexus) or by never releasing updates to begin with even if there are egregious security problems (most of the rest of Android).

Hardware can't be remotely upgraded over Wi-Fi - there is a measure of lock-in there that cannot be dealt with.

Re:Money drives innovation

[pD-brane]

If it were free software, you or the free software community actually had the option to improve it.

Whether it be free software or not, the parent is of course right that one should not expect a lot of improvements if not paying for it (however, see reply #53142799).

Re:Money drives innovation

[T.E.D.]

Let's see...users are willing to fork out a few hundred dollars every few years for the latest tech trinket, yet they want all their software for free.

I'd like all my hardware for free too. If hardware was free to make copies of, I'm sure it would be in the same boat. This is what economists call being a rational actor. If I don't want to fork out $10 for something, then clearly having it is not worth $10 to me. This is just basic economics. Arguing against it is no more sensible than raging against the incoming tide.

No both matter

[NotInHere]

Hardware may be a "solved problem" for x86 cpus, but anything beyond that is still unexplored territory. Elon musk is sad that so much talent is focussed on some cloud solution while that talent is terribly missed engineering. I agree with that. We need electric cars that can replace ICE ones, we need robots that can take care of the elderly, and this is only partially a software problem.

Re:No both matter

[freeze128]

The elderly don't want robots to take care of them. In fact, I bet that today's kids will not want robots to take care of them when they're elderly.

Bottom line: The elderly hate everything.

Re:No both matter

[quintus_horatius]

The elderly don't want robots to take care of them.

The elderly don't want robots to take care of them, but the definitely won't want to pay more for a real person to take care of them when robot care is cheaper, so robots will do -- but they reserve the right to complain all the same.

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.

Why write software?

[plopez]

When you don't have to. Stick to your core competency. Software is notoriously hard to manage precisely because it is nebulous. You cannot see it, touch it, feel it, smell it, or taste it. A strictly intellectual construct. Hardware is easier to conceptualize as it is tangible. Does apple really need to redo MS Word? Or Docker? Or a host of others.

Sure software can change faster, but all that does is create crappy software. Who hasn't experienced sales screaming "We have to ship feature X before our competitors!!!!!!!! "

My advice to Apple is stick to your knitting. You don't want to have to spin off some useless software applications that you over spent on in a few years.

Re:Why write software?

[Zero__Kelvin]

" Hardware is easier to conceptualize as it is tangible."

Not really. If you truly understand hardware you know it is a boundless discipline, and in fact there is often microcode embedded in said hardware. It's all about the interfaces and their integrity. Software, hardware, it doesn't matter.

Re:Who is Gruber?

[bondsbw]

Remove a horse's brain, and neither the brain nor the rest of the horse will win many races.

Re:Hardware is paper.

[lucm]

Software is the story.

Shingy, is that you?

Staff have to be smart again

[AHuxley]

Why was in house dx12 support not ready? Why is the port of a game so bad on a desktop? Staff are just not the best anymore.
Video is done at HD or 4K with free software or low cost solutions or software from a big hardware brand. Good enough to upload and share.
Music is streamed and created by creative people or a group created by committee to sell well.
VR is still been hyped as not inducing user issues and needs a gpu and cpu to get the frame rate.

The problem now is branding and the optics of the brand in social media. The staff presenting well as a group on social media is useless.
Having your best staff stop to help educate new team members for years is years lost on a product with your brand on it.
Average staff with no creativity or ability now been placed in top projects is not useful long term to any brand.
Stop including staff that need "support" for years on software projects. If useless staff have to be hired keep them away from software the consumers buy.
A new building for new staff and their special projects will keep new staff well away from slowing down actual products.
Government officials, inner city politicians, bloggers, tour groups can be shown what they need and want to see.

Hire only the best to work on products and code great software again.

Re:Staff have to be smart again

[drinkypoo]

Why was in house dx12 support not ready?

Ugh. DirectX is only even a thing because of 3dfx. OpenGL? Never heard of it! Here's this GLIDE thing. Wait, Microsoft is going to make their own 3D API? Shit! Here's a limited, half-assed OpenGL driver! tooooooo late.

Re:Staff have to be smart again

[AHuxley]

Its getting hard to blame external issues :)
More brands have to look at who they are adding to they own staff and why the products fail.

Re:Staff have to be smart again

[hairyfeet]

Oh lord the puppies don't remember their history!

DirectX became a "thing" because of "The Lion King" on PC. A lot of the OEMs sold a shitload of units with the Lion King game preloaded, IIRC it was Xmas season 94. All these kids came down on Xmas morning to play...only to find out the game didn't work on like 90% of the hardware out there. Of course nobody blamed the shitty programmers for only supporting a couple of chips, nope they blamed Windows 3.1 and MSFT and had a royal stinking shitfit, even ended up on the nightly news, kinda a "MSFT is the Grinch that crapped on Xmas" angle.

Well if there was one thing that MSFT under Billy didn't like? It was bad press, so next thing you know they announce "Direct3D" and "DirectDraw" to solve this very problem of every game needing drivers for every bit of kit. Later on they combined the different APIs into what is now called DirectX.

Re:Staff have to be smart again

[drinkypoo]

DirectX became a "thing" because of "The Lion King" on PC.

Whoops! Typo. I meant Direct3D. My bad.

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.

Re:Seth Godin is spot on with this one.

[garote]

Seth's glorified blog post is not news - and it is barely noteworthy. He is looking to Apple for innovations in word processing and spreadsheets, as though that were the new frontier? That is laughably out of touch.

He claims no progress in "file sharing and internet tools" ... right after Apple simultaneously releases mobile and desktop operating systems that automatically share a common clipboard, documents folder, and desktop across all devices. Whut?

And this is on top of the "file sharing and internet tools" they have already crammed in over the last six years (and keep in mind these are ALL software) :

Per-app cloud space management, cloud-based backup and restore, automatically synchronized logins, web forms, network settings, photo libraries, music libraries, chat histories, open web pages, browsing histories, calendars, app purchases (each of these requires a different implementation). Laptops that back themselves up wirelessly over your home network _while_asleep_... (That's excellent software and firmware working in tandem, that is.) Watches that authenticate laptops, phones that complete purchases for laptops, two-factor authentication across five classes of device... In-device transcription of your voicemails, background visual analysis of your photos, intelligent automatic data-mining of your mail, documents, chats, etc for unorganized contact information - again, on device... Oh yeah, and they threw together what's become a very good competitor to Google Maps in half a decade or so, including 3D flyover data and public transit... This is a wide-ranging suite of useful functions that no other company - not even your precious Google - is able to offer.

I agree, the seams are showing a lot more often these days. I'm quite upset that they cannibalized Aperture to work on Photos. I feel the rest of their "professional" offerings are already going the same way - getting hollowed out and left for dead. (Luckily Adobe is taking up that slack.) But anyone who claims software innovation has just "stopped" at Apple is either out of touch, or perhaps being willfully ignorant to try and sound clever or profound. And Seth has the temerity to claim that DROPBOX is somehow the company to beat? Ugh.

Few decades?

[xanthos]

Wtf?
"Think about how many leaps forward Slack, Dropbox, Zapier and others have made in popular software over the last few decades"

None of these are even a decade old! They are cloudy web x.0 incarnations of old unix utilities!

And Seth should know this! He is as old as I am!

Now get the hell off my lawn!!

Re:Few decades?

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, I'm not sure how he gets "omg software innovation is amazing" from Slack or Dropbox.

Look! We can make IRC and FTP pretty! Innovative!

Chess is effectively infinite

[man bash]

How can anyone possibly comprehend the "effectively infinite" game of chess? Perhaps it has something to do with its intuitive set of governing rules.

No software crashes?

[aliquis]

He can't have used web-browsers much.

Since Chrome goobles up whatever amount of RAM eventually it will be too much and you will want to kill that fucker.

Twice in a short time period Vivaldi (Chrome based by guys from Opera) and Chrome made Windows either by itself or through swap ~1TB of data each time to my SSD.

No, its about the Trinity ...

[UnknownSoldier]

This is the holy trinity of computers:

* Hardware + Software + User Experience

Great Hardware enables great software.
Great Software empowers the user experience.
Great user experiences has people loving computers.

Crappy hardware can only make for poor software.
Poor software makes for laggy user experience.
Laggy user experience has people hating computers.

--
If you're frame rate (or UI) is not targeting at least 60+ Hz, you're doing it wrong. Only amateurs target 30 Hz.

Re:No, its about the Trinity ...

[UnknownSoldier]

Thanks for the catch -- yes, should be "your" -- I had a brain fart when I changed the grammar.

Apple as example: Not by accident ...

[gordguide]

Apple learned a long time ago ... in the System7/7.5/8/OS9 days ... that if you want third parties to develop on your platform, you need to stand back and let that happen. They have introduced software (much of which is cited in the summary) to fill holes in the ecosystem, but they are pointers to lead third party developers to create something better and sell it.

They learned that lesson because they sometimes did step in and kill interest in developing for the Mac (more so with OS9, but the lesson stuck).

iTunes is a little different, in that it's a gateway to Apple income, so updates concentrate on that area, but it's wrong to expect it to be a state-of-the-art audio application. iTunes actually has no audio abilities; it uses QuickTime and Core Audio (built into the OS itself), and both are usable by any third party developer to make their own audio related apps.

When there was a glaring hole in the software ecosystem (Keynote, etc) Apple built a simple but functional app to be included with the OS It was never as functional as Microsoft PowerPoint; it was never intended to be. It was a kick in Microsoft's pants to keep developing PowerPoint for the Mac.

The point is the lack of feature enhancement is not by accident; it's deliberate. Apple wants developers to develop for the Mac, and they've learned that one way to do that is to leave room for 3rd Party Developers to fill in the void themselves.

Seriousl?

[KlomDark]

"An iPhone is a nearly perfect object. Sleek, attractive, simple."

*Gag* Really? A "perfect object"? This ain't no dodecahedron we're talking about here. It reminds me of an old soap dish. Stop with the worship of cheaply designed disposable tech. It's a bad mindset and bad for the environment.

Sleek? so thin the damn things bend/break all the time. Oh wow, such engineering. How about we go after "battery lasts a week between charges" rather than "Can be used to jimmy a door"

Attractive? I don't think so, personally. They look boring. Really boring.

Simple? Please don't insult the average person's intelligence. This is from the people who thought a mouse with more than one button was too complicated for the average moron.

The hardware is completely knowable?

[kamakazi]

Umm, sure 5 buttons, one of them being a fingerprint reader. Oh, and 3 axis accelerometer, multiple thermometers, a magnetometer, a microphone, a multitouch touch screen, a couple software defined radios, a lightning port that does a more than just USB, whatever else I forgot. All capable of being inputs which can control things in the phone. I think maybe Mr. Gruber was fooled by the sleek exterior and thought he knew the hardware. The hardware is so unknowable that there are forum discussions about other stuff that might be in there but not enabled, like FM radios and barometers.

Anyone that refers to modern proprietary hardware as completely knowable simply proves they don't.

Of course the border between hardware and software, the "firmware" layer if you will, has gotten very flexible. Without the software the hardware is a brick. Without the hardware the software, well, isn't.

This whole debate is completely academic and useless. Every time an app crashes we have proof that software needs improvement. Every time a Note 7 bursts into flames or an iPhone gets the touch flu we know hardware needs improvement.

Talk about a waste of time, why do we pay attention to these experts?