Speciation in computing
My friend Boris Smus wrote a piece today on “platform fertility”:
Unless iPads become more hackable or other, more developer-friendly tablets emerge as serious competitors, laptop computers will become specialized tools for software professionals while tablets supplant laptops for the rest of the public.
Even if iPads do become more hackable or developer-friendly tablets become more popular, I suspect PCs are well on their way to becoming a specialized tool.
The problem is exacerbated when you set out to try to invent the next thing. How do you interface with your new stereo camera rig? How many hurdles do you have to overcome to make it possible to interface with your new smart watch? How about a pair of smart contact lenses? How do you get raw USB access? … This is generally where you climb down a layer of abstraction – for example, to NDK in Android. Without such an option, you’re left dead in the water.
This is Boris’ warning about closed platforms: they cannot spawn new platforms.
Closed devices may be dead ends in terms of what you use to program the next device, but not in terms of product evolution. Bright engineers have used open computers to make gaming consoles increasingly awesome ever since they evolved from the personal computer decades ago. Consoles became their own species, and innovation continues unhindered.
As the market matures, computing devices are specializing. Curated, focused experiences are delivering a better product for certain types of computing, while not effectively addressing other types of computing. Personal computers – the trucks to tablets’ cars and game consoles’ motorcycles – will live on and be used to build yet more platforms1. Software developers, office workers, and professional creatives still need hackable, flexible, and powerful systems.
As such, I’m happy to use an open computer to create awesome software, and a closed tablet to check my email and surf the web. May the PC continue to spawn new species forevermore.
- I may be wrong, and the next generation of developers might join Cydia’s creator Saurik in creating platforms with jailbroken iPhones or hacked Xboxes. In some ways, this would be kind of awesome. [↩]
Jun 12 2012
11:15 am
As I commented when I posted this to my links blog, I think the warning is, the less a platform is hackable by non-experts, the more the consumption loop intensifies.
So now, beginners need to switch platforms (and be comfortable doing that) to start hacking.
Jun 12 2012
2:19 pm
You said: “Is the bar for experts really being raised, or is it just that bar for beginners is lowered? Contrast with PCs that booted to BASIC.”
Of course! Both of these things happen at the same time. I think Smus is saying that iOS is a dead end in terms of it, itself, being a hackable platform. We don’t know what this will cause. We do know that people will need to learn a second platform, and hack on it, to go beyond it.
And frankly, my money is on the much-lowered-bar of web based programming that B2G is heading down.
Jun 12 2012
2:26 pm
I pretty firmly feel that there is no actual loss of “tinkerability” from these trends, and that whatever losses there are, are offset by the massive increase of people having access to computing in the first place due to its lowered basic-entry bar.
It no longer costs $20,000 to have a computer at home for a child to grow up with it and X% of those who do to become tinkerers and developers. Now, it costs $500–$1500 and the potential developer pool to get that X% from is many orders of magnitudes larger.
It doesn’t make sense to develop the “next platform” on an iPad unless our iPad tools become more capable than our desktop tools. The sequential “spawning” of new platforms is an inaccurate reflection of the tech industry, as smartphones, tablets and consoles are all spawned by desktops, and all of this doesn’t even include the various other sub-platforms and meta-platforms that play a tremendous part in the ecosystem.
Jun 12 2012
2:34 pm
Indeed – both the explosion of total computer users and the innate hackability of the web and JavaScript mean there are likely more tinkerers in the iPad age than ever before. Between jailbreaking and the appearance of iPad apps built for for JavaScript-based game and app development, a large iPad install base will continue to inspire more hackers.