Steve Jobs on his “glide slope” theory of tech (1988)
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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.
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.
I think Microsoft would agree with that point. I'm sure they would love to ditch Win32 and move on.
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.
That may be general. Sounds like what the Buddhists mean by attachment that should be avoided?
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.
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.