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Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

> You can empathize with the OEMs, though. For decades, these companies have had an incredibly easy ride, producing mediocre, commodity computers, and getting very rich in the process.

I love how someone who's never worked in the sector asserts that it's all trivially easy to do and the money just rolls in.

In reality, there is almost no market sector that's trivially easy. Problems are fractal. EVERYTHING is hard. I'm sure that if you dig deep enough into it, slicing bread is a tricky business to be in. Should the bearings be teflon or delrin? How do you compete with the new machines from China? What about that new OSHA mandate coming down the pike?

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It's not easy, but in many respects OEM's weren't even trying.

Suddenly, they all seem to have the technology to build ultrabooks, a year prior, one one had any technology that could even remotely come close?

The same goes for so many aspects....battery life, screen resolution, looks....Apple blows almost every single other company out of the water on almost every important aspect, except perhaps price, and even there you can even make the argument that they are better.

So yes, it is hard, but it didn't just suddenly become not hard in the last year where some OEM's are finally starting to come out with attractive products. And despite how hard it is, Apple somehow solves almost everything - the only thing OEM's seem to take an interest in solving is either hitting a very low price point (and they'll cut every corner it takes to get there) or the extreme upper end of performance.

> except perhaps price

It's almost as if all computers were sufficiently powerful for 99% of use cases that that's the only thing most people care about...

If Apple's percentage market share was flat in the last 5 years I'd agree with you.

They're not making money on "computers" meaning desktop machines, they're making it on mobile devices.

It doesn't matter what the sector is. Doing the same thing as everybody else, and doing the same thing year after year after year, is trivially easy.

Slicing bread is a dead easy business to be in. You buy a bread slicer, and you let it run. innovation, no matter the sector, is what is hard. And the point the article is making is that we haven't seen any innovation out of the tech OEMs in a long time.

> It doesn't matter what the sector is. Doing the same thing as everybody else, and doing the same thing year after year after year, is trivially easy.

Yeah, that's why no one ever watches the Olympics.

Running? Pffft! Lots of people do that. No new techniques in the last 9,000 years!

> Doing the same thing as everybody else, and doing the same thing year after year after year, is trivially easy.

No, it's almost impossible. Doing the same thing for year after year is impossible because someone comes along and does some part better from the customer's point of view, and then you don't have a business.

> Slicing bread is a dead easy business to be in. You buy a bread slicer, and you let it run. innovation, no matter the sector, is what is hard.

There are no "easy businesses".

For starters, there's no "bread slicing" biz. Slicing bread is a small part of whatever it is your customer is actually paying for.

Never confuse "units of billing" (suc as "loaves of sliced bread") with the business. For example, the biz is often making sure that they can serve their customers profitably. Fresh, on-time, small-inventory, etc is what makes a difference, not the bread slicer.

There's innovation in every biz that lasts. Technology is usually the easy part.

Awesome response / explanation. Thank you.

>No, it's almost impossible. Doing the same thing for year after year is impossible because someone comes along and does some part better from the customer's point of view, and then you don't have a business.

That's what I'm saying. Nobody in the pc OEM game has done that lately, that's why it has been so easy to be a OEM.

> That's what I'm saying. Nobody in the pc OEM game has done that lately, that's why it has been so easy to be a OEM.

You're wrong. You seem to think that PC OEMs just order some parts and slap them together. That's no more true than "buy a bread slicer and you've got a biz".

Being a PC OEM has always been hard and the ones that have survived have innovated. (Consider Starbucks. Pouring coffee isn't their biz.)

Never confuse "I don't know what they do" with "they don't do anything".

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