No.
2,767 karma · joined July 15, 2018
[0] http://mimix.io
[1] http://miki.mimix.io
In a commodity environment, all choices are functionally equivalent. Corn from this supplier can be used in all the same ways as corn from that one. Because of this, all units of a given commodity tend to be priced the same at the same place and time.
Operating systems are now a commodity with a price of free. Microsoft hasn't charged anybody for Windows for years, and neither does Apple charge for its OS or upgrades anymore. Those used to be a big part of those companies' revenue. What changed?
Both Microsoft and Apple started making more money from services than from licenses. Even when sold as an "Enterprise License," the real product is not the otherwise-free software, it's the support you get with it that enterprise customers must have to keep the lights on.
Since Linux was always free, the profitable Linux company (Red Hat) got into that business of selling services and support right away. The other side of this business for MS and Red Hat is hosting. For Apple, who was never good at hosting, they got into selling music as a service and made enough money from that to make OS income irrelevant.
So we have reached the point in personal computer history where all operating systems are free commodities with zero-to-few distinguishing features between them. The users' choice rides on their comfort level with the surrounding environment, the specific tools they can or can't use, and the products in which they have sunk costs -- existing things that have to keep working. Those are the things that MS is selling to with this Linux push. Keeping folks on the Windows juice.
Dark stores, however, could work if enough consumers like them. Just as Covid started, Best Buy turned our local store into a 50% dark model. It's the first time I'd seen such a thing.
Half of the store was converted into bank of drive-up spaces manned by workers with a mobile app. You order online and pickup there. So far, pretty normal. BUT, here's the kicker, not all of the products are available in the walk-in store! Some stuff (like the accessory I was buying) is only available on the Dark Side. Meaning if you walk in the store, you can't buy that item. It's not on the shelves and they're not setup to "go in the back" and get it.
Personally, I think this takes all the fun out of retail -- something that's definitely gotten less fun since Covid. One of the ways Best Buy has survived Amazon is that they focused on an improved in-store, in-person experience. They were trying to make shopping fun and, with cool displays and cool tech, they often did.
It's gotten less fun as they try to reduce costs. 'Cause math, again, and dark stores are just going to make that worse. But they will probably be profitable in urban centers where there's a big mobile ordering population.
Here's the rub. Devs like Linux and open source. That's not going away. Users, however, overwhelmingly live on Windows. The stats aren't even close. Windows owns the desktop, full stop.
How does Microsoft give devs what they want and users, too? By subsuming Linux into Windows. In other words, featurizing it. Rather than extinguish Linux (not doable), Microsoft is extending Linux's reach into Windows boxes. Frankly, it's brilliant and harkens back to the good old days of mainframe virtualization when the OS you run was completely irrelevant and unrelated to the OS the hardware was running.
It's well know that one of the best ways to kill a competitor's product is to featurize it. In other words, add what they do as a feature to your product, making them irrelevant on their own. Linux had already done a pretty good job of making itself irrelevant on the desktop, lacking as it is does even a simple, standardized executable form that regular humans can double-click on and install. This is kind of Job #1 for software. But I digress.
By making Linux a feature of Windows, it won't matter one whit where devs like to work. Their apps will simply run on Windows. Microsoft will provide that one-click executable and they will virtualize the entire environment so well that the Windows user will not know or care that Linux was ever involved. Linux users will get the device support they gripe about not having since the devices will all be virtualized, too.
This is truly the best of both worlds. It's not E^3 (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish) because Linux won't be extinguished. Instead, it will continue to be the place where independent and open source dev happens to a large degree. The only change will be Microsoft facilitating the deployment of those "Linux" apps (that term soon to be irrelevant) to a wider audience, and that's a Very Good Thing.
I think Satoshi's original use case is one that's viable and has proven to be viable. Another is in blockchain verification of narrative text without access to the text itself, something I built into a programming language for fact verification[0].
Bertrand Russell said it's all "the random collocation of atoms." As far as anyone can tell, the meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything is quantum physics. It explains all of the concepts currently attributed to both the physical and "spiritual" worlds.
Many religions acknowledge that there is no dichotomy between the physical and spiritual forms of experience. There is only one thing. If that's the case, the one thing's name is quantum physics. We can puts lots of other names on it from chance to déjà vu, from "bad behavior" to Beelzebub, but it's demonstrably the random collocation of atoms and probably not much more. Unless it's The Matrix, lol.
As someone who plays MS Flight Simulator (which requires hardware nobody has; the graphics are streamed to you) and also streams games like Forza from my own Xbox, I can tell you that the hardware is there now. It is quite possible to run even a high frame rate, graphically intensive game fully remote and not notice any difference at all than playing on hardware in front of you. It's real, now.
Mighty's claims for improving the browser experience sound totally plausible. After all, it's a lot harder to do near real time overlays of photogrammetry (like MSFS) than it is to render a typical web page. MS is already showing that this "harder rendering" can be done in the cloud and streamed to you faster than it can be done on your own machine.
I agree with the OP and PG that some version of this is the future of computing. Already, people are hesitant to upgrade hardware because there isn't any real increase in performance. I myself have owned every Xbox since they were invented but I didn't buy a Series X yet. Why? There is no improvement on the games I actually play. (When Forza 5 comes out, this will change and I'll be a customer again.)
Same with the desktop, I have a three year old laptop that will run Windows 11 and I wouldn't get any improvements out of changing it. The better computer of the future lives on a box that you don't own -- just like the mainframes of the past that I worked on and enjoyed so much.
The web won because worse is better. Is electron an "inappropriate tech" for Slack? Is (another web wrapper) wrong for Spotify? Those were conscious choices, made on purpose.
The OP dismisses with prejudice the only reason Electron exists or is so popular: it saves dev time and lets people build desktop apps with skills they already have. The same app will work as a website or SaaS with no code changes.
Putting Flutter or XAML up against the advantage of your whole team already knowing the platform (HTML/TS/JS/CSS) makes those newcomers non starters.
I was looking for Whataburger's ingredients the other day and got sent to a PDF. The link says Nutritional Information & Ingredients. Does the PDF have ingredients? No. You're just SOL.
The remote work revolution is the best thing to come out of Covid. I embraced this lifestyle 20 years ago when I started a web design business. Back then, I had to explain to customers that, no, I wasn't going to come to a meeting at their office and discuss the website with four people because none of that had anything to do with actually making the website. Instead, I would just do the work at my house and send them screenshots for approval or, even better, let them visit the site in progress and often make changes while they were on the phone.
Without this remote work concept, I would never have been able to start my own company. All I had was a computer a friend gave me and a $49 paperboard desk from Wal-Mart. My Ethernet cables ran on top of the carpet since Wi-Fi hadn't been invented. I also refused to do proposals or bids, instead just offering clear examples of my work and pricing.
Up until Covid, only freelancers could get away with that. I hope it becomes the norm for everybody who can do it. While there are some extra challenges in working at home (as the world has discovered lately), they are much better than the baggage of dealing with the office and the "office culture."
I'll put in a third plug for Lit here since it doesn't get much love on HN. Lit is as bare metal as web components and data binding properties could possibly be. It's near zero boilerplate. You just include Lit and start writing your real code. What a relief!
Google also started the Polymer project which became Lit, which is the antithesis of Angular: all of its benefits with none of its cruft. If Angular ruined JS, Lit saves TS.