I think Apple has already sailed the seas of no return. Another company that puts users first will eventually arise and take its place. Life is a cycle of highs and lows. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Microsoft and Apple, the duopoly who control nearly 100% of the consumer desktop OS market, were both founded in the 1970s.
In comparison, Google was a relative "newcomer" in the late 1990s. Google and Apple control nearly 100% of the consumer mobile OS market.
There are no challengers. 3 companies own all of personal computing.
Oh yeah, these companies also collectively control the web browsers: Chrome, Safari, Edge. And they control the search engines: Google, Bing. (Google leveraged its search monopoly to achieve a mobile monopoly, which is how it crowded into Microsoft and Apple's world.)
> Another company that puts users first will eventually arise and take its place.
I doubt it, new companies spring up like mushrooms when fields gets disruptively innovated, but big companies tend to stay otherwise.
Can see it here, lots of shifts in the biggest companies the first half, while the second half is dominated by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Facebook and Amazon.
Or ask yourself, when was the last time a new American car brand was created? Tesla thanks to the electric car disruption, but other than Tesla it was a very long time ago. Same thing will happen in software once disruptive events get less common.
I was taking apart my Dyson today to clean it out. I was thinking that it was elegant and useful. I sort of like the company because it doesn’t attempt to get in the way and just provides a nice experience for a tad higher price.
Then I thought vacuum cleaners have existed for a while now. There’s the Whirlwind, Bissel, Kirby, Electrolux, Hoover, Oreck, Dyson, and most recently iRobot. Each generation had their brand.
We’re living through cycles and computers with operating systems are no different. With all the Chromebooks floating around in schools today, I bet you’ll have a generation of kids who will do everything on a web browser in the cloud and won’t complain about not having an exposed filesystem.
This is funny because I just went down a vacuum research rabbit hole and Dysons are despised by many techs and aficionados. Bagless vacuums in general are seen as a downgrade, and Dyson was the biggest hand in pushing their popularity.
My favorite is one vacuum tech who said Dyson’s biggest innovation was having a clear chamber that showed you the moving dust. Not much utility, but great product marketing.
But because this is HN, I look forward to a grizzled vacuum industry veteran coming by to put me in my place.
Microwave ovens are simple to design and that makes them not comparable, almost all the cost comes from running the factory and buying inputs.
A consumer level OS on the other hand is extremely expensive to develop and basically free to copy, so the advantage of scale is extreme, you wont see that level of competition there.
