Reading 1 - Taoxi Li

The first 7 chapters of In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson provides a brief but comprehensive background of the battle among several hardware and software manufactures. Specifically, it talks about the opportunities and challenges faced by Microsoft, Apple and other companies. This article is very informative and interesting to me overall, and it has triggered my interest to think more about the topics below.

                Firstly, I read Jobs’ biography this summer, and this article continuously reminds me of the book. I noticed how strongly Jobs' personality has affected Apple's corp culture and product. As described in the article, the MacOS is not as open as Windows in terms of application it allows and the extent of freedom it gives to Mac users. Stephenson calls the Apple Corp a “control freak” (17) in the article, and that is also a quite accurate description to Jobs. Because of Jobs’ desire to have absolute control over Apple’s product and the lack of trust on third-party developers, Mac OS has to run its on its own hardware. Today, this business model seems to be a great profit maker, but in the days when Dell and HP are mainstream hardware maker, that was a dangerous idea and almost destroyed Apple (and partially resulted in Jobs’ leave from Apple). Besides this compulsion to control his products, Jobs is also a perfectionist, which can be reflected clearly from Apple’s product. Jobs required that all the circuit inside the computers to be lined out in a certain order, even though no one but Mac engineers would see them. This pursuit of perfection leads to both of higher-than average price of Mac and the superior user-experience.

                Another thing that caught my interest in this article is the author’s no-so-accurate prediction of Microsoft situation today,which he made in 1999. The author claims that “Ten years from now, most of the world’s users may end up owning these cheaper OSes. But these OSes do not, for the time being, run any Microsoft applications, and so these people will use something else”(21). This statement is, obviously not true, judging from common sense or market research (in fact, Windows OS still takes up more than 90% of the total operation system market share today). At the same time, Microsoft is also moving slowly but steadily towards the fields of mobile devices, search engines, gaming etc. It seems that Microsoft the big mammoth has been trying to evolve some powerful brains to survive in the fierce tech competition. If there is a problem with Microsoft’s model, as with many other tech giants, though, I believe the problem might be that these tech giants lose focus in developing so many products that it get harder to make each single product outstanding. And this is what Apple did well, after some hard-learned lessons from last century. Though Apple does have products in mobile, tablets and MP3 (if iPod could be categorized as a MP3) area, it has very limited products in each area, and try to perfect them. I wound not call myself an Apple fan, but I do concur its concept in making few things perfect, as said in the following video (0:00 - 1:36) from World Wide Developers Conference 2013: "If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything? …Designing something requires focus."

                The last thought I have is about the future of Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. We could ask the same questions that were asked to Microsoft and Apple : have they put too many eggs in one basket? Do these internet giants rely too much on search engine, social media etc? What is there backup plan if the internet bubble breaks again? Will they become the next mammoths trapped in the tar pit, or will be smart enough to survive the never-ending technology evolution? Let's wait and see in 2023.