> Marc Andreessen said famously (or at least is paragraphed as saying) in 1994 that the "Browser is the Operating System" and people have been doing riffs on that since then.
Isn't that downstream of Sun Microsystems’ old slogan: The Network is the Computer?
AFAICT, Sun’s underlying vision was more on the side of pervasive RPC and/or downloadable code, i.e. closer to DCOM or NeWS than HTTP.
(We have in fact ultimately ended up layering downloadable code on top of HTTP. I don’t think I like the results, yet some of the things I don’t like seem inherent to downloadable code in general.)
It was more than this. The Sun Ray thin clients were so frigging impressive.
The problem wasn't the tech, the problem was it was SUN. It ran on Sun Hardware, with Sun Software and all at Sun Prices. Metaframe was just so much cheaper (it was also hot garbage but thats another story).
Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.
And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
Really? Most businesses leave their eternal soul and their firstborn in the care of Microsoft, with no backup plan. I just don't buy this.
Microsoft is not just Microsoft. It's the cottage industry around products like Excel. It's all the other PC applications. It's WHQL getting hardware vendors into the fold. Compare all that to Apple. Apple is big, but not compared to the greater continent of Microsoft. People are more concerned about Apple's walled gardens than Microsoft's. It's no coincidence that Apple has taken more heavy handed actions to rule their platform more. That is why their platform is smaller overall and why people don't trust them.
Sometime I said to myself. If I hacked someone's PC, his hard drive will become my NAS.