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Moving from a PC like ecosystem to a tablet like one is a net loss in my opinion. People are willing to absorb this loss and enter into a walled garden because

Moving from a PC like ecosystem to a tablet like one is a net loss in my opinion. People are willing to absorb this loss and enter into a walled garden because right now building iPad-like hardware is not easy. Can you go more into why the difficulty of creating the hardware leads to willing adoption by users that most likely will never see "how the sausage is made"? I would think it would be the opposite (commodity hardware and easy app creation would lead to wider spread adoption by the hobbyist crowd). I think it will mostly boil down to what you grew up with. I'm 41, I came of age building my own PCs, getting excited about an OS (Win95), the tools of creation (the PC) differing from the tools of consumption (the smartphone/iPad). My son and daughter (3 and <1 yrs) will be exposed to PCs due to my job, but I bet a lot of their friends in daycare will see a tablet as "the way computing has been and always will be". (Honestly my kids may think that too, daddy just hasn't accepted how much of a dinosaur he is yet).

yomritoyj 9y ago
Just like in our generation there will be people in our kids' generation who will want to know how the sausage is made and it will be a tragedy if the only way to do so would be to grow up, join a big firm and sign a NDA. Even for the others, an open platform means a greater variety of software for end users. Creating toll gates on the way to software development or suppressing software which reduces the platform owners's profit is not good for end users. Many people who will never touch a command line still benefit because a Finnish computer science student could decide to start writing a PC operating system of his own and that OS now powers their phone or allows others to provide online services on servers that runs that OS. If building iPad clones with an open hardware specification like the PC's becomes possible for multiple vendors I'm sure we will see a software ecosystem that will easily beat the walled gardens. The problem is that currently the number of firms that can build the hardware is small enough that they find it in their self interest to use closed specifications.
pjmlp 9y ago
Similar age group here. As you remember the PCs were the outliers, everyone else was mostly offering the same hardware/software integration as tablets. In fact Apple is the surviving company of those integration and most OEMs what to get back to it, because they hardly make any money nowadays just selling parts. Had it not been for Compaq and a failed lawsuit, building our own PCs would have been an alternative universe, which I never bothered to do anyway (was more expensive than buying a full new PC on my region).
danaris 9y ago
I'm not sure there's really a contradiction there: "the hobbyist crowd" is, and has always been, much smaller than the general population, so even with commodity hardware and easy app creation leading to widespread adoption within that subgroup, you can still have more people overall wanting, buying, and using something more like an iPad.

yomritoyj 9y ago

Just like in our generation there will be people in our kids' generation who will want to know how the sausage is made and it will be a tragedy if the only way to do so would be to grow up, join a big firm and sign a NDA. Even for the others, an open platform means a greater variety of software for end users. Creating toll gates on the way to software development or suppressing software which reduces the platform owners's profit is not good for end users. Many people who will never touch a command line still benefit because a Finnish computer science student could decide to start writing a PC operating system of his own and that OS now powers their phone or allows others to provide online services on servers that runs that OS. If building iPad clones with an open hardware specification like the PC's becomes possible for multiple vendors I'm sure we will see a software ecosystem that will easily beat the walled gardens. The problem is that currently the number of firms that can build the hardware is small enough that they find it in their self interest to use closed specifications.

pjmlp 9y ago

Similar age group here. As you remember the PCs were the outliers, everyone else was mostly offering the same hardware/software integration as tablets. In fact Apple is the surviving company of those integration and most OEMs what to get back to it, because they hardly make any money nowadays just selling parts. Had it not been for Compaq and a failed lawsuit, building our own PCs would have been an alternative universe, which I never bothered to do anyway (was more expensive than buying a full new PC on my region).

danaris 9y ago

I'm not sure there's really a contradiction there: "the hobbyist crowd" is, and has always been, much smaller than the general population, so even with commodity hardware and easy app creation leading to widespread adoption within that subgroup, you can still have more people overall wanting, buying, and using something more like an iPad.