It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.
Story I was told from someone who worked on the early-2000's "Tablet PC":
Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or it has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to be Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements, technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the benefit over a laptop, and it never took off.
Sounded to me like the classic "faster horse". It's not so much that they needed to make everything a PC, and more that they were such experts at enterprise sales that they didn't have confidence in their own new ideas.
> Microsoft's team originally produced a new touch-first interface that wasn't entirely different from the eventual iPad. They took it to various corporate customers, and the response was unanimous: it needs to run Real Windows or it has no future. Facepalm. So they went back to Redmond and changed it to be Windows on a touchscreen. It met all stated customer requirements, technically, but of course it was clumsy and people didn't really see the benefit over a laptop, and it never took off.
This is not so obviously wrong. It's fairly well acknowledged that the biggest barrier to the iPad becoming a general computer for most people is iOS. It's unclear that the answer is 'Windows on a touch screen' but it's also equally clear that Apple hasn't done anything like enough to make iOS work for the larger form factor.
Funny how these days it's the inverse, isn't it? Everyone, including Microsoft with Windows 10, seems to be obsessed with making PCs into large hand-helds and phones as far as user interfaces are concerned.
I think there are useful lessons that can be learned from mobile, that might be applicable to desktop, but you're right Microsoft made exactly the same mistake again in the opposite direction. I'd say they did that most egregiously with Windows 8 though.
Microsoft keep looking at a few data points they have now, extrapolate those into the future and then try to jump directly to that future. Currently it's an attempt to 'catch up' with Apple, but they keep extrapolating straight lines when the actual track of innovation is in curves. They did the same sort of thing with Longhorn, trying to re-invent the PC platform with object oriented database file systems and the whole OS running on .NET because Java looked like it was the wave of the future. They're trying to out-compete rival technologies without really thinking through what they're doing.
That’s a good point. Microsoft saw what Amazon was going with AWS, projected that into the future and got the right answer. It’s an example of where this strategy paid off. To be fair to them it’s not just random chance it worked out either, execution matters too and they seem to have hit the nail on the head with Azure.
A quote from the post calls this pattern "Microsoft takes three tries to get anything right":
Microsoft's entry into most new technologies follows this same plan, with the first effort being a preemptive strike, the second effort being market research to see what customers really want in a product, and the third try is the real product.
I didn't use a windows computer in all of 2018 and 2019. MS's "let's make PC GUIs more like a 2006 flip phone" strategy and other random instabilities and anti-user designs have inverted the difficultly of switching to linux to now being difficult to stay on windows.
Windows 10 doesn't come with the tablet experience on by default, you have to put it into tablet mode to get that. That's been true for several years now.
Win10 is a lot less user hostile that 8, but it still has the legacy of having two different UIs in parallel. Finding specific configuration setting has always been hard on Windows but you also have the dumbed down don’t-call-it-metro interface getting in the way as well.
One key aspect of this was that on the "big iron", software was under the control of the administrator and generally trusted, while the users need to be protected from one another. On "small iron", there is one user, but the applications come from a variety of sources which may not be trustworthy, so the user needs sandboxing between the apps.
On interaction design: the iPhone may not have been quite the first consumer device with a capacitative touchscreen that worked brilliantly without a stylus, but it certainly felt like it was. Styluses were the bane of pre-iPhone touch devices and I'm surprised that Samsung tried to bring them back.
Two things that styli do better than fingers are writing and drawing. That was the point of Samsung's use of it, and even Apple now has their Pencil. Yes, using them for everything, like in the Palm Pilot era, was annoying.
Towards the very end of the 90ies, some introductory CS course had a nice diagram of how general architecture features like memory management, multitasking, networking, multi-CPU, multi-user OS, virtualization and maybe some others had slowly trickled down from research prototypes to mainframes to personal computers to handheld devices to embedded controllers. Everybody in the lecture hall was mentally continuing the lines and I remember prodding my neighbor, joking about when a successor of the Palm III he was using for taking notes would run a multi-user OS. Android, with its full-blown Linux kernel underneath, came just in time.
If we trace personal computers to their root origins, we'll see the LINC. The LINC was designed to be used by a single person. This was before time-sharing and interactive computing happened and, due to the differences in their use, the two kinds of computers diverged into what we saw in the 70's until today in every way - from the hardware to the software to the way they are used.
OTOH, my laptop has more in common with a VAX running Unix than it has with a Commodore PET. Or a LINC.
> OTOH, my laptop has more in common with a VAX running Unix than it has with a Commodore PET.
This was my thought upon reading the "Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts" quote, and it's also something I've been thinking about lately. Personal computers definitely represented a distinct development track from the multi-user/multitasking industrial/academic computing systems of the time. However, as PCs became more capable and merged key innovations from the higher-end computing branch (e.g. virtual memory, protected execution environments, and the operating systems that can leverage such features), we seem to have arrived at the same point -- a phone in my pocket that's more like a VAX 11/750 available in 1981 than an IBM PC from the same year. The "microcomputer" development track that included the Commodore PET and 8086-based PC systems was greatly useful for jumpstarting the PC industry, but was ultimately set aside.
So maybe it's not so much that small computers are completely different beasts than large computers, as their initial development required a unique approach to fit the constraints of that particular era.
As someone who has personally installed UNIX on a VAX 11/750, I do appreciate the attention to human factors that the microcomputer era has contributed to computing. :)
Desktop PCs of today evolved past the level of minis of the 90's, gaining many features minis never had, but, while minis are no more (our current servers that replaced them are overgrown versions of PCs and RISC workstations), mainframes didn't stand still and continued to evolve hardware and software features that reflect the demands of their segment: reliability, throughput, IO, security, and so on.
Their evolution is pretty cool. And their software is very alien to people who grew up on personal computers.
It depends how you look at it. For example the PET had a single chip CPU and recognisably PC like hardware architecture, while the VAX processor was built from individual TTL logic units. The point the book was making was that the two types of systems have different lineages, but he wasn’t ignorant of the fact that influence went back and forth between them.
"Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts"
Are we living in a period in which many things seems to be going backwards? With ARM trying to go into servers/desktop, or the (somewhat) failed attempts to bring the tablet/phone interface to PC (Ubuntu and/or ugly full-screen-only apps)?
It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.