1 post tagged “deja vu”
Some of you tech savvy folks out there may have heard, a while back, about Google's entry into the mobile phone market, Android. Think of it, the notion goes, as a unified operating system which can be run on any compatible mobile phone hardware.
You might have also heard of this totally unpopular thing called the iPhone. It's Apple's one-widget-does-it-all-and-dammit-you'll-like-it mobile phone. It's hardware and software acting in perfect orchestration because Apple controls (some say with an iron fist) both sides of the equation.
Sound familiar?
It's just possible that many of the people reading this won't remember the mid 1980's with a view to technological advances.
There was this company called Microsoft, and they had an operating system which many of you have never heard of called Windows. In 1985, it was touted as being able to run on any compatible PC hardware. Microsoft didn't make the hardware, they just provided the operating system. Until the XBox, Microsoft's forays into hardware were pretty much limited to some really nice mice and keyboards (I'm sure better MS historians than I will tell me otherwise).
There was this other company, who, a year before, released an ugly little toad of a box. It had a 9 inch black-and-white monitor, a single, pitiful, 800K floppy drive (seriously? I have single images on my digital camera bigger than that), a keyboard, and this, well, I'll just have to call it a thing, called a mouse which it turns out they ripped off from Xerox. It also had an operating system that you didn't type commands in. You, like, clicked on these other things on the screen called icons. Crazy. Anyway, it was all produced by a single company, which you might not have heard of, called Apple Computer, Inc. The company later dropped the "Computer" part because they discovered they were making buckets of cash on iPods and this crazy iPhone thing.
Anyway.
The point here is, Microsoft's operating system became the most dominant operating system on personal computers, and Apple's computers became the system of choice for this sort of niche of iconoclasts.
Now, who are you going to bet on in the coming Android/iPhone war?
