Monopolies are for chumps
January 9th, 2009
Comment of the week, found in a MetaFilter thread about the Palm Pre:
One thing in computerland I’ve hated, really, really hated, was homogeneity. The conceit that there was ONLY one way to do it… when the ONE was was so obviously braindead. I saw the weird and wonderful platforms die – Atari Falcon, Commodore Amiga, Acorn, Be. I saw Apple Macintosh almost bite the big one.
But! Then! There was the Newton! And Palm! And WinCE! and Psion! and Zaurus! And then they all died.
Now, in Unixland, the mighty DEC Alpha is dead, SGI MiPS is dead (MiPS lives on in the gloriously weird, Chinese-government-backed Dragon netbook processor), PA-RISC should be dead, but isn’t because IA-64 is dead, PowerPC is dead, and now POWER-based AIX workstations are dead. Sun lingers on, but it’s only a matter of time before they give in and buy AMD to switch to a top-to-bottom x86 platform.
Even the Mac is just a glorified Intel PC these days.
This has depressed me no end… but wait!
Microsoft doesn’t have a stranglehold on the smartphone market! And look! Apple’s designed something pretty damn bad-ass that fits in the pocket, and using Power-PC, no less! Symbian’s still around? Whaddya know! Google’s Android is geek-chic, and liable to wind up on some seriously sexy hardware before the year is out, and Redfly wants to put a full-sized screen and keyboard at its disposal… as do various netbooks! And, now, this! Palm may not be able to rebound in this economic climate, but they sure as hell are going down swinging… and now we know why Sprint wasn’t signing onto the Android bandwagon.
The Platform Wars are back, baby! Pick your deck, and bombast about it on your blog! Competition breed champions, and makes more compelling underdogs. Monopolies are for chumps.
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:04 AM on January 9
Damn straight!1
__________- My sole quibble – speaking from a British perspective – is that the first paragraph really should also have mentioned the Sinclair ZX81, the Spectrum or the QL. Preferably the QL, which was this close to being a fine personal computer. ^
