Minimal: Minimalism in Things

Minimal is a blog I recently started following. As it's subtitle suggests, the blog looks for any relation to minimalism in culture and everyday life. In its very first blog post it defines:

Minimalism, the philosophy of a life of less, is more sustainable because it uses less, and thus recycling isn’t as necessary (though it’s still important). It’s not sustainable to continue to consume huge amounts of products (no matter how green they are) or use natural resources (no matter how organic).

Just recently, the minimalist wrote a post retrieving 3 previous ones on operating systems. They're a bit long all compiled up onto here but they're really interesting and he makes really good points as far as the correlation between OSs and the relationship between hardware and software.

The Sad State of Computing Today

The sad state of computing today.

The current state of PC laptops and desktops is depressing. Every time a new hardware vendor comes around it adds yet another interface, plug, connector or simply breaks whatever shitty driver the PC has. Not to mention the clutter.

Then you have the OS’s that run on a PC. They have to support so many different pieces of hardware that no wonder they are bad and unstable. I mean, Linux is great, BSD is great, don’t get me wrong, but because they have to support so much crappy hardware with a zillion combinations that at the end the OS runs scared. Windows is bad. Period.

Then you have Apple computers. While Apple hardware is not perfect, it is good quality hardware; add to that the fact the OS is tightly integrated and tailored to that hardware and that hardware ONLY and you have a very stable platform.

My wife mentioned the other day something that made perfect sense. She said that each brand of computers should make its own OS, like Apple, for its own hardware. So, Dell would make Dell OS, Sony would have Sony OS and Toshiba the Toshiba OS. That way we will have an OS that is tailored to the hardware and will work correctly.

Anyway, all this is very sad. We reached the point where we need to rethink the computer. Maybe it’s time to re-invent the computer. Maybe it’s time to ditch the desktop paradigm and use something different, more in tune with what people expect from the computers today.

In the meantime, stay out of PCs. They are bad for your health. If you still need to use a PC, do yourself a favor and install Linux or BSD.

On Operating Systems 

This is going to a somewhat long rant.

The previous post about Google Android being confused got me thinking about the poor state of mobile cellphones and PC’s today, and after some thinking I realized that the fault here is not the hardware but the operating system.

Let’s start with computers.

Before the PC appeared each computer has its own OS. From Mainframes all the way to what back then was known as a home computer (Texas Instrument TI 994A, Commodore, ZX, etc). Each has its own operating system that was tailored to work with that specific hardware.

Then the PC happen and it both ruined our lives and made it easier at the same time.

In the beginning it was IBM and Apple. Apple wrote its own OS, while IBM has to rely on an external source for the OS. Then the clone war happened. People started building copies of the IBM PC with hardware that was slightly different. Bill Gates saw a good busyness model here and the rest is history.

Today there are so many variants of hardware for the PC that the operating systems that run on the PC have to support a gazillion drivers for all those infinite combinations of hardware, making them (the OS’s) very unstable and unreliable and making the hardware work below its capabilities.

Apple, on the other end, traditionally made it hard to copy its hardware so the Mac is still a Mac and there is only one OS that is “Mac compatible”. Because of this “Everything just works” and it works great.

A while a go my wife, the non-techie in our family and a Mac user, asked me: “How come Dell or Toshiba or Sony don’t make their own OS’s? I mean, if each brand had its own OS it would be better because the people that built the computers know the computers better than Microsoft.”

That simple comment stroke me as genius in its simplicity and in its truth.

Yes, there would be some problems with binary formats and other things like data exchange, but if there is a standard that sets binary formats and all the other formats are open standards, or, better, some form of plain text format then it would be easy to share data between different OS’s and each computer would run then best they can. The PC wouldn’t suck anymore.

All this brings me to the cellphone world.

In the beginning the cellphone companies wrote their own OS’s. Nokia OS was great. Easy, intuitive and fast. The same with Ericsson. Motorola always sucked, but that’s beside the point.

Then something happened. OS’s started appearing for the cellphones that were not designed or implemented by the cellphone manufacturer: Symbian OS, Google android and Windows mobile to name a few.

In the United States it even got worse. Each carrier implemented its own OS. Verizon installed a hideous, horrendous and not user friendly OS on ALL its non smart-phones models. I am a huge fun of Nokia but then I saw the Nokias on Verizon and I wanted to vomit. The same with AT&T, Sprint and other carriers. Why? WHY? Do you know better than the cellphone manufacturer? NO!

Before I got my iPhone I had Verizon, simply because it was the easiest to get. When I went to pick the phone I saw that they all had the same OS. When I asked the manager of the store to give me a phone that has the original OS, not the nasty version they install, he didn’t know what an OS was.

So now we are starting to see the same pattern on both cellphones and PC’s. The OS’s being installed are not “native” and on the long run cellphones will become unstable, insecure, bloated and will work below their hardware capabilities.

It already started. It is happening.

I’ll stick with a Mac for a computer and either an iPhone or go to Europe, get a Nokia with its own OS and open the cellphone here. It’ll make my life better.

The OS Opportunity 

John Gruber makes the same point I made a few weeks ago here and a few months ago here. PC makers need to create their own OS.

"It’s not just that Apple is different among computer makers. It’s that Apple is the only one that even can be different, because it’s the only one that has its own OS. Part of the industry-wide herd mentality is an assumption that no one else can make a computer OS — that anyone can make a computer but only Microsoft can make an OS. It should be embarrassing to companies like Dell and Sony, with deep pockets and strong brand names, that they’re stuck selling computers with the same copy of Windows installed as the no-name brands.

Supposedly, tomorrow Google is set to unveil the details of Chrome OS, but we already know one thing about it: it’s designed around the assumption that the Web is the most important software platform in the world today.

But last week came news of another, similar initiative, from a far smaller company than Google: the Litl — a $700 “webbook”. If you haven’t seen it, go check out their web site — the videos on their support page offer the best introduction to their UI. It’s fascinating and clever in several ways. It is refreshingly simple. And most importantly: it is truly new. I don’t know if Litl is going to be a success — $700 seems steep for this when you can get a MacBook for $999, and the easel mode strikes me as an awkward gimmick without a touchscreen — but everyone involved with the Litl deserves tremendous credit just for having the stones to do this, to say, Hey, maybe computers in 2010 can do better than a user experience that is fundamentally unchanged from the original Macintosh in 1984.

If a small startup can build the Litl, why couldn’t a big company like Dell or Sony? People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now? Inkjet printers?

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers? The hard part of what Palm is doing with WebOS is getting acceptable performance out of a cell phone processor.

These PC makers are lacking in neither financial resources nor opportunity. What they’re lacking is ambition, gumption, and passion for great software and new frontiers. They’re busy dying."

If you've never heard about this blog it's amazing! Check it out, here.