The world that Apple wants is one where the company itself is interwoven into your life, writes DANNY O'BRIEN
THIRTY YEARS ago this week, Microsoft bought MS-DOS from a local development company, Seattle Computer Products. This week, I upgraded my stumpy laptop to Lion, Apple’s new offering for its computer products.
They say the most stressful periods in anyone’s life are divorce, moving house and a family bereavement. To this I’d like to add these regular computer upgrades. Installing a new operating system is a leap of faith that exhibits elements of all three scenarios: you have to painfully separate yourself from your old familiar ways and habits; you have to prepare to move all your data into a new environment; and, if things go wrong, you have to bury your dead and move on.
Like all rites of passage, operating system upgrades – from Windows 95 to Windows Me, from Mac OS 9 to OS X, from whatever the current version of Android is to the next futuristic phone version – are moments to reflect on change and promise in the world of computers.
Lion was relatively drama-free. I am currently kangarooing through the interface like a driver with a touchy new roadster. My laptop’s user interface now borrows liberally from Apple’s other mobile successes – the iPad and iPhone. Screens and Windows can be hurled off set with a flick of the wrist.
The more one looks at Lion, the more one sees glimmers of where the next decade’s incremental progress will take us. Despite my clumsy adoption, the merging of our new touchscreen sensibilities will continue, I think to everyone’s benefit. (I watch children now reach out to laptop screens and determinedly try to seize the dead icons. They know where our intuitions are taking us.)
Deep down in the code, there are subtler hints. The iPhone’s App Store has moved centre stage on the Mac, par to another iPhone-inspired attempt by Apple to enforce its own rules and foster a market for “official” applications over a wider, more chaotic world of software traditionally encouraged by desktop operating-system makers.
Behind the scenes, programs in the new Mac OS are being herded into more rule-bound environments too. Lion begins segregating the capabilities of individual programs so that their authors can circumscribe more precisely what they might do, and so that malware cannot seize control of a whole computer through the flaws of a single program.
Apple’s online services are slowly spreading through its computers’ core software. Like sharing data on a site such as Facebook, I can now share my computer’s screen with colleagues, mediated through our Apple App Store identities instead of Facebook logins. You can even reset the password to your computer through your App Store login.
With Lion, there is a growing assumption that computers should be able to kill and restore applications and documents instantaneously. It’s not an assumption that Lion lives up to running on current hardware: starting my computer and restarting applications feels slower than ever. But I suspect part of the reason for that is that I do not have a solid-state drive – the speedy, chip-based replacement for the whirring hard drive. Lion leans towards a future where programs and data can be shunted from storage far more swiftly than at present.
Every upgrade poses a risk, not only for users, but for companies. What if the new code accidentally smashes the data of an unexpectedly large number of customers? What if the world revolts, and refuses to emigrate docilely to the next promised land?
Operating system upgrades nudge and shepherd users into the future that the company selling them wants to exist. Just like Windows 95 assumed, and therefore managed to magic into existence, faster and larger PCs, the feature set of Lion is partly there to predestine a particular hardware upgrade.
The world that Apple wants is one where the company itself is interwoven into your life; where the features that computer users want reflect its own hardware investments and experiences; where users feel comfortable handing over some of the powers of their machines to be moderated and maintained by Apple’s regulations.
All of that is clearly possible because, despite Apple’s different business model and approach, those were exactly the spoils of Microsoft’s three-decade triumph with MS-DOS and Windows.
But despite Microsoft’s undoubted influence over an army of commodity PC and chip manufacturers, it is now looking like the future feature set of a PC is going to be led far more by Apple’s model of what an operating system should look like.
That’s got to be worrying to Microsoft. When Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead, almost exactly half way between the birth of MS-DOS and the present day, he could be confident of his predictions – because his company was tipping the scales. The feature set of the next planned Windows operating system determined what the hardware would be to run it. The adoption of USB was delayed while Microsoft tweaked its implementation of it. The evolution of the web halted while the development of Internet Explorer in Windows slowed to a crawl.
But now Apple has a competing vision of the future – and it has the clout in hardware investment to shift capital investment towards its vision. And if Microsoft cannot create the future with its operating system upgrades, how does it have a hope of accurately predicting them?
