The Genius of Jobs and Gates... And The Fall Of Both!11thFebruary
Posted by Brennan Novak on Feb 11, 2009 in
The genius of Steve Jobs is that he has always sought to humanize computer/human interaction. Nothing could illustrate this better than the above video "1983 Macintosh Dating Game." The genius of Bill Gates is that he exploited the benefits of being open and communal with Microsoft Windows- he engineered the software to work on many different hardware manufacturers machines. Apple, in contrast, insisted on controlling both the hardware and software, so they could create a more designed and stable platform. This is largely why Microsoft has dominated the computer market for so long and why Apple got left in the dust.
Both companies strategies appeal to aspects of natural law- that is "law[s] whose content is set by nature and that therefore is valid everywhere." Both companies benefited from the scientific symbiosis- Apple sold the worlds first GUI (Graphical User Interface) computer and Microsoft, at the time only had DOS a text based operating system, copied Apple's idea and invented "Microsoft Windows" also a GUI based OS.
With Apple, Steve Jobs took to the task of making these strange things called computers more intuitive so that humans could more easily use them. This is a pretty obvious step to getting people to use computers.
In Microsoft's case they sought to make just the software affordable (and left the hardware components of computers to be built by other people). Apple insisted, and still does, in being the only source for the hardware that Apple software runs on. There are pro's and con's to both approaches- Microsoft is still cheaper and Apple is still more stable. Both companies are still closed source- neither allows for independent programmers to monkey around with the the base code that is their operating systems.
Enter Linux, an open source operating-system written by Linus Torvald in 1991. There are many different flavors of Linux and even more types of GUI's to install on top of Linux. How Linux drastically differs from both Apple and Microsoft is that their is no centralized company that owns, creates, or is wholly responsible for how it is produced. Linux is created by thousands of "Open Source" programmers around the world, some get paid, most don't. It functions more like an ant colony, or a city, or a human body. If Linux can get their act together and make it easy to install (both the operating system and applications) and easy to understand for the complete novice- it will be the computing platform du jour of new decade. Judging from the design and user interface of linux.org they are still pretty far from meeting this goal.
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