At WWDC, Apple finally announced the end of their 12-year affair with IBM and their PowerPC chips with the replacement of the PowerMac G5 with the 64-bit, Xeon-processing Mac Pro (and their lesser-known server line as well).
They also offered a sneak peak of the next version of Mac OS X, Leopard (must have Quicktime or VLC to watch.
And at this moment, I’ve come to this very conclusion on the evolution of the operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.):
IT’S DEAD.
All of the really innovative operating systems have either gone bankrupt or been forced (sometimes thrown) out of the market.
And how long have we been using operating systems on the desktop (yes, I know that operating systems for game consoles, servers, and databases have been dating back to the 1950s)?
I mean, seriously, I just think that operating systems can’t get anymore advanced, only more bloated and shinified.
I mean, look at Leopard. Not much more to look at, and its being criticized by the most dedicated of Windows users as committing the same “copycatting” that Apple users have long criticized Microsoft (going back into the 80’s) for doing.
Then look at Windows Vista (this and Leopard are due out next year). They’ve put this off for so many years, and have withdrawn so many of the promised features (WinFS for one), and have received so bad benchmarks in beta (to be fair, Paul Thurrott blasted Vista for those failings), that now its being considered the first historic example of OS-as-bloatware (the beta took 4 minutes to boot up on a Pentium 4 fercrissakes!).
I’m serious. OSes are at the point where they can’t get any better, only bigger and shinier.
Can’t fucking believe that I was going all cookoo for Linux or OS X not long ago….
Sic Transit Gloria.
No offense meant to programmers, but I think the problem may stem from being paid by the line of code. It’s like “Office 2007”, of which I’ve hear rumors. What are they going to do to the flippin’ thing, other than force us all to have a minimum of 4Gb RAM for the idiot thing to take up space in?
Long ago, when I had a TRS-80 Model III (ancient bugger, ain’t I?), a third-party vendor came up with a word processing program that ran rings around TRS’s “SuperSCRIPSIT” program. It was created by people who actually used word processors. (This was in the day when a Wang word processor—and I’m serious, this thing did nothing else but word processing—cost several thousand dollars as a stand-alone system. Storage was on 8″ floppies.)
Is it possible that programmers have lost touch with with their audience, and are now programming for no other purpose than to … well, be bigger and shinier?
It might be.
This could be a byproduct of software being treated as a commodity or product, as opposed to software as a service or hobby.
Surfing around the web, I’ve seen a far greater number of independently-authored applications filed under the GPL (which Linux, Firefox, and VLC all use) than I have under any proprietary license. While they’re much more imaginative and heartfelt, these would need constant financial backing of some sort to keep the developers of the GPL’ed software working on that code in order to improve it, or else, it’ll just fizz out like a project after Google’s Summer of Code.
However, that’s one extreme.
The other extreme is exactly what you just mentioned: programmers who, in the offering of their software under, say, Microsoft’s Shared Source License, are being paid per line-o’-code. These people are making lots of money, so they don’t have any problems with the maintenance and improvement of the code for its annual release, unlike those “smelly open source hippies”. But over time, they’ve improved it (or think they have) so much that there’s soon to be very little code to improve upon, but they still need to show a difference of *some* sort for the newest release in order to make money from it. Thus, they add bells and whistles, then gloss, then this, that and the other, then rinse and repeat for the release afterward. Then it’s a hideous-looking monster of an app or an OS.
That’s the other extreme.
Which would you prefer?