The Goold Old Days
Kinds of feels like the good old days are back.
Remember when there were no big software companies? Well, other than Microsoft? I’m talking about the wild west of PC days, in the ‘80s, when you bought (or, frequently, copied from a friend) little applications developed by nobody you had ever heard of, which did only one thing, but it was exactly the one thing you expected that application to do. Whenever there was some new innovation in computing, like say the mouse, (I’m talking about PCs here, bear with me) you couldn’t count on your main system, MS DOS, to support it, or deliver an update to you in a timely fashion. You had to find the driver, and put it in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS1 yourself.
I remember when my dad brought home this terrific suite of office apps called… Eight-In-One. Anybody ever heard of that? Appropriately enough, it had eight applications all bundled together in one program, and they worked together and could share data, which was incredible (for a PC) at the time. But it was one solution in a sea of solutions. Microsoft Works was among them, but it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that it was the only game in town—there was real competition.
But that’s a bad example, because it was a suite. There was my favorite file manager from back in the day: PopDos, which used ASCII characters for graphics but let you use a mouse to work with files and let you put shortcuts(!) to favorite programs in a pull-down menu. Or PrintShop, the old-school grayscale one. Terminal programs like ProComm. You even had some system hack-ey things going on, with extended memory managers.
Then things kind of changed. Your word processor was either Word or WordPerfect, with WordStar a distant third. Spreadsheets? Forget it, it was Excel. With the advent of Windows, you went to MS Paint for your simple drawing needs, and you used the built-in terminal app for communication. And the basic requirement for mainstream success was that the program had to be a Windows program.
This is something I love about iOS and the App Store. The good old days are back; the playing field is, for the most part, level. (The App review process notwithstanding.) Independent software developers, whom you have never heard of, are constantly coming up with new ways to do things, new games to play, and in these days of the internets, new ways to connect with one another. The vast majority of apps you run on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch do not come from Apple or Microsoft, they come from small shops that are just out to make one or a few single-purpose things that aren’t covered, or covered well, by the base system, and perhaps rightly so. Look at all the notepad apps, bare-bones writing apps, to-do lists, calculators, communication clients, (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) cameras, navigators… the list goes on. None of these categories is dominated by an Apple or a Microsoft, it’s all about the little guys again.
Maybe as the ecosystem matures, a few major players will emerge, and things in the iOS world will look more like they do today in the PC world.2 I don’t know. But for now, I like this.
Tags: Apple