BWare

He told them what he was going to do, and how he was going to do it.

Oh, wait, that’s the Babe calling his shot. Here’s SJ in 2007, calling his shot:

SJ took Alan Kay’s dictum seriously, unlike Microsoft, and Dell.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

And ahem, Samsung. “Samsung Electronics forecasts 60% fall in quarterly profit”, if you don’t want to drill down. But you should read this, the next time someone starts talking about “market share.” And remember Dell, and Gateway, and IBM…

Google and Amazon are trying, but they have big mountains to climb.

The opposite can apply too – witness Nikon, Canon, Sony. Basically any camera or TV manufacturer. Good hardware, crappy software.

Interestingly enough, Kay also said this:

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years.

Which is interesting, considering this.