OS Tying

The pros and cons of bundling popular third party ideas into the OS

Published on July 7, 2004 By Draginol In Personal Computing

Calculator The soap opera on the Macintosh platform continues apace as more details on the next version of MacOS X come out. In our last episode, we saw lots of debates over whether Apple's upcoming Dashboard is ripping off Konfabulator (a popular MacOS X program that has similar widget features as DesktopX has). There's a lot of debate on this and I think the final question is this: If Konfabulator didn't exist, would MacOS X have Dashboard. We can debate that all day but I think the answer is no. Everything else becomes secondary to that question. You either believe Apple would have added this feature that is amazingly similar in terms of what it does to Konfabulator or you believe they wouldn't have.

But there is a deeper issue here. An issue that is of interest to all users of OS enhancement software (especially Windows ones). That is the problem/benefit of taking software conceived and developed by independent developers and tying it into the OS. Microsoft is notorious for this kind of thing. That's why Object Desktop is conceived as a subscription as opposed to a box you buy at your local store.

OS tying has been elegantly explained here.

OS Tying
You tie an app or functionality to the OS by not making it available separately for a price. For example, when you one day arbitrarily decide that a full-featured calendaring app is now part of the OS, that app is tied to the OS. Users who simply want the performance improvements and greater hardware compatibility historically provided by OS upgrades, no longer have that choice.

I have talked about the potential damage OS tying does. The principle damage it does is take the wind out of innovation in a particular market as you are then at the mercy of the OS vendor. People who remember Windows 98 may remember the "channels" that came with it based on Active Desktop. But that feature was inspired from a program called Pointcast. Pointcast was a real innovator who helped create a big trend during the late 90s called "Push" technology. It was really cool stuff. But Microsoft co-opted it and put in Active Desktop. It wasn't well implemented but it took the wind out of Pointcast's sails. Today, Pointcast.com takes you to one of those domain sales pages. They're gone.

Was Microsoft "evil" to do this? No. Microsoft saw something that it believed people wanted and tried to deliver it to everyone. I'm not privy to what happened at Microsoft at the time or why the channels and Active Desktop got put aside but once Microsoft's channels went away, the whole field just disappeared. Would Push technology have matured into something truly great? We'll never know.

Point Cast vs Active Desktop Channels

Microsoft has become so notorious at OS tying over the years (instant messaging, ZIP, a skinnable Windows Media Player, UXTheme, Internet Explorer, MS Movie Maker, etc.) that when we started moving from OS/2 we were told going to Windows was insane. That as soon as we came up with something good, Microsoft would just rip us off. Their suggestion: Develop for Linux or MacOS.

Microsoft gets an unfair rap though. Apple has done the same thing for a long time. Sherlock eventually sucked up all the innovations in Watson to the point that Watson died. And those who don't excuse Apple for everything can point out countless smaller examples.

Suffice to say, all the OS vendors do it. As a sweeping generalization I'll say it's a bad trend with a handful of exceptions. The exceptions are when the OS vendor decides to keep improving it (Instant Messenger and Windows Media Player come to mind). It's bad when the OS vendor implements it half-assed and kills the market (Channels, Active Desktop, WinForms, arguably Internet Explorer -- read this, disk compression, News Reader in Outlook Express).

Internet Explorer circa 1999 (5 years ago)

When an OS vendor gets into the act and bundles something into the OS, they effectively kill a market. Non-developers will retort "Well, if you make something that's better then what's included then people will buy it." Nonsense. Most shareware authors make their living largely from low hanging fruit. Most developers lack the marketing ability to clearly explain the benefit of their non-free program versus the "free" version in the OS. There are exceptions of course (WindowBlinds sales took off when Windows XP came out and continue to grow). But in general it kills them. That's because most third party programs sell very very few copies. I.e. sales are measured in the two digit field per week. Take away the low hanging fruit and that developer is pushed over the edge and the app disappears.

But the pressure on OS vendors to tie into the OS is great. Tying popular program concepts into the OS is a lot cheaper than coming up with new stuff. Apple advocates point to how "innovative" MacOS Tiger is. Balderdash. While Expose is definitely quite innovative, I haven't seen too much true innovation in MacOS since the original release of MacOS X 4 years ago. By contrast, Microsoft really is trying to do some neat things with Longhorn. Some of these things, like Avalon, have a rough equivalent in MacOS X (Quartz). But you have to give Microsoft credit for at least focusing on core features rather than simply lifting ideas from popular shareware programs and throwing them in there. Admittedly, however, other than peer file sharing, Microsoft is running out of popular third party programs to lend into the OS (top downloads at Download.com last week).

So what's your view on OS tying?

Also, here is an article that disagree with my views that I thought was pretty interesting:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/07/konfab_confab

Comments

greywar

on Jul 08, 2004

Well I can only say that I thought MS needed to integrate zip file handling in the OS years before they actually did it. Kind of a no-brainer but I was quite pleased when they finally nailed it down. Disk Compression? The need for this has largely been obviated by disk capacity that is damn near unlimited and for most intents and puposes (consumer wise) almost free.

kingbee

on Jul 08, 2004

nothing apple has done comes close to microsoft's attempts to build bizarro planet java or ie's continuing and determined deviation from compliance with w3c standards. i hope youre not referring to the windows messenger (Instant Messenger and Windows Media Player come to mind as something ms has improved. windows messenger is annoying at best and way too easily exploitable. wmp is clunky, bloated and, as anyone who's suddenly lost their cd-rom reader or cdrw can attest, it's a bully.

im not sure why ms hasnt had a run at macromedia flash technology yet. it's pretty much effectively cross-platform and becoming amazingly more robust and is in such wide use that it would seem like a perfect target.

Madine

on Jul 08, 2004

From the consumer's point of view, getting something "free" is better than paying for something, and getting something integrated with the OS is generally more convenient than buying 3rd party software.

It seems like the major problem is that there is no legal incentive for OS companies to compensate third parties for using their ideas.

I think the "low hanging fruit" analogy is correct. Often times for "utility" programs, many people benefit from the basic features/idea, but not many feel that the upgrade from basic features (that might be in an OS tie-in) to advanced features (which would only be available in a licensed 3rd part program) is worth the price.

American Innovation

on Jul 08, 2004

Put everything in the OS - I want it all bundled with the hardware and I want it free. When the machine is old in 1.5 years, I want to throw it away and get new toys. And no - I don't need perfect, I need good enough, so I'm not going to pay (in time searching/learning and money) for the next 10-15% of a 3pl prog.

And I am everyman.

Tytan

on Jul 08, 2004

Ultimately, the lack of 3rd party applications affects the price and overall quality of the OS. Without 3rd party programs to "push" the OS companies into action, they will spend years and years not putting in essential features because they don't see a mass-market appeal. It's sort of the same thing with gaming. The new ideas waiting to sweep the nation don't because good ideas have to be creative babies before they can become adults and it seems that the larger companies these days aren't interested in taking care of creative babies, because they are deemed too messy and costly to raise. Its easier to steal the kids that somebody else raises and works with than to take the time to go through the trials of raising them up yourself.

But that theft comes with a cost. Even though you get a lot of innovation for free(from somebody else), you train up your creative people to take shortcuts in their creative thinking and creative processes that over the course of time will damage the company long term. You get a body of people who can take ideas and improve them but cannot actually innovate new, unthought-of ideas(or less thought-of ideas if you prefer). Once you have established a bad creative habit pattern it is excruciatingly hard to break it(like growing up programming in Basic and then trying to learn C/C++), or to overcome the bad habits if you even recognize that there is a problem at all. In the industry right now we have an abundance of 'me-toos' and very few creative thinkers and it is costing the tech market its momentum.

Its not like there shouldn't be an adoption for 3rd party programs into an OS. But I think the adoption process has to take a farming-mentality to adopting them. You need to adopt some innovations eventually, but if you adopt them too early in their maturing process you do greater damage then good. There has to be a certain upward mobility in terms of the movement of ideas from smaller concepts to larger ones, but not at expense of the creative culture that is developed. Our most valuable commodity in the tech business is the creative cultures we can build which are the seedbeds by which these ideas come forth and flourish. When any company strip mines that culture for profit, you are not only destroying those smaller companies but any future ideas that could have come forth to provide innovation and momentum. Its an innovation and momentum that you do not often see in large scale companies because the social and structural dynamic is very different. Larger companies come up with good ideas, but they are very different sort of ideas than ones than the smaller 3rd party companies come up with and we need both to make this work.

Madine

on Jul 08, 2004

Great post Tytan.

One of the things I have noticed as I have started a career as a programmer is that it is relatively easy to copy or rework someone else's ideas, but very difficult to come up with original solutions or ideas.

Draginol

on Jul 08, 2004

Ultimately consumers are the ones who suffer when the OS vendor excessively bundles. That's because good technologies tend to die on the vine.

Most users don't even realize they're missing out. Disk compression is a good example. Users just buy bigger hard drives. But if disk compression had continued forward, we could have even more space (and I run out of disk space regularly). NTFS 5's compression blows chunks and the market is too small for innovators to put in features that seamlessly and invicibly compress graphic files or documents in various ways.

The browser is another example. IE 6 has changed very little from IE 4 (from 1998). The market is no longer large enough to justify huge capital investments in that area.

The problem with battling OS tying is that consumers really don't know what they're missing. All they see is the free stuff. It's harder to imagine things that they MIGHT have gotten in the future.

Cflare

on Jul 10, 2004

Cflare - Angel_Zero.One
cfwebsite@hotmail.com

Heck ya. You're right. But there have been a few survivors of implementation. It normally occurs when there are multiple companies offering similiar software.
For expamle, media players, there are thousand of them. And even after Microshaft implemented their own. Which by the way isn't as great as some of the third party software. Winamp has gone beyond the call of duty.

(Winamp songs start one right after the other, eliminating that pause that WMP throws in, which is great when you want a loopable sound effect to play, such as rain. Way more people create skins for winamp. Customization is greater. Loads faster. And playlists are external, which means they can be sent with the songs.)

Even after the survivors were around, microsoft continued to rip from them. (I.E. AVI - eye candy, Skins, shaped skins, equalizer, playlists, media center. Most of which came from winamp)

And now the "Channels" thing. Windows killed it, because after they tie in all this stuff, they don't have the time to update or expand on those ideas, so they kill it, the sites change and then you have dead links. Tying in, in my opinion, should only be done when the OS writers are dedicated to keeping up what they tie in. Otherwize, they idea dies and is wasted.

Draginol

on Jul 11, 2004

Well said. I don't object so much to OS tying IF the OS vendor is going to keep at it to keep improving it and move it into the future. The channels feature in Windows 98 was a clear example of sheer abandonment that killed off an entire market.

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