You've probably seen this modern legend before. I have, and it showed up
in my email again earlier this week (thanks, bro!). But this time
it reminded me of Microsoft and Intel....
Railroad Gauge
Does the statement "We've always done it that way" ring any
bells?
The United States standard railroad gauge, the distance between
the rails, is 4' 8.5" (1.435 meters for the rest of you). That's an
exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Because that's the way they built them in England, and English
expatriates built the US railroads.
Why did the English build them that way?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who
built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they
used.
Why did they use that gauge?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and
tools they used for building wagons, which used that wheel
spacing.
Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels
would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England,
because that's the spacing of the wheel-ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in England
(and the rest of Europe ) for their legions. The roads have been
used ever since.
And the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else
had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the
chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the
matter of wheel spacing.
The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches
is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman
war chariot, and bureaucracies live forever.
The next time you're handed a specification and wonder what
horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right - the
Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to
accommodate the back ends of two war horses.
Imperial Rome and the Space Shuttle
Now the twist to the story.
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there
are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel
tank. These are solid rocket boosters (SRBs). The SRBs are made by
Thiokol at their factory in Utah.
The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make
them a bit wider, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the
factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory runs
through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through the
tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider that the railroad track, and the
railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses'
behinds. So a major design feature of what is one of the world's
most advanced transport systems was determined 2,000 years ago by
the width of a horse's ass. (author unknown)
As for Microsoft...
"Think Different" has never been the mantra at Microsoft. BASIC,
Bill Gates' first project, was merely one man's implementation of
an existing programming language. DOS was a virtual clone of CP/M
written for Intel's 16-bit 8086/88 architecture. (CP/M ran on the
8080, Z-80, and 8085.)
Word was far from the first word processor, and MultiPlan,
Excel's predecessor, was inspired by the success of VisiCalc, the
world's first electronic spreadsheet and the program most
responsible for Apple IIs showing up in workplaces.
Windows, which along with Office forms the core of Microsoft's
success, drew much of its inspiration (to use the word loosely)
from Apple's Lisa and Macintosh
operating systems. (To give credit where it's due, much of Apple's
work was inspired by work done at Xerox PARC - and Apple has always
given Xerox credit.)
Internet Explorer, the world's most popular and dangerous
browser, grew from Mosaic, the world's first web browser - the very
browser that also morphed into Netscape Navigator. Microsoft once
again stood on the shoulders of giants. Their only innovation was
giving IE away for free to undermine Netscape.
In short, Microsoft doesn't suffer from the "not invented here"
syndrome. Quite the opposite: Everything that contributed to
Microsoft's success seems to have been begged, borrowed, or stolen
from the innovations of others.
They just made a more popular system for following the ruts left
by others.
...and Intel
Intel gave us the world's first CPU. That was innovative, and
many of their CPU designs have been innovative (ask anyone who
knows CPUs about the i960!). But in many ways Intel suffers from
the same "extend and enhance" perspective as Microsoft.
The 4-bit Intel 4004 begat the 8-bit 8008, which begat the 8080,
which begat the 16-bit 8086, which begat the 80286, which begat the
80386, which begat the i486, which begat Pentium. And Pentium's
descendent were legion, each following in the architectural ruts of
the CPUs the preceded them.
The few that went a different way, such as the i960 or Itanium,
never found the kind of commercial success Intel's x86 line has
known for a quarter century.
Intel has been innovative. Bringing USB to market was a great
innovation - one port that could be used for mice, keyboards,
printers, scanners, external CD burners, and devices unforeseen at
the time (such as flash drives, iPods, and digital cameras). 12
Mbps USB 1.1 was fast enough in the late 1990s, and 400 Mbps
FireWire, an Apple innovation, was a great choice for those who
needed greater throughput. It's only in recent years that FireWire
400 has become something of a bottleneck for single hard
drives.
Intel saw FireWire as competition for USB and decided to extend
their invention with USB 2.0, a protocol with 480 Mbps bandwidth.
And everyone knows that 480 is more than 400, so it had to be
faster. And where FireWire devices has about a 25¢ royalty
charge for using the technology, Intel decided to make USB 2.0
available for the same cost as USB 1.1 chips.
The good is the enemy of the better, and to save 25¢ much
of the world went USB 2.0 and ignored (or even dropped) FireWire.
Even Apple eventually followed their lead, dropping FireWire
support from the iPod in 2005.
The only problem? USB 2.0 is an inferior protocol. FireWire
allows a 400 Mbps path between devices, but USB limits each device
to about 2/3 of total bandwidth. In the case of USB 2.0, that's
about 320 Mbps - 20% slower than FireWire instead of the 20% faster
that people intuitively expect. Worse, USB provides less power to
devices, so iPods and cell phones and PDAs take much longer to
charge.
All because Intel chose to extend a good standard to crush a
better one.
Apple Innovation
Most of Microsoft's success and Intel's success is rooted in the
past, either software invented elsewhere and copied or hardware
developed in house and extended way beyond its original conception
- yet almost always fully backward-compatible.
Apple hasn't followed the ruts left by others; they have usually
taken the road less traveled, and often others (including
Microsoft) have followed.
The Apple I and II were breakthroughs. Woz's floppy drive
controller was a stroke of brilliance. Building a whole new
computer system on a whole new CPU using a whole new paradigm (a
graphical user interface?) and a new input device wasn't only
forward-looking, it threatened the Apple II, the core of Apple's
success.
Atari, Commodore, and Osborne are just a few of the companies
that were successful in the 8-bit computer world and were unable to
leverage that to success in the 16-bit world. Microsoft and Intel
managed to leverage their past. Apple build a whole new future.
Microsoft copied the Mac OS, creating Windows. Apple worked with
IBM and Motorola to create a whole new CPU architecture, PowerPC,
that would power Macs from 1993 until 2006. Intel kept adding
incremental improvements to its x86 architecture. Apple moved from
their classic Mac operating system to a whole new one, OS X.
Microsoft kept building versions of Windows that were backward
compatible with ancient software. Apple announced a transition to
Intel CPUs that would break backward compatibility with their
"classic" OS.
Microsoft and Intel tend to play it safe. Apple takes big risks.
A digital music player from a computer company? An all-in-one
computer in a world of beige separates? A laptop with a built-in
pointing device? A graphical user interface? A new computer
architecture that breaks with the Mac's legacy OS?
Lead or Get Out of the Way
Much as the booster tanks on the Space Shuttle are indirectly
designed around the width of a pair of horses, Microsoft and Intel
base much of their success on the ruts of past success.
Apple is more like early aviators. There are no ruts in the sky.
You have to innovate and blaze your own path. And from the sky you
can clearly see the earthbound following ruts left by yesterday's
chariots, wagons, and trams.
