Apple Goes Vertical and Why It Matters
Love the Alan Kay quote:<p>“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” — Alan Kay<p>Didn&#x27;t help Sun Micro much :-). One could argue they weren&#x27;t &quot;serious&quot; about the software I suppose.<p>This article is basically saying that Apple becomes nearly untouchable&#x2F;catchable when they are building their own chips and devices and software. And yet that particular pattern has failed again and again. Digital Computer Corp was my first experience with it, Sun was my second, there are companies that decided to make Java &quot;engines&quot; which probably qualify as the third.<p>From what I have observed, companies and the software they produce can be viewed as exploring a graph where a local maxima is a successful product and a minima a failed product. If you can accept that model, then you can see that different hardware options can enable you to reach different maxima on the same graph, however once you&#x27;ve started building your own hardware you limit the spaces you can reach to only those where your hardware can reach them.<p>As a result, people who are trying to sell hardware (chip companies), being unconstrained by the local maxima you are pursuing, wander out into the solution space and uncover different and sometimes wildly better maxima that can solve the same problem. The vertical manufacturer then finds their bespoke hardware a drag on their ability to move from their current maxima to the one growing in the market adjacent to them.<p>If the new comers execute well they either put the vertically integrated old timers out of business or constrain their growth to a limited part of the graph.<p>I thought Apple had learned that lesson with PowerPC but perhaps they just felt they were doing it wrong and this time it will work. I&#x27;m guessing it won&#x27;t work long term.