Outsourcing Opportunity

IN A short piece called "The OS Opportunity," John Gruber emphasizes the importance of software over hardware in the contemporary computing experience, and wonders why more companies don't follow Apple's bundled OS/hardware lead.

I agree in principle with what you might call his "If you want a job done right..." idea. There are really only three OS choices: Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, all of which — even the myriad flavors of Linux — generally follow the aging files/folders GUI paradigm. Google's new Chrome OS and the Litl OS (much like the iPhone OS and Palm's Web OS) are reimagining that paradigm to some degree, but at the moment there still isn't a great deal of choice if you've moved beyond (or never quite caught up with) files, folders, and binary apps. If companies like Sony and Dell, two names Gruber mentions outright, were to create their own OS for their own hardware, we might see more competition, more innovation, more diversity, more tailor-made solutions, albeit not in that order, and not necessarily ordered in terms of importance.

At least, that's how it would work in theory. But such a state of affairs simply would not be worthwhile given the overwhelming levels of incompetence and inefficiency that are endemic among some of these companies. Canon, a company that specializes exclusively in imaging equipment, can't even put together a decent package of scanning software and printer drivers. Their supplementary software for my all-in-one requires five — no, that's no exaggeration — separate installs, most of which demand full system reboots, and looks and behaves like it was coded by the third-graders at the local elementary. Can you imagine if a company like this suddenly got it into its head to design a full-blown OS?

The closest example I can think of along narrower lines would be Sony's PlayStation, but even that GUI, however slick-looking and easy to use, pales in comparison to the sort of giant undertaking that an entire OS would involve.

The reason Apple's integration of hardware and software does work is because Apple is a different kind of company. It certainly has its faults, but a lack of a unifying vision and a tendency to be satisfied with the second-rate are not among them. I find it hard to imagine a computer OS/hardware combo coming from any company other than Apple (or a feisty start-up like Litl) that wouldn't be slapdash and awkward and laughable. As Gruber says, these other companies, the would-be competitors, are too busy dying, but why exactly are they dying? They're dying because they are beset with cumbersome bureaucracy, riddled with mediocrity, and consumed only by dull accountants' dreams of market share. Even if they wanted to — and I'm sure there must be a lone visionary or two within their walls calling for the very sort of thing Gruber is advocating — they'd just never be able to pull it off. Not in their present states, at any rate, and not the way I see them stumbling forward into the near future. Outsourcing their OS is the best they can do; and what's worse, they know it.

MacHeist and the Long-Awaited Dream Bundle

FOR the next couple of days, MacHeist is giving away $154 in software for free as part of its "nanoBundle" promotion. All you have to do is establish a user account.

Before the sign-up process is complete, a pop-up appears to ask whether or not you'd be willing to pay for the six apps on offer and, if so, how much. As I already own the one application I'd be interested in, I responded that, no, I still wouldn't pay for them. Unfortunately, I wasn't given any space on the form to explain why that answer didn't make me a dirty cheapskate.

Since no one asked, I thought I'd slap together a dream bundle, the sort of thing I'd like to see in the future and would buy at the usual bundle-type discount without a moment's hesitation. Some of these (the ones above the divide) are apps I already own and find to be utterly indispensable. The others I have used in the past and/or would really, really like to own, though I have yet to spot them at a reasonable price. Keep in mind, too, that there are excellent apps like Little Snitch and LaunchBar; or MailTags and Mail Act-on; or Twitterific, CandyBar, and Transmit, that are created by the same developer. As much as I would like to see them all in the same bundle, I've tried to avoid double developer entries.

1Password

Fetch / Transmit

The Hit List

iBank

LaunchBar

MailTags

Parallels / VMware Fusion

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Bento

BusyCal

DiskWarrior

iRatchet (aka MacFreelance)

MacJournal

Stationery Pack

Toast

Tweetie (registered version)

Unison (given Fetch and not Transmit above)

Yep

No, no games. And no word processors. And no image editors. That breaks with the usual bundle assortment, I know, but once you're the proud owner of — to pull from the latter category by way of example — Graphic Converter, Pixelmator, and Acorn, all from different bundles, it actually dampens the appeal of new bundles that include them. Yet another 1Password license, on the other hand, is something that I can easily gift to anyone who owns a Mac.

What would you like to see? What would the above bundle be worth to you? Is there a bundle logic that I'm not quite following? And is anyone from MacHeist even listening?

A Tour of Hamburg's Burchardkai

ONE of Hamburg's most renowned and distinctive features is its port. On most days you can see immense container ships cautiously navigating the Elbe, often with the help of a tugboat that seems diminutive in comparison, and when they dock the giant gantry cranes swing into action. Even the largest ships can be fully divested of their cargo, as infinite as the occupants of a clown car, in a matter of hours. The port itself rarely sleeps. It's a 24-hour operation with only a handful of holidays per year.

Recently the teaching company I work for began providing English training to select groups of the longshoremen who work along the port. Although going into the lessons I had no idea what form and direction the actual classes might take, the participants have so far shown a surprisingly good command of English as well as an eagerness to make the courses worth their while. Maybe that's why, having sensed that I'd only culled from books the technical English that I was passing on to them, they invited me to what turned out to be a very hands-on tour of the famous Burchardkai on the southern shore of the Elbe.

It was a cold, foggy evening punctuated by rain showers, and my self-appointed guides emphasized that winter work under similar conditions could be brutal, since they had to make mechanical repairs without gloves to retain a modicum of dexterity when dealing with small parts on the gusty, frozen catwalks, and that the work was much better in the summer, even though the temperature in the cranes' electrical rooms can reach 50°C/120°F on the hottest days. We sped across the HHLA complex in an orange van that wore a spinning warning light: first to see a ship being offloaded, then among the stored containers where the long-legged van carriers slipped in and out like dystopian devices out of Blade Runner, then on to a row of unoccupied gantry cranes.

The cramped, slow-moving elevator took us up to a height of around 50 meters (164 feet), and we disembarked into the cabin, which offered a clear view — straight down — of the spreader (the extendable grip that lowers and hoists the containers) dangling above the river. After the pros made a few test runs to clear the water from the cabin's path along the crane's arm, I was put in the captain's chair and invited to drive the thing myself. Which I did. With great care and deliberation. In a way, the most unsettling thing was the realization that these countless tons of metal and cable could be controlled with virtually the same equipment I once used to play Kung-Fu Master on my Commodore 128.

I wasn't too worried about accelerating so quickly that we went rocketing off the arm and into the Elbe (there are multiple buffers to prevent such a thing, and besides, I made extra sure that they were really, really sure it couldn't happen), but I did wince at the recurring thought that I might raise or lower the spreader too quickly, resulting in whatever insane amount of damage that might cause. For the longshoremen, working at that height and with that massive bulk of equipment was as natural as breathing; they were completely at home in a world where everything is of grossly exaggerated proportions: weight, size, temperature, height.

The last leg of the tour took us to the workshop, where we warmed up and saw some of these Brobdingnagian objects divorced from their equally gigantic surroundings. The spreaders, for example, appeared slightly less imposing on their repair pallets. That still didn't completely alleviate the feeling that I was a dwarf lost on the set of an epic sci-fi movie.

Although they still might not convey the true (or apparent) scale of things, my Flickr page has some photos in addition to the ones shown in this post.