> In effect the company has a royalty on a communication stream that can do nothing but grow.
In hindsight, the desktop OS business reached saturation and it started to look like the automobile industry which is sensitive to the replacement rate of a long lived good. The introduction of SSD drives was probably analogous to the introduction of quality rust proofing in the early 90’s.
> In hindsight, the desktop OS business reached saturation and it started to look like the automobile industry which is sensitive to the replacement rate of a long lived good.
If wish you could get a good car for free. My first, second and third choice OS are all free. Helpfully, we are also at a time where old computer hardware has some very attractive elements too (replaceable bits, helpful ports etc).
Maybe in the future cars will asymptote towards the upper limit of mechanical efficiency (for each given class, like the school run, city trips, long distance, etc.), allowing users to keep them on timescales similar to homes, so the only profitable innovation will then be on the software. Then we might see "car-OS wars" and the beginnings of open source driving systems in parallel.
Nobody is stopping you to start those free open source "car-OS" right now. Considering this is actually embedded it's actually easier then writing a general purpose OS like Linux or Windows.
In hindsight, the desktop OS business reached saturation and it started to look like the automobile industry which is sensitive to the replacement rate of a long lived good. The introduction of SSD drives was probably analogous to the introduction of quality rust proofing in the early 90’s.