OEMs

Macintosh examples

The floating point unit (FPU) also became a standard hardware feature starting with the Macintosh II. FPUs are good for intensive calculations like those involved in drawing complex graphics. But the standard Macintosh graphics system continued to be based on screen coordinates and integer arithmetic; only a few specialized applications could take advantage of the FPU's capabilities. Because so few people were benefitting from the FPU, Apple's hardware engineers eventually began making it optional in some CPUs.

Soon after introducing the Macintosh II, Apple introduced the SuperDrive" disk drive across its entire product line. This drive could read floppy disks formatted for either MS-DOS or Macintosh system software. But it wasn't until 1993 that the icon for an MS-DOS floppy would actually appear on the Macintosh desktop when you inserted the disk.

These kinds of hardware support problems aren't the fault of Apple's system software engineers, who have learned to perform miracles with the legacies they must live with. The problems arise because the original Macintosh system software didn't anticipate the need for supporting new hardware capabilities. For example, it didn't support color, multiple monitors of varying size, hard disks, bus slots, or advanced networks. Despite these limitations, Apple engineers came up with inventive solutions that support all of these features today. But this support comes at a cost in terms of both the engineering effort and the complexity of the solutions required.

PC examples

The Macintosh MMU and FPU examples have parallels in the Windows market. All 386 and faster processors have a built-in MMU. However, with the exception of Windows NT users (and Windows 95 users, when it becomes available), most Windows users still have no virtual memory capability. Similarly, millions of existing Intel-based systems have at least a slot for an FPU, but the Windows graphics environment is still based on screen coordinates and integer arithmetic and can't take advantage of FPU capabilities.

Many patented hardware technologies have faced a similar fate. One example is the Micro Channel© architecture (MCA) bus that IBM invented. It provided autoconfiguration, slot independence, high performance, and other capabilities that represented a significant improvement compared to the standard architecture. But IBM couldn't persuade enough developers to build add-on cards that supported the bus. It wasn't part of the standard PC clone hardware manufactured by dozens of companies around the world, so it didn't sell in as large volumes, and it's very difficult to write drivers for MS-DOS, so many card developers didn't bother.

Many factors affect the success of any commercial product, and system software can't take all the blame for the fact that sophisticated hardware doesn't get used. But the tendency is disturbing. People who invent something new and better shouldn't be penalized for their efforts. Companies that lavish expertise and innovative technology on hardware today face a commodity market for personal computers, especially in the IBM-compatible world, in which it's very difficult to build anything besides another clone that adheres to the standard. If only companies that have thin margins and very low R&D budgets can make money, everyone in the industry ends up losing. Innovation gets punished rather than rewarded, and market growth slows. The benefits to the user of cutthroat pricing are offset by slowing innovation and the fact that many clone system suppliers stay in business for only a few years.