Serious About Software? Make Your Own Hardware! (Premium)

It is the oldest trope in personal technology. But looked at with fresh eyes fully 35 years later, Alan Kay's most quotable of quotes takes on new meaning. And I don't think it means what it used to mean.

"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware," Alan Kay is quoted as saying in 1982. The quote is in good company, too: Kay is famous for many other similar quips, including "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "better is the enemy of best" (the latter of which is a skewed take on the adage, "perfect is the enemy of good").

Anyway, when Mr. Kay first uttered these words, the personal computer market was in disarray. There were dozens of companies foisting incompatible and limited hardware solutions on an unsuspecting public. That market would eventually standardize around the IBM PC, which had first shipped a year earlier, of course.

But the point is that Kay meant is simple enough: Software needs hardware on which to run. If you're serious about software, you should make your own hardware.

And by hardware, Kay meant PCs. Devices. We know this because he also championed something called the Dynabook, his vision for a future family of gadgets, software, and services, which would run together as a discrete whole.

Various tech leaders and visionaries---most notably Steve Jobs---took Kay's words to heart and have used them to justify their own hardware endeavors. (Indeed, Jobs largely based his strategies at Next and then later Apple on various Kay quotes, it seems.) That each was denounced by Kay as being unworthy was surely a disappointment to them all.

In recent years, usage of the Kay quote about hardware and software has reached a fevered pitch, of sorts. The leaders of Apple (Tim Cook), Google (Sundar Pinchai) and Microsoft (Satya Nadella) have all brought out this old chestnut at their respective major events this past year alone.

And most people, I think, take it the way it was always meant. That is, sure Google makes its own phones now. (Well, sort of.) After all, how else would you know that Google, a software maker---an online service, after all, is just software that runs in the cloud---was truly serious about its software?

But Google---like Apple and Microsoft---understand this quote on a deeper level. And when executives from these companies utter the Kay quote, what they're really alluding to is something far more sophisticated. What they're really talking about is how they differentiate from other companies from making their own hardware components.

Google is the most recent example of this practice. Its newly-released Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL ship with a unique new hardware component called Pixel Visual Core. This is, in Google's words, the company's "first custom-designed co-processor for image processing and machine language."

In other words, the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL may simply be rebranded and slightly redesigned versions of other phones made...