I was eating some chocolate when I imagined a world where Hershey’s was widely accepted, even by elitists, as the best chocolate.
Is consumer elitism just a facade for pretentious contrarians? Or are there things where even most snobs agree with the masses?
Also, I mean that the product is intrinsically considered to be the best option. I’m not considering social products where the user network makes the experience.
Edit: I was not eating Hershey’s. Hershey’s being the best chocolate is a bizarro universe in this hypothetical.
It’s not necessarily the instruction set, it’s the platform architecture, the fact there’s such a thing as a standard BIOS. You can run Windows, Linux, Haiku etc on practically any PC. There’s Linux for ARM, why can’t I run Raspberry Pi OS on my Galaxy S10e? It’s because, though the instruction set is similar, the platforms very intentionally have nothing to do with each other.
Interesting. What do ARM platforms have? BIOS and friends, as important as they are, always strikes me as a precarious tower of baked-in technical debt.
(I know a Galaxy in particular is a locked-down SoC you can’t really touch, so maybe let’s talk about the Pi)
ARM platforms have whatever the developer of that system that day came up with, same as literally everything except x86.
Strangely enough, we do have Microsoft to thank for it. They didn’t want to do the work to enable all that crap nor did they want to enable all the vendors to do their own thing, so they were adamant about standards and if you wanted Windows support, you had to follow standards.
Meanwhile on embedded every little vendor goes wild. In the server space. ARM has taken on a similar scope, but ARM embedded is a mess and ARM server chip makers keep changing as no one gets a foot hold.
Actually I think we have IBM and their laziness to thank for it.
The original 5150 PC was pretty much an afterthought by Big Blue’s standards, they slapped it together from off the shelf parts and bought the OS from some pissant upstart company called Microsoft on a non-exclusive license. The only IP that IBM actually had in the machine was the BIOS. Compaq developing a non-infringing yet compatible BIOS made the x86 PC a multi-vendor platform, which made it more attractive to adopt than the likes of Commodore who made a series of incompatible computers even within their own ecosystem. Note how the only thing Microsoft has ever consistently done that was worth a damn was backwards compatibility…it’s the only thing keeping them in business.