Comment by bluGill

Reminds of something I heard: Of the 3 most recent recessions, analysts predicted 20.

Very soon we will produce more solar electricity than all of the word's consumption. A "problem" that is even more severe than it looks like, because we consume energy when the Sun is under the horizon too.

So, yeah, in a few years they'll be right. Even if for just a short time while the rest of the economy grows to keep up with the change.

It wasn't the Itanium people so much as the industry analysts who follow such things. And, yes, they (including myself) were spectacularly wrong early on but, hey, it was Intel after all and an AMD alternative wasn't even a blip on the radar and 64-bit chips were clearly needed. I'm not sure there was any industry analyst--and I probably bailed earlier than most--who was going this is going to be a flop from the earliest days.

It’s understandable why companies try and sometimes succeed at creating a reality distortion field about the future success of their products. Management is asking Wall Street to allow them to make this huge investment (in their own salaries and R&D empire), and they need to promise a corresponding huge return. Wall Street always opportunities to jack up profits in the short term, and management needs to tell a compelling story about ROI that is a few years in the future to convince them it’s worth waiting. Intel also wanted to encourage adoption by OEMs and software companies, and making them think that they need to support Itanium soon could have been a necessary condition to make that a reality.

I don’t know what factors would make IEA underestimate solar adoption.

one thing I found amazing about the IEA chart is how similar the colors of each year was making it very difficult to see which year was which. the gist of the chart was still clear though

The issue isn't person transport it is shipping and home heating and agriculture

I drive electric so like to imagine myself sheltered from gas price increases but I know grocery costs would explode

> by buying more expensive cars

Not to mention less efficient cars.

How can you possibly say that crude is half of the pump price? The economics are incredibly complex and murky, and the price of gas doesn't move with any sort of linear relation to crude except in very long timeframes. Regional refining capacity is way more important.

I’m curious what kind of code his 30 lines were - I’m betting something FP-heavy based on the public focus benchmarks gave thst over branchy business logic. I still remember getting the pitch that you had to buy Intel’s compilers to get decent performance. I worked at a software vendor and later a computational research lab, and both times that torpedoed any interest in buying hardware because it boiled down to paying a couple of times more upfront and hoping you could optimize at least the equivalent gain back … or just buy an off-the-shelf system which performed well now and do literally anything else with your life.

One really interesting related angle is the rise of open source software in business IT which was happening contemporaneously. X86 compatibility mattered so much back then because people had tons of code they couldn’t easily modify whereas later switches like Apple’s PPC-x86 or x86-ARM and Microsoft’s recent ARM attempts seem to be a lot smoother because almost everyone is relying on many of the same open source libraries and compilers. I think Itanium would still have struggled to realize much of its peak performance but at least you wouldn’t have had so many frictional costs simply getting code to run correctly.

This form versus substance issue is a really deeply embedded problem in our industry, and it is getting worse.

Time and again, I run into professionals who claim X, only to find out that the assertion was based only upon the flimsiest interpretation of what it took to accomplish the assertion. If I had to be less charitable, then I’d say fraudulent interpretations.

Promo Packet Princesses are especially prone to getting caught out doing this. And as the above story illustrates, you better catch and tear down these “interpretations” as the risks to the enterprise they are, well before they obtain visible executive sponsorship, or the political waters gets choppy.

IMHE, if you catch these in time, then estimate the risk along with a solution, it usually defuses them and “prices” their proposals more at a “market clearing rate” of the actual risk. They’re usually hoping to pass the hot potato to the poor suckers forced to handle sustaining work streams on their “brilliant vision” before anyone notices the emperor has no clothes.

I’d love to hear others’ experiences around this and how they defused the risk time bombs.

> “You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?"

It’s comforting to know that massively strategic decisions based on very little information that may not even be correct are made in other organizations and not just mine.

There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.

We're not living through this again at all with generative AI, right?

There was apparently earlier Pentium 4s that supported some version of a 64bit isa, support for which was fused off before sending to customers in order to convince people to move to Itanium.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/former-intel...

To this day, I don't know if Intel thought Itanium was the legitimately better approach. There were certainly theoretical arguments for VLIW over carrying CISC forward--even if it had never been commercially successful in the past. But I at least suspect that getting away from x86 licensing entanglements was also a factor. I suspect it was a bit of both and different people at the company probably had different perspectives.

Intel and AMD have a cross licensing agreement where they pay each other the right to use various IP. One of the things Intel pays AMD for is x86_64.

Thanks for your story, I had no idea.

The Nokia N9 was also the last phone by Nokia to be made in Finland. After that, and the whole brand licensing to HMD thing happened, Nokia-branded phones were made in China going forward. Such a shame.

I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have.

I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol

I always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone

At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"

Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked

Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info

Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too

I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app

I got one because I absolutely hated the duopoly between Google and Apple and wanted to see a third player. It was a pretty good phone. I ended up making quite a bit of money porting apps to it over the years as well.

I bought one cheap at Costco as a travel phone, and I enjoyed using it enough to make it a daily driver once I got home.

In my case I was a Windows user for work and Linux fanboy at home. I just hated the android experience at the time (phone before my Lumia was the original Galaxy I think which was a piece of garbage) and enjoyed playing with a Lumia at the store.

> When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees

Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...

To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But it's not the only way to do so.

First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up quality guardrails in other way.

I personally point the blame on their constant breaking of SDK and API surfaces. From 7 to 8 and then to 10, so many APIs that were in use just broke and had no real 1:1 equivalent. I also think the death of Silverlight had a hand in it.

What I don't understand is all this MBA training and everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash and end up just slowing they growth of the app market everywhere else.

And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.

Windows Phone 7 was another OS. Windows Phone 8 was the next totally incompatible OS just couple years later.

Okay: multitasking in windows phone was rubbish. You would see a loading screen all the time when switching between apps that lasted seconds. Of course that was still better than the pile of garbage that Android was/is, so it was your only option if you, like me, weren’t able to afford an iPhone. But that’s doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I miss it.

Yes, I agree that health and fitness are a much bigger part of the branding now than they were initially (but the basic features were there right from the beginning — I remember sitting in town halls, with "pings" ringing out at 10 to the hour, and everybody standing up for a minute).

Sure. My point was that entry level APPLE watches never changed much in their price point.

If every single indie developer disappeared and didn’t make software for computers - to a first approximation, no one would notice a difference.

Yes the mountain of open source software is on the server and for developers. Regular users have never cared about open source ur being in control of thier computers.

Most of those developers were looking for revenue, though, and there’s a really wicked network effect rewarding the popular platforms. By the time the first WebOS device launched in 2009 Apple had already shipped tens of millions of iPhones and Android was growing, too. By the time decent WebOS hardware was available, there just weren’t many developers looking to target a user base at least an order of magnitude smaller – even Android struggled because not as many users were willing to actually buy software.

Makes me think about the VR market. Tons of hardware, very few apps. It's interesting.