Thinking about it a bit more ... when systems become more and more closed, as x86 systems are becoming now, the field of innovation is reduced to what a single company can think of -- the monopoly provider, so to speak.
When systems become more closed, you hear stuff like this: "The percentage of people who want to do this, compared to the number of people who just want to buy a finished computer, is way down in the noise. It's a marketing / sales / ROI issue." I can not possibly recall how many times I've heard that over the years. Many of the companies that pushed this line the hardest are dead now. One of the first times I heard it was DEC marketing guys talking about Unix. They didn't like the fact that Unix discovered a bug in the 11/70 that the DEC operating systems did not. They also made it clear it was not going to get fixed: "you guys are not a big market -- nobody else has this problem". Systems that are open, as the embedded ARM-based systems are now, have a far wider field of innovation. Nobody is making a PentiumStix or a PentiumPlug. Nobody is doing an x86-based Oswald. You can't. You can't learn what you need to know. Although, mind you, the OLPC is x86-based. But, it actually proves the point: the open source BIOS code development was supported by the vendors: first, AMD, and second, VIA. I understand vendor resistance to non-vendor research and innovation. It's not a big market, never has been. But, in the end, it can come back and burn the vendors. ron
