@kaler

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
– Alan Kay

Apple

Steve Jobs quoted Alan Kay when the original iPhone was introduced.

(Forward to the 6:00 mark)

This is why Apple acquired PA Semiconductor.  This is why Apple owns a chunk of Imagination Technologies.

Apple gets it.

Oracle

Larry Ellison gets this, too.

We want to be TJ Watson Jr’s IBM. … We are not going in the hardware business.  We have no interest in the hardware business.  We have a deep interest in the systems business.

– Larry Ellison

This is why Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems.

(Forward to the 26:50 mark)

And today it looks like Oracle will take a run at ARM.

Oracle gets it.

Facebook

There have been rumours this week that Facebook may be building a phone.  Mark Zuckerberg did an interview with TechCrunch this week.

There’s the Apple approach of really designing all the hardware – I don’t think that they manufacture it themselves, but they probably work very closely with Foxconn – but they do have chip design and all of that in-house, I’ll bet we’ll never do anything like that. That is different from what we do.

…

I mean, who knows, 10 years down the road, maybe we’ll build our own operating system or something, but who knows. That is more history than we’ve had so far with the company, so it is really hard to predict that far out. But for now, I think, everything is going to be shades of integration, rather than starting from the ground up and building a whole system.

– Mark Zuckerberg

I don’t know if Facebook gets it.  Let’s see what happens when both Google and Apple get more social.