Of Visions, Dents and A Score and Five Years

Twenty-five years ago today, the lights turned on here at OFB. We were going to help the Linux Desktop revolution happen. We’re not there yet, but it has been an interesting ride.

We weren’t originally a general interest publication, but specifically focused on being an “open source migration journal.” I didn’t imagine we’d still be publishing 25 years later or that we would become a much broader outlet covering politics, music, culture, faith, sports and more.

No surprise I might not be the best prognosticator. That this was originally meant to be at the forefront of the new era of Linux desktops shows I’m not always particularly good at predicting what’s next. We humans usually aren’t.

I was reminded of that while preparing to preach on 2 Corinthians 1:15-19 for tonight. Paul made plans, shared those plans and then had to explain to the people of Corinth that he wasn’t lying to them when God’s plans and the apostle’s plans differed. We don’t know what’s next always and our efforts to lay it out don’t always come together.

Some of what we predicted here at OFB has happened, just in unexpected ways. Thanks to the smartphone revolution, virtually everyone carries a UNIX-like operating system with them each day. iOS shares its core with MacOS that is certified UNIX. And Android is built on Linux itself.

Even the Linux desktop has made surprising strides. ChromeOS and the new Googlebook OS, which blends ChromeOS and Android, bring a Linux desktop experience to average people in the way we hoped SuSE or Mandrake or RedHat — or a startup like OEone — might have in 2001. I still hope for the day you might see regular folks using the Linux desktop as in, say, Debian running GNOME. Nonetheless, the feat is real, even if it arrived as a vehicle to promote the most privacy-invasive tech behemoth’s services.

The year of the Linux desktop arrived at some point. But, none of it happened the way I thought and most of us didn’t notice it when it happened in its own, backdoor way.

Actually understanding where the puck is going, as Steve Jobs liked to say, is not a gift most of us have. Jobs of course did and would, no doubt, be a fount of interesting insight if he had lived to see the convergence of technology and culture in the current AI revolution.

Today marks the fifteenth anniversary of Jobs’s death. A clip circulating amongst today’s retrospectives shows tech journalist Walt Mossberg interviewing Jobs just over a year before his death — you can see the Apple CEO’s gaunt appearance already in the video — and questioning him on the company’s purchase of a little known tech startup.

The company’s name is one you might have heard about: Siri. It’s easy to forget, because the vast majority of its life has been as an Apple brand, but Siri was originally an independent startup.

Given that the focus of the time was on search, Mossberg pressed Jobs on whether this was Apple’s entry into Google’s home turf. “They’re an AI company,” Jobs replied, “We have no plans to go into the search business.”

Early Siri is rudimentary compared to just about any AI-powered tool today and the wonder of the iPhone 4S’s debut with Siri is obscured by years of the “personal assistant’s” stagnation, but I can still remember how it felt at the time. “Siri, do I need an umbrella today?” was amazing in 2011. The conversational interaction Siri did then certainly was a precursor to the agents of today.

Prior to the purchase of Siri, Apple had also purchased a small chipmaker named PA Semi. The move felt backward at the time. Apple had just switched to Intel processors for Macs — the trifecta of Windows, Mac OS X and Linux were now all running on the same platform. Why would Apple be interested in a company creating a new chip based on Apple’s old architecture, the RISC-based PowerPC?

Jobs’s vision would take years for those not privy to planning to see. Clearly, Jobs never wanted Intel to be the end game. 2007 would bring the iPhone and Apple’s return to serious design of RISC-based computers, albeit with a different (ARM) architecture. ARM wasn’t taken seriously as a powerful platform then, but that investment into PA Semi was the fuel behind the company’s A-series chips that established the iPhone maker as the purveyor of the objectively most powerful smartphones, tablets and — not accidentally — mobile AI accelerators.

All of that would allow the much more cautious successor CEO, Tim Cook, to do the Jobsian Mac processor swap from Intel to Apple Silicon processors six years ago. Vision.

The results have positioned Apple uniquely well in the AI age, even as the company has fumbled actual AI-powered software. A team from a company making chips for an increasingly obscure, old architecture became the architects of a line of chips incredibly well suited to running the current leading edge of computing. AI goes so well with the Mac that Apple’s higher powered desktops are regularly sold out for months now.

Two purchases and both, in their own ways, foundational to a revolution much larger than the Linux desktop — or any desktop OS — ever could have been. Jobs didn’t live to see the fruit of either, but visionaries often see well beyond their own time. It makes me wonder what Apple might have done with Siri if Jobs had lived longer.

I doubt Alexa would be the smart speaker most people use. I wonder if OpenAI and Anthropic would dominate the broader AI conversation. And, since Jobs was counterintuitively more inclined to Open Source than one might expect, maybe the Open Source revolution would be benefitting from an Apple infusion of open weight models.

That’s not to say Jobs always knew the future either. He could see more than I could in 2001, but he too was human and limited.

He may have known during that Summer 2010 interview that his time was short, but the reason for that may have been the very contrarian impulse that had been at the heart of his visionary successes. Walter Isaacson relayed Jobs’s regret over insisting on his own, unproven path for cancer treatment rather than a conventional approach that may very well have given lasting remission. A tragedy, because I do think he was a singular figure in the modern world and he fostered so much of what we take for granted today — perhaps not inventing it, but bringing it to life in ways average people like us can use.

None of us, even the most visionary among us, has perfect vision. Only God does.

Sean Parnell, assistant to the Secretary of Defense (d.b.a. Secretary of War) misapplied Isaiah 6:8 over the summer. Isaiah’s call and his response “Here am I. Send me.” was specifically the call of a prophet to speak the Word of the Lord to an unfaithful people, not a vague general verse that can be slapped semi-blasphemously on a military recruitment poster.

That’s no offense to our military. The passage is simply being misappropriated. The caller in that passage is God, not any earthly institution, and the calling was a special one for a particular man. Even generalized, the calling that remains is proclaiming the clear, timeless Word of God to those who twisted it to their own ends. Not — irony alert — twisting God’s Word to support whatever we’re doing, good, bad or indifferent as it may be.

The people of Israel back then thought they knew where things were headed. They didn’t. You and I and the U.S. government and the most creative and the most visionary — all of us are, well, not God and also mistake the direction of the future time and again. We do not see as clearly as we think we do.

We do often follow our foggy notions onto the unrighteous path over the righteous one. But that’s why Isaiah and the prophets were sent and why the Lord Himself came. To quote the great philosopher T.A. Swift, “I should not be left to my own devices / they come with prices and vices / I end up in crisis.”

Here at OFB, whether it is prognosticating about technology or politics or whatever else, well, we aren’t prophets. We’ll get plenty wrong in the 25 years ahead of us; that’s a prediction I am sadly confident in.

But, as I look back on the first quarter century of Open for Business, I am proud of our current and past contributors for seeking to stand up for what is right over what is trendy or partisan. We might not get everything right, but by God’s grace, hopefully even when we perceive less than clearly, we’ll keep pointing to the good and true as revealed by the One who does.

Steve Jobs spoke of leaving a dent in the universe. We want to be “denters” who dent for truth and righteousness.

We will do our best to continue to speak out for it with God’s help. And, we’ll go on this journey, as we always have, with you, our readers.