I'm not quite sure how this relates to the original article, but:
> the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police".
> for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are not able or willing to provide a safe "native" sandbox completely uncoupled from curated app stores.
The key word here is absolutely "unwilling". All the platform vendors want platform lock-in, they don't want a general purpose platform. Microsoft originally tried to do this to the web with ActiveX, before even Flash. At least Flash was slightly cross-platform in that Adobe provided Mac and Linux versions. These days no platform vendor is going to give up their 30% cut voluntarily.
In a world of fully general app sandboxes, you can switch out your hardware and OS at any time without disrupting your life or business. Therefore those are commoditized, and their price drops to the marginal cost of production - which for software is zero.
(Also I think CS theory took a while to catch up to practical security; everyone used to teach the model in which multi-user systems were trying to protect users from one another, not one where a single-user system is trying to protect the user from predatory apps, viruses and potentially unwanted programs.)
> In a world of fully general app sandboxes, you can switch out your hardware and OS at any time without disrupting your life or business. Therefore those are commoditized, and their price drops to the marginal cost of production - which for software is zero.
I think software's marginal cost of production is zero only if no updates/fixes are ever needed. I know it sounds like nitpicking but just think of all the vulnerabilities discovered, specially the closer software gets to the lower end of the stack. Even if an OS could suddenly stop adding features and still be viable in the market, the cost of patching it as holes are discovered is certainly not zero.
That's not a marginal cost of production, though. It costs almost the same to fix a bug if you have one user or a billion users.
It certainly is a real cost that has encouraged software vendors to move from "box" sales (which became tricky when we gave up on boxes) to annual licenses and/or SaaS. But it's not a marginal cost.
The zero mainly comes from the ability to scale for free. Sure it costs a few million bucks to maintain Linux (or whatever), but when divided by billions of copies the per unit cost becomes effectively zero.
> the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police".
> for some reason "commercial" OS vendors are not able or willing to provide a safe "native" sandbox completely uncoupled from curated app stores.
The key word here is absolutely "unwilling". All the platform vendors want platform lock-in, they don't want a general purpose platform. Microsoft originally tried to do this to the web with ActiveX, before even Flash. At least Flash was slightly cross-platform in that Adobe provided Mac and Linux versions. These days no platform vendor is going to give up their 30% cut voluntarily.
In a world of fully general app sandboxes, you can switch out your hardware and OS at any time without disrupting your life or business. Therefore those are commoditized, and their price drops to the marginal cost of production - which for software is zero.
(Also I think CS theory took a while to catch up to practical security; everyone used to teach the model in which multi-user systems were trying to protect users from one another, not one where a single-user system is trying to protect the user from predatory apps, viruses and potentially unwanted programs.)