In 2017 I started eatOS, because the businesses that feed us were running the worst software in the building.
By 2017 cloud, mobile, and cheap sensors had modernised most industries, yet most restaurants still ran on clunky, decades-old point-of-sale systems. Cassini completed its Grand Finale at Saturn, ending a mission that had transformed the rings and moons into known worlds.
In 2017 I started eatOS. The reason was almost offensive in its simplicity. Restaurants, the businesses that feed entire cities every single day, were running on some of the worst software anywhere. Point-of-sale systems designed in another era: expensive, ugly, brittle, and hostile to the people forced to use them at the busiest moments of their day.
Everything else had been rebuilt. The cloud made infrastructure cheap. Phones put a computer in every hand. Yet the person taking your order was fighting a beige terminal that had not had a real idea since the nineties. The gap between what was possible and what restaurants actually had was enormous, and gaps like that are the only thing I have ever chased.
So the work became this: take everything the last twenty years taught the rest of software, the cloud, mobile, clean design, and now intelligence, and hand it to the people running the floor and the kitchen. Not a fancier till. An operating system for the whole restaurant.
It is the same instinct as every year in this archive. Find the place where the future has clearly arrived everywhere except here, and go there.