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Steve Jobs And The Oh-So-Cool iMac
The truly successful technologies and technology companies are utilitarian and dull -- decidedly non-hip. You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are, only how useful and easy to use. They don't really care how much heavy breathing they generate in the media or among excitable teenagers and college students. Those two companies have, in fact, dominated their environments by pointedly focusing on the non-technologically adventurous middle-class and busy business executives and workers and by presenting themselves not as cool but as reliable and accessible. And for this sin they get jeered at -- all the way to the bank. Their motives may be money, greed and power, but they understand what really drives technology in America and much of the world. Steve Jobs does not.
The tech media have served as enablers and co-dependents in Steve Jobs' sometimes-brilliant marketing impulses. Last week, the volatile Jobs projected himself onto the cover of Time magazine by unveiling the oh-so-cool new iMac, a computer as entertainment/culture center, a "hub for music, pictures and movies." It's elegant and affordable, says Time, and takes up little desk space, "but will millions of PC users get it?"
Probably not.
Gates understands something Jobs and media don't. When it comes to technology, it's middle-class consumers and their tastes, needs and expectations that determine success or failure. This is a hard lesson for many hackers and programmers too, who remain bewildered that superior systems like Linux aren't on every desktop. But the middle class, for years abused and exploited by the arrogant tech industry (just think of what poor Comcast subscribers have been going through for weeks now), wants easy of use, safety, utility. Just consider at the telephone, the automobile, or for that matter, Wal-Mart. Apple has demonstrated for years, and so, to some degree, has Linux. Harry and Martha in Dubuque decide which products will enter the mainstream and last, not college kids editing movies or downloading music and DVDs, or using firewire ports to fiddle with video clips.
Apple, perenially aspiring to coolness, has always been the favorite computer of the non-hacker hip and the creative. And of many people (like me) whose entry onto the Net and Web has been made easier for the first programming language that really made sense to non-techies. Jobs' colorful, well-designed, fun and entertainment-centered iMacs and Powerbooks have been getting fabulous press for years. His idea to fuse the desktop with pop culture is, in fact, a powerful one. But it's too soon. The middle-class isn't ready for that. Most Americans don't need the 1,000 songs the iPod can store, and would rather go to the megaplex than edit movies on their computers.
So Apple accounts for only 4.5 per cent of new personal computer sales, according to Gartner Dataquest.
That's probably because Jobs hasn't addressed the central problem facing computer makers: the public doesn't trust them. Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support, increasingly expensive software, and hardware that's almost instantly outdated, middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year. The public is increasingly wise to tech scams like hardware that's obsolete every 18 months and software that doesn't even last that long. Computers -- even the jazzy new iMac -- are a long way from reliability, and are profoundly mistrusted. In fact, it was only a couple of years ago that the candy-colored iMacs were the next cool thing. Now they're about as hip as Windows 98.
If you're a teenager, Web designer, film editor or visual arts major, or even a loving Grandma, it's great that the iMac allows you to create your own DVDs, organize and edit digital pictures, play CDs or convert MP3's, turn home videotapes into high-quality edited films. What's less clear is whether or not the public -- especially that critical middle-class chunk of it -- wants to do those things on a computer, or is confident about its ability to use machinery that's still more complicated and problematic than its makers seem able to admit.
For nearly a generation now, from Jobs to the makers of instant replay TV machines, some of the best minds in the tech world -- usually the younger ones -- have been crippled and misled by the confusion between what's cool and what's going to be successful, between what's neat and what's necessary. The survivors of the Net's first generation -- brilliant plodders like Gates and Steve Case -- understand quite well that they aren't the same thing, and have, as a result, increasingly come to dominate the Net.
You can't deny that there is a place for form in the market as well. I'll grant you that function is tops, but you can't just throw out form as many would have you believe. Form (aesthetics) is equally as valuable as function and the state of mind of the person using the product has actual effect on the end result.
Make the user happy and make the machine functional and you'll never go wrong.
See Cringely's piece on how Jobs defines 'winning'. It's not how Katz defines it.
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who cares about market share. The real question is, how do Apple's profit earnings compare to Microsoft and to Dell (need to compare both since Apple does OS and the box).
Also a good question to ask is, how does Apple's growth (in terms of profit percentage) compare to Dell and Microsoft?
If Apple has better growth/profit than Dell/Microsoft (D/M$), then 4.5% means good news - there's still 95.5% of the market that can potentially be consumed.
If Apple makes the same profit (in terms of bottom-line $$$) as Dell, but does it in only 4.5% market share as opposed to Dell's insanely huge 35% or whatever, then which is the stronger company?
Note, I havent looked up the numbers. I'm just suggesting that these are more interesting demographic/statistic metrics than merely repeating market share market share like a mantra. Market share isnt everything.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
The big uses for computers for the average folk these days would be email, web browsing, word processing. For that, you can live on less than a gigahertz of speed. Things aren't going to improve that much with a top-of-the-line Athlon as compared to a discontinued PII. So if you don't need the extra speed, what differentiates the computers? RAM, HD, video card... style maybe.
What differentiates cars? Why don't car manufacturers spend gobs of cash throwing the newest "maximum speed notched up by 10 mph!" engines for their vehicles? Why do they, instead, focus on styling, CD players, automatic this-and-thats? Probably because you could make a car that can go 500 mph in the shape of a Civic, but honestly no one would need the extra speed (mainly because of traffic laws, but you know...)
So maybe the iMac's push for style (and very good specs, given its intended audience) is just Apple moving into the next arena of computers as stuff-of-life: the basic concept stays the same, but it's what you add in details that matters.
In that way, Apple is definitely ahead of the game.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Yup ... that's higher than BMW's and Mercedes-Benz's market share Combined! And, I could be wrong, but I don't think than anyone is calling either of those cars endangered or that their existence is threatened.
...
Here is Apple's retail manifesto:
Apple currently has around 5 percent market share in personal computers. This means that out of one hundred computer users, five of them use Macs. While that may not sound like a lot, it is actually higher than both BMW's and Mercedes-Benz's share of the automotive market. And it equals 25 million customers around the world using Macs.
But that's not enough for us. We want to convince those other 95 people that Macintosh offers a much simpler, richer, and more human-central computing experience. And we believe that the best way to do this is to open Apple stores right in their neighborhoods. Stores that let people experience firsthand what it's like to make a movie right on a Mac. Or burn a CD with their favorite music. Or take pictures with a digital camera and publish them on their personal website. Or select from over 300 software titles, including some of the best educational titles for kids. Or talk to a Macintosh 'genius' at our Genius Bar. Or watch a demonstration of Mac OS X, our revolutionary operating system, on our theater's giant 10-foot diagonal screen.
Because if only 5 of those remaining 95 people switch to Macs, we'll double our market share and, more importantly, earn the chance to delight another 25 million customers. Here we go
Shop different.
---
"Don't anthropomorphize computers. They hate that."
You will never seen a Microsoft or AOL exec talking about how cool the their companies or products are, only how useful and easy to use. They don't really care how much heavy breathing they generate in the media or among excitable teenagers and college students.
When's the last time Mr. Katz watched TV and saw an AOL commercial? The blinking lights, teenagers shouting, "Wow, Cool, Instant Messenging!" and other things like that.
Sorry, Katz, the shift is definately towards the younger, hip audience, especially for AOL. Microsoft? Maybe not, but there's still focus on the gaming industry there as well. Not sure what the point of this rant was.
'Coolness' is not and was not the perennial Apple motto. Not even under Steve Jobs. Witness the Apple I through the III. All were utilitarian machines. The first were geek hardware without the geek price. And having a wooden case was not 'cool'; it was being cheap.
1984, enter the Mac. What was the motto? Anyone? Yes, it was "The Computer for the Rest of Us". The machine for everyman. Its aim was usability and simplicity. And it was. For a long time, the 128k Mac typified computing for the average slob. Not until 11 years later did M$ come close to this.
Steve Jobs did not find the mantra of coolness until returned from the wasteland of NeXT. The idea that a Mac was cool did not develop until the iMac. And it is what has succeeded.
I think that Jobs has matured, rather than devolved. He realizes that people won't buy insanely great things. Not en masse. But as long as 4-8% of people do, the company will be okay.
In 1993, people didn't buy usability. They don't in 2002. What people buy is familiarity and cheapness. And at that, M$ wins.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Nobody would ever label them cool, just stunningly successful.
...
The truly successful technologies and technology companies are utilitarian and dull -- decidedly non-hip.
Consider the following classes of people:
- artist
- craftsman
- engineer
- businessman
I believe they all have different "success" criteria when it comes to their "products/services/career". Don't assume the financial or market-share bottom line is the universal criteria. It probably is for the last category, but even then, that's a stereotype that not all businessmen care to follow.
And don't laugh now... even corporate entities don't need profitability or market share as their success criteria. Consider non-profits.
Thank god the world has people who consider hip and well-designed products to be successful even when they don't take over the world.
Standardized up the wazoo, gives pretty good service, aimed squarely at middle-class consumers that want value and reliability at not too high of a price.
Extremely standardized (to the lowest level), very cheap... aimed at consumers who want/need the product (be it food, cars, computers) at the least cost. Products aren't as reliable and may produce breakdowns as a side effect (gastric or mechanical). Product as a commodity.
Not bad products, aimed at their target segments (companies that need lots of them) mostly for price and cost of ownership (although in Compaq's case, that's debatable).
Aimed at upscale, upper-middle and upper class image-conscious consumers who usually don't know too much about the product they're buying. Product hallmarks are that it looks cool, nobody will look down on you for buying their products (except the next segment), they're usually overpriced, it looks cool, and they have good reliability, service, and ease of use. Did I mention it looks cool? Underneath the appearance, they have pretty standard, very good quality components.
Products that are usually upgraded from stock products by people with a high knowledge of what they're doing with it. In Mom's case, she goes to the grocery store and cooks some damn fine pasta from ingredients she gets there. Sometimes she orders ingredients from specialized stores. In the computer geek's case, they take a stock computer (or build one themselves) and replace and upgrade the parts they choose. And we all have a car geek friend who can tell the 20 different modifications to a '69 Mustang just by listening when someone revs it up. (Sometimes we are that person.)
And how can you summarize another long-winded Katz article and lots and lots of posts?
To each company their own market segment. Business 101.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Don't forget Microsoft Office is available for the Mac, so although the experience is different the tools are available. On the analogy: I should also say that while BMW and Mercedes are driven like any other car, the experience is very much different and the spare parts are usually specific to those makes.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
In a brief piece on the BBC web site, Donald Norman offers this opinion of Apple and the new iMac:
Apple is the best company in the world to make this because Apple understands consumers, understands design and understands computers.
Steve M
There is plenty of astute commentary, which Katz has apparently not bothered to read nor absorb, on how MS won the desktop battle. It was over and above all a business victory, not a technical one. The only thing easy about AOL and Windows is that they're easy to buy. The so-called "ease of use" falls into two categories: familiarity due to dominance of the market share, and being forced into limited options of what you can actually do by poorly designed software.
I'm not a Mac fanatic. I've used both systems extensively and all computers basically suck to work with, because they're like Model T's: very early phases of a burgeoning technology. I was convinced enough to put in an early order for a new iMac because it was a truly different entity from the usual desktop monolith, because it was a powerful computer for an acceptable price, and because it meant I could stay away from Windows XP. Having seen plenty of OSX and XP there is no question whatsoever what is the OS I'd rather own.
It is the first new computer I've purchased, although I've owned or borrowed several and been working with computers near-daily for the last 16 years. Not a bad accomplishment for Mr. Jobs.
All this being said, I'm sick to the teeth of hearing about Steve Jobs' "attitude," about hipness, squareness, personality, and market shares. I don't care if Steve Jobs is an egomaniac or obsessed with being the hippest. I don't care if he's a maverick just to satisfy some mental hang-up. Would someone just review the damn computer?!
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
1) Apple has the best tech support of any company out there. I recently had a problem with my 3 year old 21" Apple Studio Display (still under Apple extended warranty)... it was sent to Apple overnight ($500 on their dime) and was back with me in less than a week (this is a 100lb monitor mind you).
2) iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD... all free, all best in class. Nuff said.
3) And if their hardware is almost instantly outdated, how come my 3 year old g4 500 runs Return to Castle Wolfenstein 1024*768 at more than acceptable framerates using normal settings? No small feat by my estimation.
"Smokey, this isn't Nam, there are rules." -Walter
Absolutely.
However this begs the question on how to define the function of the computer.
Ultimately the function of the internals is computational power and the throughput of data through the system. This of course should be the primary concern in the design or form of the components.
However, I must also say that there are more elemental functions that must also be taken into account. The swiveling LCD for example greatly succeeds in its implimentation of a zero footprint monitor that can be placed in almost any position you like, however, it fails it the need for easy replacement and maintenance. So basically what I'm saying is that there are many functions of the computer as a whole that need to be addressed and far too many people only address the functions they are accustomed to using.
I don't think its a stretch to for Jobs to concede that MS won the operating system war - thats why he is trying to fight the total user experience war - something MS can't do unless it wants to start making boxes.
Yes, and to amplify on this a little more, one should ask why the various major features were added to MacOS X versus Windows XP. In the case of MacOS, virtually every feature was added to enhance the user experience. Apple is pretty good at paying attention to detail and making life easier for the users. Microsoft, on the other hand, added most of the big new features to XP in order to lock it's users into Windows, to increase revenues, and to kill competitors. The Windows UI is still a hodgepodge, and Windows applications follow loose guidelines if any with regard to user interface.
The Mac has some major advantages (Unix!), and my guess is that Apple will gain significant marketshare this year. The thing that Katz most seemed to miss is that Apple is good at making complex tasks simpler. That is the exact thing required in order for the Mac to begin displacing Windows in the home of the proverbial Joe Sixpack.
299,792,458 m/s...not just a good idea, its the law!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Next, you show your true ignorance with your statement that "middle class consumers" drive the market. Are you really that stupid? Everyone knows that it's businesses that drive the PC world for a myriad of reasons. Yes, every day there are more and more personal goodies for computers, and individuals are buying more of them, but that still does not compare to the amount of money generated by businesses. Every company that uses microsoft software is forced to have a license for every single workstation, unlike the home user who just borrows a friend's. When these businesses upgrade to XP, Microsoft is going to rake in a huge amount of profit. That is what drives their "innovation," not the whims of individual PC users.
Right on! Windows and MS Office are very well suited for doing your basic run of the mill office work. Windows boxes provide a cheap and standardized way to fill your office full of machines that you can easily find minimum wages workers to run and do routine office chores.
But an iMac with OS X is suited better for other "niche" markets. Sure theres the Artist/Musician market that everyone says is Mac land. But now with iPhoto and iMovie they are also well suited for the doting parent market which is full of people like me with pictures and home movies I want to get out to far flung relatives without spending hundreds of dollars for extra software that I'll have to fiddle with to get working the way I want anyway. For me the extra cost of the iMac is offset by the software that it comes with that will let me quickly cobble together photo albums, dvds, and CD-roms with movies on them to send out to the extended family thousands of miles away.
I also happen to be in another niche market. I'm one of those people that uses computers for hard core number crunching (ya know the sort of work that got computers called "computers" in the first place). The iMac has a G4 with its AltVec vectorization routines and that means I can now have a machine at home that will outperform the $10,000 HP workstation sitting on my desk at work. The iMac really is like a mini supercomputer and I start drooling when I start thinking how much time this little thing could save me. Granted Linux boxen and Linux clusters can reach comparable performance levels to G4 macs... but with a mac I don't have to do any work to set up the system or to keep it up. (I've run Linux and I like it, but the laziness in me prefers OS X) With OS X I have a full-on UNIX development environment right out of the box. Besides, I'm betting that the G5 will pull ahead of the Pentium-4 in terms of number crunching ability (measured in flops not megahertz), so I'm porting my software from the HP to the Mac hoping I'll get a G5 at work with the next replenishmnet cycle.
Finally, I have to give OS X credit for finally making me like GUIs. I always hated hunting through mazes of menus to change a setting where in UNIX I could just edit a config file or type a command line argument. So far my experience with OS X has been that I get the power of the command line very well integrated with the GUI. Heck, I can even drag and drop icons into the terminal window and get the full path to a file and that is sooo sweet.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
This is very close to what I was thinking even before the rest of the article actually loaded.
Steve Case and Bill Gates are laughing all the way to the bank because they've managed to sell millions of people inferior products. The knowledgable hate them, sure, but the mainstream? It's so easy to use, no wonder it's number one.
Steve Jobs is different. He doesn't want to damn the world and get rich quick. He wants to change the world, and for the better. That's been his goal ever since he started stealing executives away from sugar-water companies, since before that, marketing a product that no one knew anything about to the masses.
Steve Jobs is not doing what Bill Gates et. al. are doing because they only care about the money, and they're too blinded by greed and arrogance to see that their product is inferior and unreliable (I honestly do believe that Gates thinks he is doing the world a great favour with Windows; I don't think he sees things from our point of view).
So yes, Jobs and Gates may both be lunatics who refuse to see reality, but the reality Gates refuses to see is substandard, overpticed software. The reality that Jobs fails to see is that you can't get rich by making quality products and competing fairly on style and reliability.
Remember what happened the last time a Steve (in this case Woz) refused to see reality? He built a personal computer in a garage and enabled Jobs to start the entire personal computer revolution that we can't live without today.
I don't know about you, but my money's on Apple.
--Dan
About a year ago I decided I wanted to buy a Mac, mostly because I was excited about the impending release of OS X based on the beta I had seen. I really wanted to be able to play around with the OS and get good with programming it (having never used Objective-C before), but after pricing new Macs, couldn't justify the cost for one. On a hunch, I decide to try eBay and found tons of used Macs for decent prices. I ended up getting a G3-266 with 160MB ram, 6GB hd, cd-rom, and audio/video input/output for about $400. After about another $75 to upgrade it to a G3-300 (300 has 1MB cache vs 256KB or 512KB in the 266) and 768MB ram, it runs beautifully. The only problem it has running OS X is because of the built-in video card (Apple supports these G3 machines with OS X, but won't supply accelerated video card drivers for them), playing any kind of video full screen can be an unpleasant experience. However, if you're like me and could care less about that, something like this would be perfect for you.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
> the only company that has the right to
... apps are easy to localize completely transparently to the user. All the languages are included with every copy of Mac OS X, so a machine can be shared by users who prefer English or Japanese or whatever. The Web Sharing feature is Apache. The kernel is a modified Mach. File and networking is BSD UNIX. Lots of UNIX utilties are included, like emacs and vi. When you use Apple's excellent graphical Disk Utility, it is running fsck for you. Preferred font format is OpenType, but it supports all the others, too, even Windows-format TrueType. The email app in Mac OS X is all standards based. The Mac version of IE is the most standard-compliant browser available, and is nothing like the Windows version.
> produce Mac hardware is Apple. That
> sounds pretty exclusive to me.
The only company that has the right to produce Presario hardware is Compaq. The only company that has the right to produce Windows operating systems is Microsoft. Your point is meaningless. You think of a "Wintel PC" as an open cake (x86 hardware) with closed icing (Windows). On the Mac, the open cake goes up past the hardware well into the OS, where all of the core is open source and exposed to any user who wants in. Then the closed icing is the Aqua GUI. However, Aqua pays you back for its closed nature with really defined GUI standards and a ton of great, mature Mac software, and it doesn't ask you to leave the file system and networking in a closed layer where one company can add "content protection" or sanction apps that ignore network security.
Mac hardware has evolved over the past five years, and standards are always favored. High speed peripherals are 1394, low speed ones are USB. Wired networking is Ethernet in the consumer machines, and Gigabit Ethernet in the pro machines. Wireless networking is 802.11, with every machine having built-in antennaes and an internal spot for the networking hardware. Displays are DVI. VGA, S-Video, and composite-video (TV) outs are there for convenience also. RAM, HD, etc. are all standard components. Graphics are either NVIDIA or ATI. Everything you see on the screen is a PDF. There is also a PostScript interpreter built-in. The Mac's "BIOS" is an international standard that's also used by Sun (Open Firmware). The file system and app platform is fully Unicode
Get over your out-of-date Microsoft FUD. "Proprietary" is about as meaningful an adjective as "terrorist" or "drug lord". The terms mean NOTHING. They are used as argument enders because there's no reason in them. They destroy debate and discussion rather than advancing them. You don't want to be locked into one vendor, so make standard documents on a standards-based system. If, in the future, you switch away from Apple, all of your documents and peripherals will go with you.
Check out this piece from the Onion poking some fun at the new iMac. I especially like "special drool tray catches saliva of enthralled technogeeks."
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Sorry Katz, but in the world of technology the concept of better product = success is bunk. It's all about market penetration and monopoly power. It makes very little difference if Mac OS X is better than Windows XP because 95% of the market already uses XP and I'm willing to bet that most of those folks have never even used a non-Microsoft OS. It's hard to compete when you can't even step on the field.
I have a perfect, highly unscientific example of this. I teach an introduction to Macintosh course in the art department of a local college. This course is a prerequisite to all the other design courses in the curriculum since all the classes are Mac-based. On average, less than 5% of my students have ever used a non-Microsoft OS and, in fact, most of these students thought "Windows" and "Computer" were synonymous -they were unaware you could even have one without the other.
Despite this demographic skew, at the conclusion of the course around 90% of my students stated that they were planning to switch from Windows to Macintosh. Now the question is, were the students switching because they liked the Mac better or because everyone in the art department used Macs? Part two of the question? Does it matter?
Marketshare = success. Plain and simple.
DigiSquid Design.
i think i was writing more cogent arguments when i was in highschool. at the very least i wasn't painting myself into a corner with my own stupidity.
jon katz writes:
"Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support, increasingly expensive software, and hardware that's almost instantly outdated, middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing. They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year. The public is increasingly wise to tech scams like hardware that's obsolete every 18 months and software that doesn't even last that long."
how does this make sense in his greater argument? apple seems to be the only manufacturer and large os retailer that is doing anything about these issues. so is apple addressing these concerns and is thus losing the battle? or are they not but others are? or nobody is?
point by point commentary (slashdot take-down style)
"Burned by years of outrageously poor tech support...
apple has excellent tech support and wins accolades both over the phone and at the apple store. what makes it even better is that their products are easier to provide tech support for.
increasingly expensive software and hardware,
final cut pro has certainly lowered the cost of professional-level video editing by about $50 000. and the iapps are the best consumer applications of their type on the market, all free. apple hardware has not risen in price, it has fallen. the imac configuration last year offered a slower processor for $4500. this year it sells for $1800. impressive.
that's almost instantly outdated,
apple hardware retains its value in resale better than anyone else and remains in service longer. in fact, one of apple's problems has been that their hardware (and software) last too long. users don;t want to upgrade because their machine is doing for them.
middle-class consumers aren't the least bit interested in the coolest new new thing.
six million imac owners and 150 000 ipod owners say otherwise.
They want computing that works like TV does -- that's easy to use, takes little space, costs relatively little money and works every time you turn it on, year after year.
the mac works more like a tv than anyone else's box, more reliably. (i will remind jon that the whole reason we are using computers instead of watching tv is because computers are more complex and challenge us in ways that tv cannot (the info flows two ways here), and that there will be trade-offs in ease of use.) if the tv could do it, why isn't it? if someone is doing this better than apple, why aren't they?
anyway, my point, jon, is that you can't have it both ways. either apple is going in the right direction and you've defeated your own argument or they aren't and you just aren't paying attention. or everybody is going in the wrong direction which doesn't make for much of an argument.
either way you lose. what makes you lose even harder is that you walked into it.
maybe apple's market position has to do with other factors you haven't cared to comment upon?
maybe.