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Apple vs. Microsoft Myths Revisited
allgood2 writes "John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a great article exploring the myth that Apple could/would be Microsoft if only they had licensed their operating system. This myth has oft been purported in technology and business media."
In Q2 2004 Apple's market share was at 3.7%, while in Q2 2003 Apple was at 3.8%.
Apple's shipments, in fact, increased from 452K boxes to 495K, but the market grew at a rate of 10.9%, while Apple grew at the rate 9.3%, so officially they lost market share.
Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I originally chose the Mac over PC. It was 1990 and I was looking to get a new computer. I went to a computer store and looked at what they had on the shelf. The Mac Plus was used, but it was still a current machine. It was still being manufactured by Apple and it was so much slicker than the DOS machines that were on display.
I was primarily a Mac user until 1996. I wanted to get into PC Gaming. I built a Pentium 100 PC. Over the years that followed I spend money upgrading both platforms. My PC was for gaming and my Mac was for everything else. Over time I just became less and less interested in the Mac platform. When Apple eliminated onboard SCSI, Serial and ADB they made ALL of my peripherals obsolete. So not only would I have had to buy a new mac, I would have had to buy all new peripherals. That was the final straw.
Two years ago I bought two dead iMacs and pieced them together into a FrankenMac. I have all of the guts (sans monitor) running inside of a briefcase.
It runs great and is going to fulfill its intended role perfectly. But, I have no intent to ever go back to Mac as my primary platform. In my mind, the extra cost and diminished software choices don't make it worth the extra polish that Apple puts into its machines.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
No they didn't.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done.
And also something of a rip-off of MacWrite, which also came out 6 years before. It was MacWrite that was everything above you claim for Word, and it inspired Word for Mac, which long predated the Windows version. So if your argument has merit, one could say that what Apple should have done was to develop MacWrite and make it available for Windows as well, much like their modern iTunes strategy.
Actually, Sun does make desktops (that's what their workstation machines are, really. they stand alone quite well) and there are notebooks.
/ 11 23542.html
http://solutions.sun.com/catalog.static/en_US/7
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
Well, not necessarily.
The problem was that the IIgs had a 65816 processor, not a 68000. So it's not quite an "underclocked Amiga". Now, the 65816 is pretty impressive given the context, but even then, it really didn't have much future to it compared to the 68k series.
And, if you look at the competition, everybody else on the 6502 (NES, Commodore, Atari, Acorn, etc) reached for the 68k, except for Acorn who made the ARM instead. And the big people working on the 6502 line was Commodore (who owned MOS) and Western Design Center (who were and still are a small company). Whereas the 68k line was backed by Motorola, who has a lot of resources to throw at it.
And the IIgs, while well designed, was pretty far out of headroom for growth, without some major changes.
So really, even though the IIgs was a great computer, Apple really shouldn't have released it because all it did was prolong the inevitable end of the Apple II line without actually "parlay"ing it into the future.
Really, they "should" have killed off the Mac and do what Acorn did -- release a new computer based on a newer processor that was able to emulate the Apple II. The problem is that, while the ARM was fast enough to emulate a BBC Micro, the 68k probably wasn't, so they wouldn't have been able to just make the Mac do it.
Gentoo Sucks
The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
First, he goes to a lot of trouble to explain that you couldn't run Mac OS on the PCs that were already shipped because they wouldn't have Mac ROMs.
.
Well, a computer company that licensed the Mac OS could include the Mac OS 64k of ROM on the motherboard with minimal difficulty; the whole 64k E segment of the first megabyte of memory was reserved for BIOS use, but was not actually used on any machines until the PS/2 came out. (Heck, of the 64K in the F segment, only 8k was used by the actual BIOS; on the original PCs and XTs, 32k were used by the IBM Basic and the other 24k were unused.)
There was no retail OS market at the time, but they could have been accomodated as well; ship an adapter card with the ROM on board, to be decoded to the reserved-for-adapter-card-ROM C or D memory segments. Heck, use the same adapter card to attach a bus mouse if you like . .
Graphically, he's wrong, too. A 1982 Hercules graphics card was perfectly capable of displaying 720 x 348 on 1981 IBM monochrome monitors. Sure, that's 36 pixels shorter vertically than the Mac display, but it's actually higher resolution (250,560 pixels vs. 196,608). When dealing with monochrome graphics, the computer neither knows nor cares whether the monitor uses amber, green, or white phosphors. And a 1984 EGA display, at 640x350, is just barely inferior to a Mac in resolution, and delivered sixteen colors.
There are other issues, of course, which may have made making a Mac out of the PC much more difficult. But Mr. Gruber clearly doesn't know what he's talking about when he opines on early '80s PC hardware.
The original Macintosh was a work of art. Both the hardware and firmware/software were optimized as well as possible. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
BYTE Macintosh Preview.
BYTE Macintosh Team Interview.
I have a collection of most 68000 compact macs and play with them every now and then, they're quite fascinating little machines. I can feel the amount of bloat between every release. System 1.0 boots in 2-3 seconds from a floppy! (System 7 takes about a minute from a hard disk on the same hardware). Some of the difference is of course due to the few features but mostly it's the difference between compiled C and hand-tuned ASM.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" -Steve Jobs
Although the idea of licencing its OS or harware would be impossible today (OSX on x86 would have no software), and Apple's foray into clones in the mid-90s almost killed them, they could possibly have created a large market for clones if they had done so earlier.
The question is more that they would have had to charge high prices for the licences of the MacROM (prior to the neworld machines that had the ROM in software) and/or the motherboard design in order to offset the loss in marketshare of their hardware.
If Apple had stuck to three basic designs - one desktop, one laptop, one tower - plus perhaps reserving special stuff like the iMac as Apple only and made sure that the quality of their machines were absolutely the best, I'm pretty sure that sales would have been high enough in the professional Mac sector in order to let the clones live and hopefully raise overall MacOS marketshare. I refer to the quality as important because Macs used to be the most qualitative computers around, but over the years have dropped slightly in order to reduce costs. I mean, IBM's Thinkpads sell extremely well despite their high price chiefly because of their quality, and this in the cut throat PC market where most stuff is dirt cheap and dirt crap, quality wise.
Apple invests a large amount in R&D and would need to basically finance that in order to grow and survive. If Apple had continued on their way, iMac and iBooks (both with looks copyrighted or patented), iPod, OSX (free on Apple's machines, discounted as OEM to clones but still with a price), excellent software division (FCP, shake etc) they would have possibly less hassle today than they do, and a higher marketshare to boot.
Not only that but a higher marketshare would bring CPU prices down.
Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (1987) was therefore version 2.0
---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel
Your corporate clients knew Excel was the right took. They just never dared not buy IBM-compatible. Wimps. Just like today they do not dare buy OS X.
The next pasture is always greener
Here here! I really like OS X and Apple products but here's what happened when I bought a new PC last month, my choices were (all prices Canadian):
$2399; 12" Powerbook, DVD+RW;
$2099; 15" Compaq Laptop, DVD+RW;
$2429; 17" iMac DVD+RW, 1.25GHz G4, 256M RAM, 80G HD;
$2799; PowerMac DVD+RW, Dual 1.8GHz, 256M RAM, 80G HD;
$996; Sony Vaio DVD+RW, 2.8GHz P4, 512M RAM, 120G HD
I bought the Sony, it easily out-guns and way under-prices the others. Sorry Apple, I really like your products but the fact that you can't entice an Apple fan like me to buy one of your desktops is not saying much for your pricing strategy.
For what it's worth, there's nothing in the Windows world that touches your laptops, but they're still a little too pricy for me. (Also, I'm simply *not* interested in that hideous eMac -- especially since I already have a 17" CRT.)
SLL
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
These days, I think that looks and the want to be different are teh two main reasons people buy Macs. Back in the day, MacOS really was as good or better than Windows at everything (compatibility aside since that's not relivant here). MacOS really did do graphics better, it did have a more usuable GUI, it was more stable, etc.
/., Windows XP is quite stable, PCs have the latest greatest in graphics, both have easly usable UIs (some argue that OS-X is less usable than OS9, but it's still quite usuable) etc.
These days, it's pretty much a wash. Despite what people like to crow about on
So you've got a platform that costs more money, doesn't run all the games as you noted, and doesn't offer any real noticable improvements to your average user other than eye candy both on and off screen. Means that the eye candy crowd is who you are going to attract.
The third one does, and but only in the context of dragging icons and double clicking them (in the June of 1981 line item). It comes up tangentally later in the 1988 and 1991 sections amount Microsoft. That particular line item in June of '81 I believe is referencing a computer made by Xerox not Apple.
Any chance you'll point out the specifics of the text that clarify that the Mac's didn't specifically take the concept of Icon's from Xerox? Or that Job's inspiration for developing a GUI based computer didn't come directly from his visits to PARC.
Heck, even Jobs openly admits that at PARC, they showed him three things, and he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't even notice the other two (OO programing, and networking).
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html
Search for the text "three things". It's right there. Now, Raskin did work there for a little under two years before the PARC visit, but unless it's the "PITS" thing, I don't see anything that leads me to believe that Apple didn't get the idea of a GUI directly from PARC. Raskin might have had the concept in a design 15 years early in his Ph.D, but PARC appears to be the one who shocked Jobs into realizing it was a revolutionary idea. So in the end, it appears PARC deserves a lot of credit you seem to want to deny them.
Insightful my ass - you're full of shit. They seem to have been profitable for three YEARS prior to the iPod, due to things like the iMac, iBook, Powerbook, etc. Gee, these are HARDWARE devices that they may not have sold if they'd licensed the OS. They tried the OS licensing idea - it was the clone years of the mid-90's. It was a flop - people didn't buy more Macs, people just bought cheap hardware from clone makers, killed Apple's profits, and saddled Apple with a huge support legacy.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
It's because of compatibility. If you want to move from one platform to another, companies move with the path of least resistance. Over time, CP/M gave way to DOS, which went to Windows 3.1, to Win 95, to 2000, to XP. Each time there was minimal pain in moving.
Meanwhile, Apple II users had NO upgrade path. They migrated sometimes to the Mac, sometimes to the PC. Why didn't they all go to the Mac? They bought into a platform (the Apple II) that cost them less than $1000, and were being asked now to buy into a platform that cost at least $2500, usually more, plus all new software.
That brings me to my final point - even if Mac OS X were available on generic x86 and Apple found a magical way outside everything we know of economics to survive, a lot of people STILL wouldn't migrate. They'd still have to buy all new SOFTWARE, and let me tell you - for a lot of people that can dwarf the cost of the hardware.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
Nothing. At all. At the time, making their own hardware was the best option.
When NeXT started out in 1986, there was no such thing as a commodity personal computer. There were IBM clones but they weren't anywhere near standardised and in any case, the most advanced of them were based on the 80286, a thoroughly shitty 16-bit processor.
The other players--Apple, Atari, Commodore and others I'm forgetting--were mostly better in that they generally used 680x0 CPUs but they still weren't particularly decent. They certainly wouldn't have run NeXT's software.
But they're irrelevant because the NeXT systems were workstations, not personal computers. Workstations were the serious computers of the day. They were still single-user (mostly) systems but they were fullblown Unix boxes. If you wanted to do any sort of scientific or industrial computation, that's what you got. They were priced in the $10k-$100k range and the big-name players in that arena were (IIRC) Sun, HP, DEC, IBM and SGI (and probably others) and NeXT was competing with them.
If NeXT had gone software-only, they would have had to pick their platform(s) with no clear winner in sight, then live or die at the mercy of its vendor. They would also have missed out on the huge piles of money they made by building and selling hardware. In those days, there was still big money in proprietary hardware.
IMHO, NeXT went software-only at about the right time, just as commodity (IBM-compatible) PCs were getting powerful enough to eat the workstation market. I doubt, though, that that would have been enough to save the company. Once you get into the PC operating system market, Microsoft will kill you, as Be found out.
Just before Apple bought them, they were selling OPENSTEP, the NeXTStep API and framework ported to a variety of platforms (including Windows NT). I suspect that if they hadn't taken over Apple, we'd all be developing our "real" apps for OPENSTEP now (or GNUStep if you're a Debian user) and porting them as necessary.
ObCitation: here.
As an aside, Apple is in a pretty wierd place. They're a throwback to the '80s when it was still enormously profitable to make computer hardware. It isn't anymore (although Apple seems to still make a modest profit from it) but they've got a tiger by the tail--if they move to commodity hardware, they have to compete with Microsoft who can and will kill them.
Their current strategy is to stay out of MS's range by remaining incompatible with PCs, all the while using as many commodity parts as possible and focusing on innovation and good industrial design. Given those strengths, I wouldn't be surprised if they minimized the computer business or got out of it entirely. They're currently much more adept at competing with the likes of Sony.
There is a reason, and it's explained (rather well) in the article. If you're intelligent enough to grasp it, I encourage you to read it.