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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.
Except Apple did license the Mac OS to companies. And they nearly went bankrupt because of it. UMAX, Motorola, PowerComputing, Radius. They all had licenses. Apple's share just decreased even more rapidly.
No they didn't.
Actually, Sun does make desktops (that's what their workstation machines are, really. they stand alone quite well) and there are notebooks.
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http://solutions.sun.com/catalog.static/en_US/7
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.