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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."
Well even if Apple just licensed their OS and didnt make computers they would have alot nicer product on their hands because their engineers know how to create very seemless products. But Apple is a computer company, unlike any other company on the market, they make the OS the hardware and they shiny cases that hold them. I can not think of another company that does the same thing! (maybe Sun but they dont make desktops or laptops) Companies like Dell and HP could learn alot from Apple. I just hope they never just license the OS like microsoft does.
keanmarine.com
.. was Price mainly. That and the availability of lots of software [games] :)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
In the article he says:
"But the truth is that Apple and Microsoft have seldom been direct competitors."
I agree, but disagree. It's not so cut and dry, and even though he doesn't
claim it to be cut and dry, it's just too simple of a concept to throw out there.
Apple was a desktop machine, for people. Microsoft aimed dead ahead that market
as well. (business, school, and home). Were the Apple II and Macintosh just for
school and home, not business? I think VisiCalc would answer that one pretty easily.
Same thing with Filemaker. The Apple was a great business machine, a machine for
students, and for the home. Microsoft took dead aim at all of them, and continues
to do so to this day, as it tries to enter nearly every market out there, even hardware.
The part of the article I do agree with, says:
"Thus the difference between Microsoft and Apple wasn't about open-vs.-closed; it was pragmatism-vs.-idealism."
How many times do you hear Bill Gates talking about being a pirate? Well, maybe he
does, but you hear MORE of the idealistic talk from Steve Jobs and co. I find it odd
that an idealistic company can exist at all. Normally they remove such things (idealism,
morals, quality) when money and profit take precedence. But, as the author says, I guess
that's why Apple only earns millions, but Microsoft earns billions.
In my mind, Apple has taken steps that will ensure it some great success. It has
entered into many markets, not just one. It has servers, desktops, and peripherals.
It hocks software *and* hardware. It has embraced open source (let's not discuss to what
extents) and made quite an amazing set of documentation for users and developers alike.
For me, as a humble developer, it is a godsend. Yet, for my 78 year old father in-law,
it's just as amazing. How can that be? And, for an IT company needing a server, it may
very well be just as appreciated.
Microsoft made attempts at all of that, too. In my mind, they are competitors.
Could Apple have been Microsoft? That's a loaded question.
I would question why any company would want to be Microsoft.
Moreover, why not be like Apple?
I'd rather be the old, trustworthy shoemaker on the street corner, making quality in
a niche market, than some big shoe company spread all over the world. (if the analogy
makes sense)
"Apple matured into a modestly profitable computer company. Macs account for about 5 percent of the computers in the U.S., and 2 percent world-wide."
Since when is a Fortune 500 company modestly profitable?
Well, ok. This is 2004. Let me try again.
Since when has a modestly profitable company lasted for so long in the Fortune 500 ranks?
Apple makes money. Everyone tells them what they ought to do. Like it or not, Steve Jobs is usually right about what they ought to do. It isn't licensing. Profit != marketshare.
The security issues in Windows have nothing to do with having drivers for every computer accessory ever dreamed up by Man and beast. It has to do with incredibly stupid decisions made by Microsoft. Just look at some of the fixes that Windows XP SP2 includes that people have been clamoring for since Windows 95 was released!
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Yeah, that's why that cisco company never took off.
today is spelling optional day.
The Apple IIGS in 1986 ran a full-color MacOS-equivalent (and superior, in some ways) called GS/OS very well, and it was essentially an underclocked Amiga. (The Apple IIGS also had very large ROMs; whether the Macintosh would've made the same impression it did had been released two years later I can't say.) Since it was totally compatible with Apple IIe (etc.) programs, it could have been the kind of "parlay" the article's author went on about, but it sank under Apple's neglect and unfathomable obsession with the the Macintosh.
- _Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
"Or consider the display. The Mac's GUI depended on a 512-by-384 pixel monochrome display, capable of displaying text in the novel color scheme of black text on a white background. This, at a time when PC displays were typically used as character-based terminals displaying orange or green type on a black background, and displayed only 320-by-240 pixels."
No not quite. CGA was 640x200 and Hercules had an even higher resolution. These are of course monochrome.
"The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design. The mouse pointer. The desktop metaphor. Overlapping windows. Icons. WYSIWYG word processing. Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac."
Of course by 1985/86 The Atari ST and the Amiga had a very simular UI and they both added color. The Amiga added stero sound and multi-tasking.
The Macs real strength over the Amige as printing. The Atari had some real good DP stuff.
"It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995, a decade after the arrival of the Mac."
I would say to be fair that Windows 3.11 did not totaly suck and was even useful. I did use it. I will admit that I used to say that Windows 3.11 sucked less than DOS and that Windows 95 sucked less than 3.11. Lets not forget the problems which was System 7 on the Mac.
The Mac was a big step and OS/X rocks but lets get our facts straight.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
You know market share isn't the same thing as percentage of units sold, right?
Mod point free since 2001
"The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design."
And a couple of years later, the Amiga was at the same point. And Beta was better than VHS, etc., etc., ad nauseum. It's not performance or technological superiority that guarantees success, but money and advertising.
Duh.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
The best thing Microsoft ever did was to get IBM to agree that Microsoft could license DOS out to third parties. IBM was under the impression that its proprietary BIOS would make third party compatible computers impossible. It was wrong.
Because of that blunder, Microsoft was able to sell a truly IBM compatible product to business, which were the primary buyers of computers at the time. It was the "IBM compatible" part that was of the utmost importance to business.
Apple NEVER had that "in" with business and any attempt to sell its OS separate from its hardware would have failed.
Also, by exerting control over both the soft and hardware, Apple is able to achieve a more stable platform. Sure having tons of peripherals and software to chose from on the IBM compatible PC was and is great. But more choices leads to more complexity. And complexity leads to instability.
Still, I wish Apple would release an x86 version of OSX. I've played around with it a bit and would really like to run it. Sure I could buy an Apple, but building yourself is just too much fun to give up. And it's cheaper too.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
IMHO I think Apple would make a killing and a serious dent in the desktop OS market if they released an X86-compatible version of OS X. I know it would be difficult to make it work with all the endless permeutations of X86 hardware and peripherals out there but even if they just made it compatible with the big ones, like SB, nForce, intel chipsets, etc. they would still hit a pretty big market share. I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Why did you take John's nicely formatted article and ass it up like that? Additionally, he's selling memberships to help pay for his site, I'm sure he'd probably like people to actually come to the site to buy them...
~jeff
Oh come on. Windows 9x/NT was better than Mac OS 9 and prior.
I know this for a fact because at one time I owned a mac that had OS 9 as my only computer and I recall going with my girlfriend to her college computer labs that had windows 9x/NT with MS office. Windows was just no nonsense usability. Write your paper, print it, simple no-nonsense usuability. The Start button just made perfect sense, task bar, quick launch, system tray, file explorer, and having menus on windows did too. I really wondered then why I was using a mac.
The reason that Apple didn't get a lot of market share was that they didn't price the systems right for that. The Mac was never sold as something that everyone would have, unlike either the PC or the Apple II. It was sold as something that could keep a company in the Fortune 500 with 4% of the market. Apple went for a strategy which could be (and was) successful with a very small segment of the market. Microsoft and a number of other companies went with strategies which demand a monopoly; of course, only one managed it.
If your plan is low margins and high volume, you have to beat everyone else who has this plan. If your plan is high margins and low volume, there's a lot more room for competition. Of course, in a market with a successful company of the first type and a number of successful companies of the second type, the first one has almost all of the market share, but that doesn't matter all that much. And as your margins get higher, the market share you need drops.
Apple probably could have done better by continuing the Apple II line until it could be folded into the Mac line, thereby keeping a foot in the low-end market and providing an upgrade path. They'd also have done better in the business market if they hadn't already orphaned a system, which makes users have to face the fact that they're using a closed system. But licensing the Mac to other companies would just have driven down the margins and made them need more market share.
At one time, Apple had the best hardware, the best OS, and all the big hit programs came out on the Mac first. IIRC even Excel came out on the Mac first. John Sculley decided to go for profit margin rather than market share and Apple made a ton of money. Unfortunately, shrinking market share caught up with them. Corporations buy on price. They don't care how easy a computer is to use. I remember a quote in a trade magazine where an IT manager said, "All the employees screamed when I replaced the Macs with PCs but I saved the company thousands of dollars."
People point out that when the IBM PC became a commodity Microsoft made a fortune. But look what happened to IBM. They got squeezed out of the PC business. The same thing started happening to Apple when they licensed the Mac.
Thanks for that. I got a little chuckle out of "the niche market that is networking hardware." That was cute.
Right now Cisco's market cap is just over $135 billion. Apple comes in at almost $12 billion. I guess there's niche, and then there's niche.
I don't see anyone running a PC running IOS, which is what the "business analysts" claimed Apple should have done with Mac OS.
There actually are tons of "PC's" (x86 servers) running Cisco software. Cisco PIXes, Content Engines, NAMs, Call-Managers. I could go on. These are also "proprietary hardware" (they're mostly re-branded stuff from other PC manufacturers, but you still gotta buy them from Cisco, in the bluegreen boxes with the bridge logo on them).
But your use of Cisco as a parallel to Apple isn't that bad. If I had to distill it to a one sentence explanation, I'd say:
Cisco and Apple both went for high-end proprietary hardware, emphasizing good design over low price, but Cisco targets businesses who will drop millions of dollars to go from a 2% failure rate to a 1% failure rate, or to save their support staff 15 minutes of time in a crisis, whereas Apple targets individual users who don't have the same attitude towards how much money they should spend on their computer systems.
He's right, and what's more - Amiga people know this drill the best.
Back before 'multimedia' was a phrase, Apple, Atari, and Commodore lived the dream. The problem was the business PC users who would actually say things like, "Ahhhhh! I don't need any fancy graphics or sound..."
Imagine that attitude today! Well, you don't have to - it still exists - it's called DENIAL. 90% of the time when people go to buy a replacement computer they say things like, "Well, we'll give the old one to the kids to play games on..."
Oh really? Say, why not give the kids a USABLE box since the old one is just FINE for spreadsheets and word processing. I'll tell you why - because they're in denial about the fact that they DO want the bells and whistles after all, but due to our culture THEY ARE AFRAID TO ADMIT IT.
How much more proof do you need than Compaq's internal sound being called, "BUSINESS AUDIO"! What the hell does THAT mean? It means you get to hide your addiction to Doom better.
Few non-geek types like to be thought of as a child. Children play games after all - not adults, and certainly not on a computer! This attitude has been slowly changing but in the 80's, this was the way it was.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I was looking for a comment like this to reply to - I knew if I scrolled-down far enough I'd find it.
At any rate, Windows NT4 most certainly did not suck - it had full multitasking, something that Macs really didn't have until years later - granted it wasn't as good as the Amiga's multitasking at the time, but for popular use, it worked just fine, was very stable, and had a reasonable level of user-based security (something that was not at-all common on PCs at the time).
Now as for the past - wouldacouldashoulda - I don't really care about Apple failing to license their products in the past. OS-X is a whole 'nother ballgame. It's basically unix and with a modicum of tweaking and some extra drivers, should be possible to compile for X86 CPUs and most anything-else out there.
But it will never happen, because Apple is too fond of their own hardware solutions to see the bigger picture, and they really want to keep their "designer" image - there are still a lot of people out there for whom owning a Mac is a status-symbol of sorts (read: bumpersticker about how intelligent and artistic the owner is).
Eventually when Linux is getting to the point of becoming common on the desktop (say, 5 years from now), Apple may re-think it's strategy, but for the reasons I lised above, I doubt it.
Apple has, however, conquered the one major problem that Linux still has - for it to be commonplace on desktop PCs, Linux needs to be able to be installed, configured, and maintained without EVER seeing a command line interface or editing config files by hand. I know unix-types want their CLI and I'm all for having it, buried some some folder of the operating system that normal users never need to look at.
As soon as Linux can consistantly pull-off this trick, the userbase will skyrocket and application developers will follow.
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
t's quite obvious that you don't really know your PC-clone history (note: IBM didn't "leave the hardware open"), let alone your Mac history.
IBM did leave the hardware open when compared to Apple (except the MCA bus developed later).
Seriously, the author of the article has a very very good point when he mentions that terminals at the time were 40-column (80 if you were lucky) text displays -- not machines capable of displaying 512x384...it was the integration of hardware and software that made [and still makes] the mac what it is.
The video lilitation for PCs of the day was largely due to the amount of available video memory. Instead of storing data about the location, value, and attributes of an ASCII character, you needed enough memory to store data about the position and color of each pixel. The fact that most of the static data on the Apple was stored in ROM just made things easier. Unfortunately the PC market could employ this "shortcut" because no single PC entity developed both the hardware and software. It would require cooperation between corporations, which is difficult even to this day.
Apple has slowly been adopting various ideas from the PC market over the last decade or so. The move from SCSI to IDE as the default option is one example. The move to PCI is another good choice. Most Mac users don't have to go out and buy 5 volt buffered DIMMs either. Apple has done a great job of accepting some PC standards to reduce the cost to its customers. In order to do this they had to seperate the hardware from the software yet allow them to interact as if they were still one.
Apple makes great machines at a fairly reasonable price, but they made their decision about 2 decades ago and continue to choose to live by it. Articles like this serve no purpose than to bring out the trolls.
Considering the longevity of Macintoshes vs. PC's, no, I would indeed expect the numbers to differ.
Regardless, marketshare is irrelevant. My Powerbook works just fine regardless of what computer you might like to use.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
The reason why Apple avoided licensing the OS to other companies are because its primary revenue generator is its hardware division: when Apple licensed its OS to PowerComputing and Umac and company, its hardware sales declined, so the company started losing money. Apple's software sales were and are essentially meaningless to its bottom line because it is selling an OS that can only be used by computers that Apple itself is selling.
Apple was and is really a hardware company, not a software company. The motorola platform would have had to supplant the x86 platform in order for it to be successful, and indeed, there's a rumor that there was such a port created at one point in Apple's history, but Apple simply wasn't willing to lose its hardware revenue.
While interesting and informative, it is also interesting to note one *huge* point that is left out in the article: The price. Mac have always been more expensive than PCs. Not that they are a lower value, but they are almost inexistent in the "entry-level" personal computer market. And they have always been.
Hence, the entry-level investment has always been higher for a Mac. You couldn't say "I'll buy this crappy one, and if I like it i'll upgrade later". Or simply speaking, if you had a thousand bucks to buy a machine, there was no alternative.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I found the article rambling and self contradictory. I often wonder why Apple people are so defensive about this. It's OVER. You can't go back. Your mission, should you decide to accept it is to figure out what to do from here on out. The article DID get one thing right though:
"The fact is that the Windows monopoly is an anomaly, and exists only because of IBM's decision to license the DOS operating system from Microsoft, rather than buying it or writing their own from scratch. Microsoft didn't choose or decide the "open" nature of the IBM-compatible hardware business -- they just went along for the ride and then took full advantage of their fortunate position."
Which makes the other considerations moot. The good news, is that Microsoft won't get another free pass dumped in their lap. They have to either produce better software, or cheat to stay ahead, and their ability to cheat is being rapidly cut off by the international market as well as enlightened IT managers here in the States.
From the article:
Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac.
Then my Amiga, and the GeOS package running on my C64 were figments of my imagination? Or was the author of that article still in the alternate universe?
Apples and oranges. You can't name one enterprise router/switch manufacturer that doesn't use proprietary hardware. But there is certainly no shortage of manufacturers building hardware to run any given desktop OS....of course with the exception of Apple...
Also remember that Win95 was developed with Plug and Play, a very ambitious effort on MS's part. MS drove ISAPnP as a new standard, heavily influenced PCI, and even got monitor and video manufacturers to implement new PnP standards. The work required of system vendors was enormous as the changes necessary to support PnP were huge. Win95 was a monumental effort and some of the technical fallout from it benefits mac users today.
But the gist of it is pretty much right.
I've owned Macs since junior high, and I can't remember a point where they weren't "the alternative." I mean, wasn't that what those 1984 and Lemmings commercials were about? Wasn't the computer always aimed at, or at least embraced by the various creative fields? I can't tell you how many offices I've worked in where the art department used Macs, and everyone else used Windows. So, yeah, they're "the alternative", which usually implies a smaller but cultlike following as opposed to "the popular." Mac users are kind of like the Goths and Punks in the corner of the lunchroom sneering at the Preps and Jocks.
The Mac has its lot in life. And it's not a bad one. It's possible Apple could've done something different and sold more computers, and from a business standpoint they could be considered a failure because they aren't worth ten times as many billions-- but they are still worth billions, and that's saying somthing. Apple also has something that Microsoft never had and never will, millions of loyal users, many of whom border on the fanatical.
Me, I'm happy with where they are and where they're going. I mean, look at DVD Studio Pro 3 and Final Cut 4, Shake... The soon-to-come Motion... But then, I'm an animator, so my needs aren't everyone's.
It's disingenuous to just say: "There's a kind of infection that likely can't be stopped, so it doesn't really matter how secure the code is". It's ignoring all the other kinds of infection that are directly linked to the codebase's security, and can be stopped.
The thing is, Apple started developing the Mac in the late '70s. When Apple finally shipped it (in '84) a PC with more than 64K was an impressive rarity. (Can we say "Commodore 64?") There may have been dozens advertised in magazines, but the installed base of such systems was small. 640K was an awe-inspiring dream for most users.
192K of RAM+ ROM was a great deal of memory in '84. The 128K of memory was what made the Macintosh such an expensive machine, and put it out of the price range of most users. And even then, the system was almost unusable. The word processor could only fit 8 pages of text into memory without overflowing.
Now, by '86, of course, things were different. The 286's were becoming popular, and Windows 1.0 and OS/2 were coming out, and Amigas had a GUI as advanced (from a technological, if not a usability perspective) as the Mac. It's amazing what a little competition can bring.
The big issue was the one raised in the first post. Apple would have had to give up hardware to become the dominant O/S player. The PC manufacturing world chose Microsoft windows for one reason, Microsoft was not IBM. There was no way Compaq or any other clone maker was going to let IBM define the hardware and software platform, not after they declared their intention to take the market proprietary with the microchannel architecture.
The other reason that Apple could not be a player was that between the launch of the Mac and the launch of Windows the Mac O/S pretty much ossified. Apple saw it as job done, finished. There was no forward movement. All the research dollars went into whacky stuff like the Newton and Dylan. It took the launch of Windows 95 for Apple to pull itself together, kick the deadweight out of the executive suite and bring back Steve.
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. The NeXT box had some really funky stuff but it was light years ahead of MacOS or Windows at the time. I would have been really interested in getting into it if it had not been obvious that an education O/S pitched at that price point was a sure fire looser.
If you put Clive Sinclair and Steve Jobs together and took the median you might get something useful. Clive Sinclair could have defined the personal computer market if he had put a real floppy drive and a real keyboard on the QL. Steve Jobs could have done likewise if he had spent less time thinking about the correct shade of black for his magnesium cube and instead made something affordable in a plastic case.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
"The Start button just made perfect sense, task bar, quick launch, system tray, file explorer, and having menus on windows did too. I really wondered then why I was using a mac.
"
Keep drinking that kool aid. The Start made perfect sense, until you wanted to shut down. System tray was merely a poor copy of the Mac's control strip (which was probably a copy of something else). Finally, menus on windows is the absolute worst UI mistake of Windows. It takes Fitt's Law, stomps on it, spits on it, cuts it up, eats it, and hurls it out the window.
Those UI elements that you claim made 9x/NT superior were the reason I _didn't_ (and still don't) use a PC.
I just ran in to this when I purchased my PowerBook. I could get a Dell for $1799. The 1.5GHz PowerBook was $2499. By the time that I got the systems configured to the level that I wanted, the Apple was $3,200 and the Dell was $3,600.
The difference is that Apple sells their systems with base models that are usable configurations. When you look at the Dell (or HP, Sony, etc), their base models have too little RAM, to small or too slow of a hard disk, etc.
The PC companies know 1) that you look at the initial price, and 2) once you have seen that price, you won't question the price of the options. The options are seconday.
This is how Dell makes tons of money. Ever seen their prices for video upgrades, more memory, larger hard disks??? Their add on cost is higher than what the part goes for at Fry's.
Point is: When you look at a configuration that you will actually use, the Apple systems are extremely price competitive.
These OS's were very unstable; OS 8 was like Win 3.1 in stability.
Even today, on my kids iMac's, I have to reload the OS every year because all the drivers and software screws up the OS until it won't print or do other normal stuff. No way to figure out why, because there is no error log, it just pretends to do it and won't.
OS 9 will lock up suddenly until my son has to crawl under his desk and pull the plug, it gets *that* locked up.
OS X, lets face it, was 10 years overdue. If Apple would have had any balls, they would have pushed hard on AUX to become more mainstream, because that's pretty much a blueprint for what they did with BSD and finder and called it OS X.
No, apple screwed up big time, taligent, pink, darwin. 10 years for nothing. Pathetic.
Meanwhile OS 8 and 9 still suck, but X won't run on an iMac with 256M of memory. So we're fucked because I'm not spending 4 grand to replace all 3 iMacs.
Maybe I should just get a bunch of Dell's for the kids...
Here is a situation, I need a new desktop computer. I have a nice laptop already and I have 2 nice 17" LCD displays .
Sounds like you are in the same position as somebody who already has a set of tires and complains that Ford doesn't sell any cars without tires. The solution is the same: sell those old tires of yours on Ebay and use the proceeds to help you buy a car with tires.
OK, so the article argues that if Apple had licensed their OS then they wouldn't have necessarily made more money, because it's the model their businesses customers would have preferred and...er...umm...stuff.
I think the author of this article confuses the (Apple licensing the ability to rip off their UI to Microsoft was a mistake) argument with the idea that Mac OS should have been running on Intel hardware.
Should Apple tried to put their OS on all hardware? - No.
Should Apple have let Microsoft rip of their UI in exchange for having some office applications written on their OS? - No.
Apple does have few interesting plays in their back pocket:
1) They have a fully functional GUI on top of an open source OS
2) their open source OS is still building on BOTH Power PC and Intel platforms.
3) a version of Microsoft Office (like it or not, this is a huge advantage that the Mac has over other Open Source OS's)
I don't have insight into why Apple continues to do Intel builds of Darwin. It could be for no other reason than to keep IBM in check.
It would be interesting to see how Microsoft's reaction would be if Apple took that Intel build to market. Microsoft needs Apple to remain in business, but how badly? Would Microsoft do another build of Office to run on an OS X for Intel platforms?
The future could be interesting.
If PCs were the same price as Macs, I would bet that people would hold off from upgrading more often. People will put up with a speed hit (which hits Macs and PCs alike) until prices are reasonable.
*shrug*
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Erm... there is a difference between ease of use, and the pretty factor. Sometimes their mutually exclusive even. Granted, win 95/98/NT were kind of clunky, they were quite easy to use... Thats why I never bought a Mac at that time, the single button mouse, the lack of context menus, the silly universal top menu bar. Windows, though, has customizable tool bars, a movable, resizable, task bar. The start menu was wonderously simple to use. And for me, I could get under the hood and tweak to my hearts content (well, in a limited way).
Sure, OSX is still prettier than XP, but XP still has more functionality as an OS. The neat little slider/tasker bar is pretty, but I find it cumbersome, I still don't like the little Mac top menu, where I ALWAYS have to move my mouse to the top the the screen (waste of arm movement, IMHO), still the damned one button mouse.
I'm not a microsoft freak, BTW, my next OS (after XP pro) will probably be some Mac release (when Longhorn comes out... ech), unless Linux gets with the program, or I can get some sort of 32bit DOS that runs Windows apps.
Your comparison, BTW, is like me saying that Mother Theresa was a better person than Bush, and you replying that Bush is prettier. It doesn't answer anything, it doesn't mean anything, its just packaging.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Yeah right, you were a developer. That's why you don't understand what actually happened.
The article mentions Sculley's Newton and how it barely interacted with the Mac and was instead intended to supplant it. A few years later the Palm Pilot would clean up because it integrated with the desktop so successfully. Similarly, one of the the key selling points of the iPod was, and continues to be, its tight integration with iTunes, an application that people really like.
Further, the author goes on to sketch a vision of how Apple could have been Microsoft through evolutionary improvement - first with backward-compatibility from the Mac to Apple II software, then the Newton as a peripheral. He points out that this would have involved Microsoft-style parlaying of dominance in one platform into dominance in another. This too is exactly what Jobs is doing, with the popularity of the iPod promoting the use of iTunes Music Store, to the point that almost 2% (!) of legally sold music in the US is sold through iTunes Music Store.
I wonder if the parent is trying to be funny, or is this trolling for flame.
Menus are on top of the screen because it is easier to throw your mouse upwards and get the menu, rather than navigate with precision to the menu that follows each window border around.
Menubar on "top" is better than "bottom", because it is easier to move your mouse forward than to pull it back. These are the 5 precise points that the mouse pointer can get to on any screen:
1. the current point (contextual menu is useful)
2. top-left, bottom-left, top-right, bottom-right.
I do agree that contextual menu was a good thing. I think Apple was just too stubborn after having a one button mouse for years and still argues that you don't need more.
Quick launch was something that I remember using in OS 7. It was called launcher. Later, the control strip (from powerbooks) took over with same functionality.
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.
Then NeXT would have vanished in the first year or so. Making hardware was criticially important to getting mind share. NeXT and Be made computers, if only for a little while, and they got a lot of attention. GEM, VisiOn, and several other attempts at a software-only play hardly made a blip on the radar.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Macs have had contextual menus since the mid-90's. I had a four button mouse in 1994.
The reason Apple's menu is stuck to the top, is to encourage muscle memory. The menus are in the same place all the time, and they're infinitely tall. You can fling your mouse at the top of the screen and hit a menu, with much less aiming. This is covered exhaustively in every text on UI design, which Microsoft wiped their ass with.
I'm still wanting somebody to explain to me what "tweaks" they had on PCs that made the user experience so much better. Why does needing to fuck around with my computer to make it work right sound like a good idea to you? I would really like a specific example. To me, it sounds like the bogus hand-waving of somebody who didn't like Macs because they were "too pretty" or some such ridiculous bullshit.
Packaging!=design. That's why Apple's products are superior to Microsoft's...always have, always will be.
Note that (physical) packaging can be well designed as well...and Apple does a hell of a job with that. But that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
What a load of crap. I called Apple to get the iBook 800Mhz two years ago in the basic configuration with 128 Mb RAM. The Apple sales person told me (and I quote): "128 Mb is not enough memory for this computer, it will barely be usable".
They have since upgraded memory for their bottom line computers, but they are in no way better than Dell in this area.It works like this.
Back in the early days when Macs were a serious competitor to Dos, anybody who knew anything about computers knew that Macs were better than PCs. That essentially accounted for about 5% of the population.
Another 15-20% of the population knew somebody who was willing to tell them that macs were far better than PCs.
The other 75%-80% of the population would just go look up computer consultants in the phone book. That's where the Mac fell down.
You see (and just about everyone here knows), the mac was so well designed and easy to use, that the average Mac consultant could handle about 5 times as many customers as the average PC consultant. This means, that -- even if Macs had half the market, there'd still be 5 times as many PC consultants... That meant that the vast majority of sad sacks who wanted to get a computer would end up randomly calling a DOS consultant.
Now what software do you think that a DOS consultant is gonna suggest to a know-nothing would-be customer???
Thus began Apple's death spiral.
para-Quote from a friend of mine (circa 1995).:
(sigh....)Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
You were doing so well until the last couple of paragraphs.
.. doesnt look like a phase out to me. Nor the new versions of MSN Explorer and Messenger, or Windows Media Player for Mac, or the Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac, or the upcoming Virtual PC 7 for Mac. Yea, not going away quite yet ...
... 3-5 percent of the market perhaps, but definitely quite a bit more powerful than that in terms of effect and innovation.
Microsoft WAS willing to write for Copland - but it was cancelled because it was way over budget and behind schedule. The thing just wasnt going to make it out the door. So Apple bought NeXT to get their OS. That was more than six months before the famous MS investment. What Microsoft did NOT want to do (along with Adobe) was create "cocoa" versions of all of their apps - thus the modern OS X came from Rhapsody in about 1998 (shipped much later obviously).
As far as Microsoft support for Mac apps goes - besides IE I just dont see it. Office 2004 is a nice update to Office v. X IMHO
Office is really the key app there - and dumping that app would be very bad for MS. Office is their cash cow, so why give Apple and all the Mac users of the world a great reason to push OpenOffice? Do you think Apple getting behind OOo (perhaps file format compatibility in their new office suite - making the only viable cross platform option the OASIS format) would be good for Microsoft? Probably not
And let's review, kiddos: has Microsoft "gotten" this extraordinarily simple idea -- the central insight behind the 1984 Mac OS release?
Does the standard Windows API include dialogs that handily address 99.7 percent of all the situations you need in something like, oh, a Word processor? Or are your applications littered with shoddily-written, badly-contructed dialogs that force the user to wade through double negatives and ambiguous choices in order to do things like save a .csv file from Excel? How consistent are the menu options you get?
This isn't just a matter of Apple having the control to make its OS for a limited range of systems. That Excel example is real: the choices you get when saving to any format other than Excel are ridiculously muddled, and have been for several generations of the program. In Word, the outline features have always been at war with the style features -- and we never, never have any sort of consistency across the basic Office products in how they do stuff. This is in Microsoft's flagship products.
Do a mental tally of how many developers you think truly understand and accept the importance of consistent API. They're impatient with it, by and large. To wit: Linux. Apple really does understand this, and seemingly very few other companies do. Heck, big brand software makers bring in scads of money just changing their interface and releasing new whole-number releases. (We know where you live, Adobe.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Suppose, just for a moment that Microsoft, not Apple, is the odd company. We all like to think that phenomenal success is our American Birthright. But how common, in business, is it truly? I'm not given to believing in "natural monopolies" so I'm less forgiving of MicroSoft that the Ashcroft Justice Dept.
Building a business, and doing it on your terms, is a crushingly hard thing to do. Apple has done this.
Microsoft has not so much built a business as slashed their way through the competition and many laws: being a monopoly -that is to say, flouting capitalism, the free market and the legal system- is a relatively easy thing to do if you are greedy, rapacious and possess little scruples.
So the question isn't "What rational decisions should Apple have made to be like MicroSoft?" That just gives MicroSoft a pass on their criminal behaviour (crimes proven in a court of law and never disputed) because it assumes that MicroSoft did not commit crimes and deal underhandedly to get where it is today.
For Apple to be as successful (sic) as MicroSoft they would have had to fight as dirty and be as ruthless as MicroSoft. They would have had to commit the same crimes.
While MicroSoft was busy perfecting corporate weapons and tactics, Apple was busy perfecting engineering. Apple deserves to be successful on those terms. They are.
Just do what you do best
Arnold "Red" Auerbach.
And if games is what you're into, buy a box that plugs into your TV and get on with it.
But I don't care for console games and consoles. The resolution of my television is considerably poor compared to the computer and I can't get mods as easily for the games as I can on the computer.
I'm not wasting thousands of dollars of computer hardware on games when it could be doing something productive and earning money instead.
And I have the ability to live a life that involves both work and leisure, and though the majority of the work is done on the computer some leisure is as well. Why would I waste money buying console games when the equivalent (or better) title is available for my computer at often half the price? I've already spent thousands of dollars on computer hardware to use for my print, web, marketing, communications, video, etc. work and guess what, as a bonus it runs games that are cheaper than their console counterparts and I save money as a result. Plus I don't have to spend more money to buy a console.
To each their own, but to imply that you can't work and play is quite insulting not to mention the argument is tired and unoriginal. And oh yeah, a copout. Nice effort.
Apple never saw the Mac OS as "job done". Rather the opposite is what killed them - they didn't think the old codebase could be used at all, and spent billions and years on Copland. Copland went nowhere, and in the meantime Windows 95 hit the scene.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
While in theory you're correct that market cap is not a "hard" number as say revenue or earnings, it does represent the market's current valuation of a company's assets and future prospects. And it does have substantial bearing on what price will be paid for a company - acquisitions don't necessarily take place at a stock's exact value, but are usually within 20% of the value at the time of any announced transaction.
Also, if you had taken the time to actually look at the sales and profitability of Cisco and Apple, you would see that Cisco typically earns about 20-25 times what Apple does in an average quarter (over the last year or two). Revenue for Cisco is not that much higher - only 2-3x, but it is a vastly more profitable company than Apple and hence more valuable to investors.
So many trolls, in just one message.
/bin, /System, etc). Or spyware - how many million places can it hide on Windows (look at AutoRuns for an example)? On OS X, there are precious few ways for software to autorun. Either it's a StartupItem (at /Library/StartupItems, which requires admin priveleges), or it's in your Login Items.
Of course a virus or worm can be written for the Mac - I never claimed it couldn't. However, there haven't been any, while we have hugely destructive (or at least time and bandwidth wasting) ones for Windows. This isn't just because of the software monoculture and a larger target audience - it's technically much more of a challenge to write a virus or worm for OS X.
Worms can't effectively spread on OS X - there are no default services running for them to attack. Viruses are hampered on OS X due to the permissions in place. If you're not an admin, you can attack a user's home folder - whoopie. If you're an admin there's a lot more, but you still can't touch any of the core OS (/etc,
As for troubleshooting, RegEdit and TweakUI are my friends, make no doubt about it. However, I feel very safe in saying it's easier to get a grasp on all of the various UNIX fundamentals and OS X fundamentals than on the registry. The registry is the ultimate maze of settings that have next to no protection from any random program messing with them.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I feel almost silly pointing this out a day late, but...
There was a NeXTSTEP for Intel. At some point NeXT decided they couldn't make it as a hardware company, sold off their plants, canned their hardware design folks, and ported everything to the PC. It worked really, really well, except for the sales part.
You could even buy it pre-installed on some ( Compaq?? ) PC-maker's boxen back in the day ( like, 1993?? ), before M$ exclusive licensing deals helped kill it off.
Seriously. Where the hell where you? Why didn't you buy it? It was freekin' great. Everyone was too busy talking about this "awesome" WindowsNT thing, so I didn't get to start programming Objective-C again for another 10 years...
If y'all are wondering why Jobs is so hesitant to push out Yellow Box ( aka "OS X for Intel" ), you might look into the history of NeXTSTEP for Intel to learn why.
As for education OS, my university's computer music program was where I first saw NeXT machines, but I guess the very fact that they had a computer music program points out that it wasn't your typical fund-starved school, perhaps...