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."

Comments

Apple being Microsoft?

[dcstimm]

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.

Re:Apple being Microsoft?

[kubrick]

I think what we found out when Apple did allow clones was that people who wanted to run the Mac didn't have to have the coolest looking machines with the liquid cooling, flip open doors (okay neither of those existed back then, but...). They just wanted something that was affordable. That's something the clone makers could do. Make something for cheaper and, in the case of Power Computing, cheaper. Apple couldn't keep up and they started to lose market share to the Mac clones (heck, I bought several clones during that time period). Heh, instead of competing with them, they shut down the cloning business.

I think Apple was actually upset that the clones were competing on the basis of being faster & cheaper. Power, for example, were shipping machines with recently announced PPCs faster than Apple could manage to, and were thus eating into Apple's high-end sales, rather than just competing at the low end, where Apple wouldn't have minded losing some market share in order to build the total user base for the OS. Much more of a hit to profits that way.

Re:Apple being Microsoft?

[badasscat]

In the Windows world, none of these competitors MAKE anything. They cobble together parts. Dell is not designing anything but the case. Apple is designing the mainboard.

And so is Dell, unfortunately for many users.

Apple doesn't build their own hardware any more than PC makers do. Apple is not building their own DVD-ROM or hard drives, they're buying them from companies like Toshiba and Maxtor/Seagate/whoever. They buy their PowerPC chips from Motorola and IBM. They buy their graphics cards from ATI and NVidia. I don't know whose memory they're using but it ain't Apple's own, I'll tell you that.

All Apple does is design their motherboards and cases, just like PC makers. In fact the architecture itself these days is basically the same with the exception of the CPU.

The PC world competes solely on mindshare.

So what you're saying is there's no difference between PC's other than the case? That a Dell Dimension is the same as my scratch-built machine is the same as a Falcon Northwest is the same as a Sony Vaio? I don't think anybody could seriously argue that. It's like saying all cars are exactly the same just because they all burn the same kind of gas. Only their exterior shells are different.

PC makers do compete in a lot of different areas, and many PC makers have totally different target markets. So you'll get PC's all up and down the pricing spectrum, at varying levels of true quality (build, materials, etc.) and with varying levels of features, performance, and yes, aesthetics. You can even significantly deviate from "standard" PC architecture, with RAID arrays, dual graphics cards, 64-bit AMD processors, etc. and you can still claim to own a "PC" (in the colloquial parlance of our times, that is - Macs are technically PC's too, of course).

With a Mac, you're stuck with the configurations Apple wants to give you - they'd be like a single PC maker in a sea of hundreds on the other side of the fence. Now, obviously this is working for them in some ways, as they're generally profitable of late, though mostly due to iPod. But I'm not sure that I buy this idea that they'd be less profitable if they'd continued licensing their OS. I understand the whole argument about diluting the brand name, yadda yadda yadda, so what? There's a tendency for people to believe that because of the way things turned out in the world, that that's the only way they could have turned out, and I don't believe it.

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.

The reason I chose the PC over Apple...

[MrRTFM]

.. was Price mainly. That and the availability of lots of software [games] :)

Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple...

[TedTschopp]

And the reason the price was cheaper was that the PC has a more open architecture, and people/companies were able to build cheaper, and yet even more cheaper accessories. (sound cards, Video Cards, etc). This made the market larger and larger. Which in turn made people want to develop for it. All this generated a nice feedback loop which continued to drive each other.

1. Open Market
2. Cheaper to Develop
3. Cheaper computers
4. More Customers
5. More Developers (Games)
6. Goto 2

Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple...

[Moofie]

How many Microsoft updates have measurably improved the day-to-day performance of your computer?

Want to play games? Buy a PC. Want to do work with your computer, instead of working on your computer? Buy a Mac.

I have both. Perfect solution.

Oh yeah, and Marathon kicked the holy hell out of Doom and Doom II (and I happened to like it better than Quake, although Quake had a great engine). Too bad Bungie is now in the belly of the beast...they used to be a great game publisher.

Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple...

[nuggetman]

If opening the case voided your warranty, I seriously doubt Apple would put a fucking hinged door on the side of the case.

I can get a serial ATA hard drive from CompUSA. Where the fuck did you come up with sending it back to Apple?

And if you're going to screw up the mobo and CPU by disconnecting and reconnecting a hard drive, maybe you should take up a new hobby other than computers. Like sitting in the corner and drooling.

Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple

[skrysakj]

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)

Re:Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple

[Geoff-with-a-G]

I would question why any company would want to be Microsoft.

In this case, the obvious answer is the correct one: many, many companies would love to be like Microsoft, because Microsoft makes a fuckton of money.

You can talk about soul-searching and whether or not money is really all that fulfilling, but you asked why a company would want to be like Microsoft, not why a worker or a CEO would want their company to be like Microsoft. Publicly-traded companies want (as far as any non-living, non-sentient entity can be said to want) only one thing: increase shareholder value. That's not cynicism, that's the law. If you, as a company, decide to take an idealistic stance and disregard the priority of making lots of money, you can actually be sued. And with good reason.

Imagine if your checking account was suddenly cut in half, because the bank decided to be idealistic. Would you cheer them on and say "Good for you! Way to be! I didn't really need that money anyway!" That's what you're asking corporations to do. That publicly traded stock represents other people's money. People who don't work for Microsoft buy their stock, maybe as part of an investment portfolio, say for their retirement. Just like your checking account vanishing, those are real people who would be hurt if Microsoft suddenly said "fuck profit!"

Now, if you really meant "Why would an individual want to work for a company like Microsoft, instead of a company like Apple?" I suggest you get to know some moderately sucessful Microsoft employees. Despite the slashdot view, people who work at Microsoft don't approach it with the attitude of "Well, I'll be a mindless corporate automaton, but at least I'll make some good bucks." Many people at Microsoft, especially the top officers, genuinely believe that they're idealistic, and that they're changing the world for the better, doing revolutionary things. Now you can question the validity of that viewpoint, but we can question the validity of Steve Jobs' viewpoints as well. My point is that the contrrast you try to paint between the companies, idealistic vs. pragmatic, while an illustrative look at their business plans, doesn't really reflect the spirit of the company and the people who work there. Both of them are pretty idealistic, and I think that was one of their strengths.

Re:Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple

[Geoff-with-a-G]

After a court declares them to be an illegal monopoloy

They weren't declared to be "an illegal monopoly". They were declared to be a monopoly, (which isn't illegal, there's tons of legal monopolies) and some specific actions of theirs were declared to be illegal (bundling IE with Windows and pressuring OEMs not to pre-install Netscape). You can call that nitpicking, but it's the difference between "You're stupid" and "That thing you just did is stupid." The courts haven't declared Microsoft to be bad. They declared some of Microsoft's actions to be bad. By blurring that line, you do yourself a disservice. Do you think those illegal policies were inacted by some mid-level manager, or by Bill Gates himself? If the former, why blame the whole company for it? If the latter, will you stop thinking Microsoft is immoral when Gates retires or dies and hands the reigns over to someone else? You've developed a moral opposition to an amoral (not immoral) entity.

There are some of us who will not invest in, work for, or buy from criminal enterprises.

You keep telling yourself that. Just about every company valued over a billion, hell, over a couple million, has done something criminal. Good luck not trading with any of them at all. Plus, our entire country was founded on a "criminal enterprise". We refused to pay taxes, and rebelled against our government, killing lots of its law enforcement and military officers. I bet if you look at all the laws of this country right now, you probably disagree with several of them, and have violated several of them (software copyright? speeding? narcotics? oral sex?).

Look, if you hate Microsoft for emotional reasons, fine. You're not alone. Half of fucking slashdot probably agrees with you. But don't try to paint it as black-and-white, Microsoft is criminal and we're not. Grow up.

Re:Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple

[FunWithHeadlines]

Since there are legal monopolies and illegal monopolies, I'm not sure your statements are accurate. That is to say there are some monopolies that exist in such a way as to be declared to be in an illegal situation. That was Microsoft.

Do I hate Microsoft? Um, well, yeah, but not for emotional reasons. I read the Findings of Fact from the Jackson court, the same findings that were upheld in the appeals court. After reading all 150 pages, I realized I despised Microsoft's odd obsession with not being satisfied with 90%-percent of the market but wanting those last few percentages too. And they were willing to bully their partners, threaten them, lie to the public, and basically act in truly sociopathic ways. Yes, all billion-dollar companies engage in some shady deals along the way, but with Microsoft it was the culture.

And yes, I am not a criminal, and I don't engage in such behaviors. Microsoft is criminal, and I'm not.

Modestly profitable?

[crimson_alligator]

"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.

Re:As the article says

[RatBastard]

A secure and stable OS (Because when you don't have a nearly infinite amount of con figurations, it's pretty easy to be secure and stable)

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!

Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl

[ruiner13]

"...is because the corporate market was and is resistant to buying proprietary hardware..."

Yeah, that's why that cisco company never took off.

Oddly enough...

[_Quinn]

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

The number of errors is huge

[LWATCDR]

"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.

I agree...

[Anita Coney]

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.

Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl

[jeffehobbs]

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

Re:Anon. Karma Whore

[mantera]

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.

Apple didn't go for the high-volume market

[iabervon]

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.

Here's How I Remember It

[Javagator]

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.

Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl

[Geoff-with-a-G]

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.

Re:Anon. Karma Whore

[Nogami_Saeko]

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.

Re:What a load of BS...

[Izago909]

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.

Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl

[Pieroxy]

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.

Huh?

[Feanturi]

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?

I could quibble with many points in the article...

[huchida]

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.

Re:significant error with video hardware

[Thu25245]

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.

Re:Personal connections?

[Zeinfeld]

You seem to forget that at the time the PC came out there was no Mac, no Lisa. IBM did not go to see Microsoft for the O/S, they wanted Microsoft BASIC which Microsoft supplied to both Apple and Commodore. IBM expected to buy the O/S from Digital Research but Gary was out wind surfing.

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.

Apple's are price competitive with Dell's

[micron]

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.

What is in Apple's back pocket....?

[micron]

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.

Re:What is in Apple's back pocket....?

[angrykeyboarder]

" There is nothing you mentioned here that I can't get in the Linux world for FREE."

I guess you missed the part where he mentioned Microsoft Office. Like it or not, it's still the best out there. OpenOffice.org is good and is the best out there in the Open Source world. But it's still not as good as Microsoft Office.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of Linux. But it still has a way to go in the user-friendly department before it can catch on with people who aren't geeks (as I am).

Jobs Learned How to Parlay

[ewagner]

It looks like no one's mentioned this so far, but the remarkable message of the story isn't what Apple's done in the past. More importantly, it's about Apple's future now that Steve Jobs knows how to leverage a platform with the iPod+iTunes combination.

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.

Re:Anon. Karma Whore

[johnnliu]

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.

Re:Anon. Karma Whore

[Moofie]

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.

Not so...

[Cpt_Corelli]

The difference is that Apple sells their systems with base models that are usable configurations.

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.

The Mac's *REAL* Problem: It Worked Too Well.

[Stephen Samuel]

That may sound like a joke but I'm dead serious.

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).:

Given that most people who own computers own PCs why does everybody I ask who knows about computers tell me "Get a Mac" without even thinking??

(sigh....)

Re:Much of that is wrong

[runenfool]

You were doing so well until the last couple of paragraphs.

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 .. 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 ...

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 ... 3-5 percent of the market perhaps, but definitely quite a bit more powerful than that in terms of effect and innovation.

It's called an API, folks

[ianscot]

Apple makes things very similar between different programs, and that makes it easy to use different programs. When I launch a program I've never seen, I already know the exact location of the application's preferences, and I have a good idea of the location of application's menus.

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.)