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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."
An interesting article to start off with, but then it started to make sweeping statements about how unchangable the hardware market is. The author assumes that hardware at the time was set in stone, but the fact is that if Apple could build Macs, then larger companies who sublicensed the OS certainly could too.
As he meanders past this rather bizarre statement, I began to lose interest in its increasingly meaningless prose, ending with a stunningly profound (note my sarcasm):
"There is only room for one PC operating systems monopoly".
Not frontpage material IMHO.
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Funny you say that... that's exactly the reason I chose the Amiga over the PC, back in the day.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
He makes the argument that because Apple was 10 years ahead they couldn't have licensed their stuff and taken the places of MS. I make the argument that because they were 10 years ahead they were in the prime position to take the lead. When Apple/Mac decided not to license their hardware they chose to be the sole supplier of Apple/Mac hardware thereby reducing options and diversity compared to the PC platform. It ensured hardware compatibility because only Apple and a selectively chosen minority of hardware vendors could make add-on parts. It also bound their hands because their hardware could not be specialized for specific applications using off the shelf parts. The lack of competition also made sure that Apple wouldn't be more than a niche market. The PC market was ripe with competing parts and by extension led to many incompatibility issues. With the advent of much more stable OS's and PCI-x, I see this being a non-issue shortly.
My biggest problem with the article is that the author has a hard time telling the difference between hardware and software. The more than decade lack of an adequate GUI OS for x86 can't be blamed on the platform but the software developer (MS), but Apple is its own hardware/software vendor. That's why a direct comparison can not be reasonably made, although it is my opinion that since Apple was ahead in the early days if they had left the hardware open (like IBM did the x86) Apple would have a much greater share of today's market.
One thing that most people forget is that Windows didn't start as a monopoly, and probably wouldn't have gotten there on its own (lack of) merit. Microsoft's monopoly is built on Word, not Windows.
In the DOS days, Microsoft had tremendous mindshare, but they still faced real competition. IBM had PC-DOS (which may have just been licensed MS-DOS... it's been too many years and I'm not sure anymore.) And Digital Research had DR-DOS. Now, neither of these were BIG competitors, but the barrier to entry in the DOS market wasn't that high.
There came a time when the world was ready to start transitioning to GUIs. The Mac had shown it was possible, and PC hardware eventually got fast enough to do something similar. Microsoft had their Windows product, but its early incarnations were absolutely terrible and nobody bought them. IBM partnered with Microsoft on OS/2, and for a long time, it looked very much like that was the way the world was headed. The expectation in all the magazines at the time was that OS/2 was everyone's future. (and, for the record, it was an excellent operating system, one which I liked very much.... with some of the worst documentation and error/help messages ever done. IBM was used to mainframes, not Joe Computer User. No big surprise that it failed, in retrospect.)
When Windows 3.0 came out, it started selling reasonably well. But what REALLY made it take off... was Word.
Word for DOS was a good product, but was always an also-ran next to WordPerfect. WP was arcane and difficult, but it was tremendously powerful. Word for DOS was easy, but not very powerful, and wasn't taken seriously by very many.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done. When people saw how easy it was to, for instance, lay out a table -- they switched from WP 5.1 for DOS in droves. EVERYONE wanted Word: it was THE program. This was the 'killer app' that drove Windows to monopoly status. For a long time, the only real competitor on the Windows platform was Ami Pro, which was a neat program, but more of a page-layout tool than a true word processor. Word kicked its butt for most tasks. WordPerfect took years to come out with a really good Windows version, and by the time it arrived, the market had shifted and they were dead.
THIS is the key to Microsoft's dominance... a single program that was so good, everyone had to have it. They sold mountains of copies, tens of millions (into a much smaller market). And then they really started using the dirty tricks they learned in the DOS days to lock their competitors out. They dropped OS/2 like a hot potato, and made damn sure that it was never preloaded on ANYTHING.
All those billions really come down to two things: a single, insanely great program, and absolute ruthlessness. It is very unlikely that Apple could have survived that environment. Had they come out with MacOS for Intel, then Microsoft would have flexed their TRUE monopoly, that of Word... and stopped development for MacOS. Without Word, MacOS was dead. And Apple has certainly shit on their users many times, but they have very rarely been genuinely ruthless toward their competitors. It's not in their nature; they're trying to excel. Microsoft wants everyone else dead and buried.
I do think that Apple should have licensed their software onto other manufacturer's machines. Power Computing moved the Mac faster than it has moved before or since. But they had NO chance at becoming the new Microsoft without Word... and a sharp knife for their competitors' backs.
I think the point of the article is with respect to the PC. Cisco is successful in the niche market that is networking hardware. I suspect it's more difficult to program on Cisco's proprietary hardware, than say, something using x86 architecture.
Not to mention, I don't see anyone running a PC running IOS, which is what the "business analysts" claimed Apple should have done with Mac OS.
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.
Don't forget Daystar. The first (and to my knowledge only) company to make a 4-Way SMP Mac OS machine.
Problem is that Apple didn't start licensing the machines until after they had lost the battle for supremecy. Had Apple licensed 10 years earlier they may have had better results. By the mid-1990s people had chosen their sides. The availability of clones meant that people who were unwilling to pay top dollar for Apple branded upgrades had the choice of buying a clone instead of going over to a Win-PC. They didn't bring many new users over from the windows world because it was too late.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I think the problem is that Apple was assuming that the things that *had* ruled the market before 1984 would *continue* to rule the market.
///, the Lisa, and eventually the Mac. Because conventional wisdom said that the Apple II line would be gone anyway and that people wouldn't value long-term compatability.
Until the PC came along, microcomputers did not have really compatable upgrades. Sure, CP/M stuck around for a while, but after they ran out of steam in the 8080/Z-80 systems, everybody migrated elsewhere.
Same thing happened with mainframes. There was all kinds of crazy incompatable mainframes, and *then* IBM made the System 360 series and suddenly stability hit.
This is why Apple made the Apple
I think the big thing not addressed in the linked article was the possibility of creating an "open" hardware standard, like the PC. Given that Atari and Amiga both followed with their own 68k systems, and Sun and others were making workstations out of them for quite some time, it's not entirely impossible that they could have produced a compatability standard.
Not like it would have worked, mind you. It's important to remember that, were IBM to have only been in the PC business, they would have been slaughtered by how the PC became an open standard. And it also could have happened that Microsoft, Amiga, Atari, or others would release a competing operating system and deprive Apple of the OS revenues.
I think the big thing is that Apple's decision made complete sense given the situation at the time. The big players would often try to sue or otherwise prevent their plug-compatable competition from stealing their business.
And there weren't Commodore or Atari clones, either, mind you.
In a certain sense, we only think that Apple made the wrong move because of the partially-accidental semi-open PC platform. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. It is now possible to trust somebody other than IBM/Apple/Amiga/Atari/etc. for hardware, but it wasn't back then. I mean, when my parents purchased stuff for their Apple II, there was one Genuine Apple disk drive and one off-brand clone. But you had to have the Genuine Real Thing, Just In Case.
Gentoo Sucks
The problem with Apple licensing wasn't that the hardware was incompatible (though it was - the Mac back then had a huge ROM, 1MB or so, and most screens were CGA).
The problem was that PC users were dicks. Let me rephrase that - "mice are for wimps." The culture of business IT back then was "macho at all cost."
At the time, there was no client-server, no distributed systems. Computer people were basically mainframe guys. And what self-respecting mainframe guy back in the day wanted a GUI? Easy-to-use software? Interactive terminals?
Every computer that was easy-to-use was one more nail in the mainframe coffin, and a knife in the heart of batch job bozos. Would they actually buy something that made them obsolete?
Nope!
PCs were non-threatening things that they could turn into dumb terminals (can anyone say TN3270?).
Give an IT guy back then a Mac, and he'd freak out. It was only until Windows 95 that GUIs became "acceptable" to corporate users. Win 31 worked, and WfW sort of worked, but it was Win95 that brought the GUI to IT.
Before then, IT people would rather have eaten their left testicle than buy a GUI-based computer, much less a Mac. Let's get real.
If Apple had licensed the Mac, they would have tanked, pure and simple...much like the way Power Computing almost destroyed Apple back in the day.
It's amazing that people that cry "licensing" don't remember the times. It was 15-20 years ago, but still, you'd think that some of them would have exited puberty by then.
What's hard is that Apple doesn't really have a competitor in the Macintosh market. In the Windows world, Dell competes against HP who competes against Gateway who competes against Joe Schmoe Computers etc. They all try to make a better product for a cheaper price. Competition inspires innovation (well, Apple can still innovate pretty well).
Then thing in the Apple universe, if you want to buy a computer that can run the Mac OS, you have to buy it from Apple. They can release whatever type of computers they want, for any price they want, and that's what we have to live with if we want to run the Mac OS.
Would allowing clones out there for the rest of the Mac community have helped? Maybe in the long run. The more computers out there built for the Mac OS, the more PowerPC chips being made, the more money for Mot (now IBM), more incentive to invest in chip design and research, and so forth.
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.
Oh well, who knows how things would've turned out. I say instead of pushing for licensing and clones, push to have the latest games released simultaneously for Mac and Windows. Most of the people I know buy Windows so they can play games when they're hot. They could care less which platform they do email, web browsing, word processing on. They just want to make sure they can play all the games out there.
There's never enough when you have too little
Answer: It's not.
Apple's real problems started after the ouster of Steve Jobs by his hand-picked protege, former Pepsi executive, John Scully, in 1985. What followed was a decade of mismarketing, management reorganizations, engineering chaos and declining market-share. It was Scully and Spindler that refused to license Mac OS (and that squandered years of profits on aimless persuit of countless technological fantasies). It took a half-dozen reorganizations, three changes of top management, and the loss of more than half of Apple's market before the morons that hijacked the company were finally willing to try licensing. By then it was far too late: Apple no longer had the market position or resources to survive the transition.
Maybe licensing would have been a success in the late eighties or the very early ninties, but, by 1995, it was too little too late. Could licensing work now with Mac OS X? Probably not: Apple still doesn't have the resources to survive such a transition and the advantages of Mac OS X over competing products (including Windows and Linux) is not great enough to ensure success.
On top of this, Steve Jobs has some experience with producing an OS for the IBM-compatible market that suggests support costs would likely bankrupt the company (they barely have the resources to support OS X on just the recent Mac models): in the mid-ninties NeXT ported NeXTSTEP to x86 and sold it for general consumption. The Achilies heel of the strategy was that NeXT could not possibly support the full range of hardware in the IBM-compatible market. Essentially the same barrier stunted the early growth of Windows NT and actually killed IBM's OS/2. Even Microsoft can't muster the required resources: they rely on market position to persuade other manufacturers to do the development and maintenance for free. The problem is, once the third-party manufacturers have invested in developing Window's drivers, they don't have the resources or will to develop much of anything else. It's a classic network effect: once MS had the largest piece of the market (even without having a majority) all the manufacturers jumped on the MS bandwagon.
Overcoming the network effect at this late date is nearly impossible: you would need nearly unlimited resources, and it would still be an uphill battle (as the Linux/FOSS community, which happens to have such resources, is finding out). Apple hasn't got anything close to adequate resources for that fight and they know it. Instead they have cut their liabilities and are choosing their fights very carefully. It may not be a plan for sure fire success, but it's the best plan given the circumstances.
I think you're thinking of Windows XP
Apple's UI has always been done in-house. Their HI guidelines are probably the most comprehensive ever published outside of academia.
Frog did once design hardware for Apple...they designed most of the beige "Pizza box" style Apple machines in the late '80s/early '90s (before the iMac.) Those machines looked nothing like today's curvy/shiny/artsy Macs; they look like any other PCs. So far as I can tell, thier work for Apple ended with Steve Jobs and the iMac.
Me too.. and, while we're at it, I'll nitpick a chunk of the otherwise-excellent article at DF:
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.
The Amiga had all this, along with much better colour support, far superior sound hardware, some rudimentary hardware acceleration for graphics, and pre-emptive multitasking.
What they didn't have, was a parent company with any scruples, so out it went... but the Amiga 1000 smoked the Macintosh back in the day.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Having been an employee at NeXT and Apple between the years 1996 and 1998 I can testify that not only was the 1999 modest but in fact, in 1997 Apple had only 3 months worth of working capital on which to run the company. One of the most necessary and drastic actions Steve took was to revoke the Sabbatical Program. Nearly 1/3rd of the entire staff had earned up to 12 weeks of paid vacation. Not to mention the merging of 20 some odd separate marketing departments into the vaunted "Think Different" single marketing department. Or the over 500 staffed IT Department costing the company over $45 Million annually to run with over 180 in-house applications that had yet to be sold to consumers? Steve gutted that group and what useful software has and continues to be adapted to current and hopefully future software from Apple. We all found the gluttony within Apple to be disgusting (meanwhile during the merger Apple Engineers were pissed with our free variety of beverages perks and how upbeat and enjoyable the NeXT headquarters work environments actual were). My personal favorite change was when Steve gutted the outside Latte/Espresso vendor from within Apple proper along with the Cafe staff. It sent a storm of posts on the internal web anonymous bitch section (employee feedback section) until the day arrived when Steve was praised because he introduced everyone to the newly revamped Cafe with free Coffee/Lattes for Staff. It just reminds me how speculation can sure create wild stories, and how experiencing it in actuality helps calm those storms of BS.
We only had 12 weeks in which to effectively redefine Apple, trim the exhorbitant costs that it was taking just to keep the company afloat, and more importantly market products to get Apple back on track. It was then early in 1998 we all were asked to head off campus to what would be the unveiling of Apple's Future--iMac.
I agree the clone licensing campaign that Steve revoked was necessary for Apple to survive. Steve learned well with all the grandiose ideals at NeXT and was not about to make the same mistakes back at Apple, now that he had one last chance.
How many people realize that a stroll around Steve's neighborhood with an Executive of Microsoft turned into the $150 Million non-voting shares investment from Microsoft back into Apple and how when that was revealed in Boston that most folks hadn't a clue how important ending that feud was to Apple's future bottom line.
Sevceral times hye uses the phrase "wildly popular Apple II". One of the biggest reasons it became so was third party support. Apple did what they do best with the Apple II, and let others build on that and make their own fortunes.
One of those others was Microsoft. Besides producing several programming and software packages for the Apple II, they wrote a portion of the machine's ROM. Look inside an Apple II; the ROM chips have a Microsoft copyright.
Apple couldn't "be" Microsoft. They could have, however, maintained the sort of relationship they'd had, and used Microsoft to continue support and further development of their line. Unfortunately Jobs saw fit to take yet another opportunity to try to prove Woz wrong. Now, Apple has a small fraction of the market share they did before Jobs did so.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.
;-)
Good idea! Too bad Jobs already thought of it. Anyone who's programmed for Mac OS X should instantly recognize all the NeXT APIs from back in those days. Nearly every API is *exactly* the same, right down to the byte length of the parameters. The only thing that's changed, is that the look of the widgets is far less "Unixy" than NeXT every was.
NeXT OS is not dead. It has merely evolved into a higher plain of existance.
P.S. For laughs, try typing "man open" in the Terminal application. The man page should give you some nice background on how the command originated in NeXT OS.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share?
Because that wasn't (and isn't) where they want to compete. They are aimed at the professional high-end desktop market. They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't. They're pretty much like Sun, only they get their chips from moto and ibm, and obviously the two companies haven't put their research money in exactly the same places.
Was it the right choice for Apple? Was it right for Sun? Did they screw up? It could be fun to conjecture, but it's really just water under the bridge.
All we can do is look back and thank God they didn't turn out as Microsoft. Whether it was due to not licensing or not catering to the low-end market or something else it just doesn't matter.
Moof.
If it was so critical, how come after the merge, NeXT employees got sabbaticals based upon their time served at NeXT (which didn't have a sabbatical program)? If sabbaticals were crippling, why did Steve's buds from his failed company get them?
And the number of people who had earned the sabbaticals was stated in the comm meeting as 1/5th. I know, I was there. Yes, 1/5th, as in you get a sabbatical every 5 years. This seemed every bit as Dilbert's "40% of sick days are taken on Mondays or Fridays" joke statement.
As to gutting the Coffee bar, I was good friends with the owner of the coffee bar. He had taken it and made something of it. Steve decided he had to take it away and give it to one of his cronies. This was months after he changed the cafeteria, which was pretty much a good thing, except for losing Jaime at the grill.
I have no idea what your comment about 180 in-house applications is. We have almost as many in-house applications now. And those in-house applications were never supposed to be sold to customers in the first place, so to say they were languishing is ridiculous. Finally, if you think we have fewer than 500 IT people at Apple now, you really need to get a better count. Have you been upstairs in Valley Green 6? How about the music store folks? That department is all IT.
I've was at Apple in 1991, 1992-1993, and 1995 to present. And the number one thing that burns my behind is the NeXT wingnuts coming in and acting like they saved Apple. NeXT didn't get where it was by knowing how to do business. And the engineering is horrid. No one at NeXT had any idea about release to release compatibility. Have a new OS coming? Just call up your 12 devleopers and get them to release new versions.
The X folks in their wisdom threw out everything that Apple had developed to make the machine easier to use. Amazing how with Rendezvous now you can just open a browser and find your printer! Heavens! Perhaps with future enhancements you'll be able to find them on other subnets! The Mac could do this in 1986, but the NeXTies threw it away. Then they can rediscover it later and look like geniuses.
How about the ability to share a folder on your hard drive over the network? Mac OS 7-9 could do it. Windows can do it. Mac OS X still can't do it. You can only share a certain folder in your home directory.
It's all stupid. Apple wouldn't have survived the idiocy of the NeXT OS crew if it weren't for the improvements in the hardware org that were made at the same time. Killing the 20 machines Apple made and releasing good ones using commong chipsets really saved the company, not MACH.