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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."
The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share
Saturday, 7 Aug 2004
Toss it back and forth long enough and a nugget of conventional wisdom eventually comes to be treated as fact. With regard to Apple and the Macintosh, the prime example is the idea that Apple made a catastrophic error in the 1980s by not licensing the Macintosh.
This idea has been repeated so often by so many sources that today, most people, even Mac users, simply take it at face value: If only Apple had licensed the Macintosh, they could have been Microsoft.
But this is not a fact. It's conjecture, and barring a time machine, it can never be proven. But even if you could go back to 1984 and show Apple's then-executives a glimpse of the future and the Mac's eventual market share -- merely "licensing" the Mac very likely would not have made a difference. In fact, in an alternate universe where Apple had licensed the Macintosh or Mac OS in the mid-80s, things could have ended up worse for Apple, as in bankrupt-and-out-of-business worse.
There are a few simple reasons why nearly everyone thinks Apple could have conquered the PC industry had they licensed the Mac:
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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.
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Apple licensed neither the Mac hardware nor software.
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Microsoft licensed MS-DOS, and later Windows, to any IBM-compatible PC manufacturer who was willing to pay for a license.
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At a basic conceptual level, from a user's perspective, Windows works pretty much like the Mac OS.
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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.
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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.
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Microsoft became the most fabulously profitable and successful corporation in the history of the world. Over 90 percent of the computers in the world run some version of Windows.
Given these facts, it's not hard to see how the conventional wisdom came to be. Apple had a 5-10 year lead in terms of UI design; if only they'd licensed the Mac OS in the 80s...
But we need to stop right here, because if we want to be realistic, if we want to be even vaguely rigorous while playing this particular game of "What If?", then we need to clarify exactly what Apple could have licensed in the mid-80s.
The operating system, of course, we might decide -- because that's what Microsoft did, and they made tens of billions of dollars doing so.
But except Apple couldn't just license the "Mac OS" (which wasn't called "Mac OS" until the mid-90s) in 1984, because there weren't any computers that could use it. Much of the original Mac operating system was implemented in ROM, as hardware. The Mac's designers didn't do this to tie the operating system to Apple's proprietary hardware -- they did this because it was necessary in terms of price, performance, and the meager memory and storage they had available. Each 400 KB floppy disk had to store the System (to boot the Mac), whatever apps you wanted to run, and your data files. Every KB of the Mac Toolbox in ROM freed up another KB of space on your floppy disks.
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.
In
* It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995...
... They released a windows that didn't suck? I wasn't aware that this event had occured ;-)
The idea of point and click icons that have made Microsoft Windows such a successfully selling OS to the masses originally came from MacOS. No questions about it.
I couldn't think of a sig.
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More FUD from Apple users? On Slashdot?
Wow, who would've thought?