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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
In Q2 2004 Apple's market share was at 3.7%, while in Q2 2003 Apple was at 3.8%.
Apple's shipments, in fact, increased from 452K boxes to 495K, but the market grew at a rate of 10.9%, while Apple grew at the rate 9.3%, so officially they lost market share.
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.
So it'll be a while.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
"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.
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The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
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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.
I agree, even asinine. But you evidently did the usual Apple slam of only comparing against their top end desktop. OK, let's go to the Apple store and see what I can get. The cheapest desktop is $1049 CAD ($799 in America, btw). That is a lot less asinine, or even assinine.
What's that? You only count the high-end stuff worthy of your attention? OK, fine, but then do the same when comparing a Dell. If you compare low-end PC to high-end Apple, you'll end up looking assinine and asinine.
The original Macintosh was a work of art. Both the hardware and firmware/software were optimized as well as possible. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
BYTE Macintosh Preview.
BYTE Macintosh Team Interview.
I have a collection of most 68000 compact macs and play with them every now and then, they're quite fascinating little machines. I can feel the amount of bloat between every release. System 1.0 boots in 2-3 seconds from a floppy! (System 7 takes about a minute from a hard disk on the same hardware). Some of the difference is of course due to the few features but mostly it's the difference between compiled C and hand-tuned ASM.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" -Steve Jobs
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.
...and that's all there is to it.
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.
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.
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For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
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.
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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.
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.)
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