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Redmond Yawning at Apple-Google Alliance?
Debra D'Agostino writes "Despite the media hype around Google CEO Eric Schmidt's appointment to Apple's board, CIO Insight Executive Editor Dan Briody says it's not that big a story. 'Apple and Google are already plenty tight,' he says. Arthur Levinson, CEO of Genentech, has been on both boards for years. And Al Gore and Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell are both Apple board members and advisors to Google. 'While it's fun to speculate about what an Apple-Google alliance could produce (GoogleMacs? MacGoogle? GoogleTunes?) this move is far from an alliance,' Briody writes. 'And even if it were, it wouldn't be first time that two upstart powerhouses have joined forces in an attempt to unseat Microsoft. Remember AOL-Netscape? Boy, they just steamrolled the team from Redmond, didn't they?'"
I think a lot of people bought and listened to MS because they were the biggest and seemed to be leading the way, so you bought their stuff and did things their way because that was the easiest... Now with two giants providing a different path, MS will start to look far weaker and people will feel that they are now entitled to make non-MS decisions.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
What he said about AOL-Netscape may be true, but AOL-Netscape was a lame-ass alliance.
Seriously, I've known Apple fanboys to be zealous to the point of failed logic, but I've never known a mac user to be outright stupid (lookin' at you, AOL).
Meanwhile, Google is ubiquitous and powerful, with a number of good web-apps that are challenging to MS's model. And the pair of them are at the (to date) height of their power with very little overlaping in the finger-to-pie categories.
If there's a plan, I hope it's a good one.
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Get linux. Use KDE. Submit bugs to the KHTML/KJS bugzilla. I guarantee you, if you do that, the next Safari will be far improved (ie: where do you think they get their rendering engine from?)
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If we're lucky, we can all see the fiery explosion that will be the downfall of M$.
Where do you guys come from with all this venom and FUD? God, complete with a $. Your type really seem to think so much alike that I'd swear every one of you are the same person. It's so ironic, it's sad.
Anyway, getting to the point: Maybe I agree or disagree but you should provide some reasoning along with a statement.
Let me try: I don't think there is an alliance, and even Google and Apple together are not going to just "crush" Microsoft. MS' sheer size, marketshare along with its diverse involments in many more markets that Google nd Apple combined coupled with its admittedly dubious business practices are going to ensure they'll be around a *long* time.
why run from Vincenzo?
The key to beating Microsoft is to unseat Windows. Having a new board member at Apple isn't going to do that.
If Apple was serious about unseating Windows then they would copy Microsoft's strategies. Microsoft can see threats coming. The Playstation was a trojan horse into the living room. MS pumped a lot of money into putting a machine into people's living rooms that would stop them from needing to buy a Playstation. This is a long term strategy.
What Apple should do is buy Sun and put those hardware engineers to work on making the worlds best game console. That console should be a server with thin clients around the house, it should serve up great games and movies to the tv, and also let you wirelessly connect a Monitor and keyboard thin client and use Googles internet office suite for working on all your work like needs. TV and music on demand would be served up through Apples iTunes store. With this strategy Apple/Google/Sun could take over the entire household computing needs. And you know it would be cool because it comes from Apple.
Of course in the meantime I'm going to end up buying Vista, Office 2007, a Nintendo Wii and think about an Xbox 360.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
I've always respected google and appreciate what they've contributed to the OSS community. To me, they are apple, but only better and without the snobbish attitude of anything Apple..
While Windows has it's devotees, you're much more likely to find die-hard Mac users than fanatical Windows users. Despite increased sales, Macintosh is still a cult / non-conforming sort of thing, so chances are better at finding 'stupid' fanatics who don't know anything besides it's not Win.
This just isn't the same as Windows fans, who *generally* either buy the cheapest (Dell) machine or need it for work. So don't say there are many / more Mac idiots, just more outspoken and obvious ones... partly -because- it is Mac and not Windows.
It's always confirmation bias!
Your predictions are appealing, but I'll play the devil's advocate: they are a little premature and discount Microsoft completely as a competitor, which is pretty short-sighted considering competing in market share (many times unfairly) is the thing Microsoft does best.
For one, applications on the desktop are much more mature than their AJAX and Java counterparts - Writely.com and Google Spreadsheets, for instance, don't even pretend to replace Microsoft Word and Excel at this moment. This will of course change, but saying that the migration of applications to the Web will end the OS war anytime soon is a stretch. Someone still has to build the platform to get to the Internet, after all. We're not looking at the end of an OS war - just a new type of OS war, one where the aim isn't to provide the best native operating system but the best bootstraps to get up to the best web platform. I doubt that Microsoft will stop competing once it becomes clear that native desktop applications are an obsolete piece of nostalgia. How about a very-thin-client version of Windows and subscription-based access to an AJAX version of Office, with all the features of the native versions? I mean Vista is coming along slowly, but make no mistake: Microsoft knows what it can afford to do, and losing its desktop operating system and application share isn't something it will suffer gladly. They'll want to enter by brute-force and compete in this new market just like every other - and while they may not dominate completely like they have in the past, they will certainly be a major player.
I don't see how the migration to OS-independent desktop applications entails a migration to Linux either. Competing with "free" is easier than you think: having millions of dollars in marketing, cultural forces behind your products, promises of support, and a near-guarantee of reliability are all something that Linux doesn't have yet for the free LiveCD versions. It's either free or you pay for support. Not both. Charging just for support and giving away an OS is something Microsoft and Apple can both do in the future to compete on price.
Moreover, the "open source" replacements are often inferior to their commercial counterparts. There are plenty of examples of superior open source products, but I can cite many examples of the opposite. I can't even play DVDs on the standard Ubuntu distribution - it requires apt-get install'ing the css and mpeg libraries. Most users don't want to muck around with package formats. Linux has a long way to go before it is an actual competitor against Microsoft and Apple for users other than those in the tech-savvy crowd. A solid, winning desktop distribution and a standardized UI and widget set will definitely help. If I understand consumers correctly, most feel more comfortable relying on something that they paid good money for. This may change, but again, I think it's too early to declare victory for Linux, especially since Apple is gaining on Microsoft especially among laptop users. Maybe in 10 to 20 years. But the OS wars are still healthy, and are actually heating up.
History does not agree with your premise. If ease of use was so important, Apple would be dominating the industry. MacOS had far superior "plug and play" support well before it came to any environment Windows ran on ("Microsoft" and "Apple" are not OSes). And even with the state that WinXP is in today, there is still a very large market for supporting end user desktops. It would seem that Windows (and even OSX) falls short of your ideal. Don't get me wrong - Linux (since you brought it up) as a desktop platform does have various short-comings. But I don't find "supportability" as much an issue as you make it out.
Apple lost in the early years because IBM lost. When IBM lost control of its "personal computer" architecture and it became a commodity platform, it set the stage for Microsoft's success and the demise for Apple who managed to "win" and keep control of its own platform. Tough break for Apple. They failed to bootstrap their own version of a commodity platform years later. And I'm not so sure any attempt today to support the x86 platform today would be successful (not that it wouldn't be interesting to see it attempted).
You're assuming that Microsoft has to be unseated at the OS level. I disagree. What has to be done is to remove the OS as the lynch-pin to any given strategy. Web apps would be one piece to that - although I'm not convinced that alone will do it.
I'd guess that the first of these weaknesses that will be exploited is in the Office market since it is easier to switch to another suite, i.e. OpenOffice, then it is to switch operating systems. Switching over to other non-Microsoft products paves the way towards helping people rid themselves of Windows as well.
.NET, Tablet/Media Center XP, VS 2005, Office 2007, Vista (pending, but we know it's coming..) and so on.
It's funny that with so many Office/Windows wannabes this keeps happening *not*.
Most Linux/Apple fans assume Windows users feel desperately trapped into Windows/Office and wanna switch the moment they are given the opportunity.
It's simply not the case. Not even just home users, but many professionals (art, programming, whatever) and businesses feel just right in Windows, where it provides them with easy to support and manage, flexible and capable solution.
And don't understimate Microsoft. They are not vegetables. If Office/Windows was to start losing market share, you can expect Microsoft will not sit with their hands up their bottom parts.
You'll see massive campaign with lowering of prices, new attractive offers, various incentives and a lot of interesting new features in Microsoft's products that will keep them in business. In fact, they are doing some of this all the time which allowed them to produce incredible products like
I think the point is that Linux can out-Windows Windows.
Windows won the OS war because it was cheaper because it could be installed on pretty much any manufacturer's desktop PC. IMHO Apple made the superior product (and I think it still does, but YMMV). But Wintel was "good enough" and cheaper. Apple is never going to compete at the bargain basement cheap box level, but then again the people who buy those sorts of computers are unlikely to care about the OS as long as it works and it is "good enough".
Windows has been and will be hard to dislodge simply because it has a virtual monopoly on compatibility. You "need" Windows because almost everyone else has it, and you need to run the things they do. The more that apps come via the web, the less reason you have to use any particular OS other than its intrinsic merits (and most Windows users don't use Windows for that reason). At that point Linux becomes good enough, and since it is pretty much free, Microsoft cannot compete. Hence Microsoft's obsession with creating "standards" that it controls. So far, they are losing. Google owns search and Apple owns online music (and shortly online movies).
But everyone knows this. If Microsoft cannot stop the increasing flood of OS independent applications, they will bleed money because most people won't need them. They may as well focus on games, because at least there is a need for them there.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
If you look at the top 500 companies in America, you'll find they share the same 1000 people as board members. The super rich get around. If you own 10% of a company, you're probably going to want to try for a board spot, so you have some say beyond just voting shares. Thus, the billionaires all run each other's companies to a certain extent. Talk about anti-trust, you'll see eventually this being exposed. Then they'll look back at the records the SEC keeps, and the state regulators and they'll find all sorts of "coincidences" that allowed these 1000 people to basically take control of 98% of the wealth in America. They control thru their influence the jobs market, the manufacturers, stock prices, etc. If they were to all get together, say in Idaho, and consort with one another on long-term goals, they could really shift the direction of the world. Not unlike the lords and dukes of earlier times.
It shouldn't be all that surprising that two major innovators in computing share a few billionaire board members, that's all.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I would suggest reading up on OS X on the developer site. Read up on Core Audio, Core Data, Core Image, Core Video and the new Core Animation framework. Before the .NET framework was 1.0, Apple had "frameworks" galore for developers to develop against.
Your post perfectly illustrates how Mac people [often] can't imagine the perspective of others. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user, posting this from one of my two Internet-facing Mac OS X servers.
What you don't get is that Apple may one day to decide to maximize hardware numbers by chasing emphasizing sales to users who run Windows. In other words, one day Windows-running Mac owners may outnumber OS X-running Mac owners. Consider what happened to iPod firewire connectivity once it was clear that more Windows users own iPods than Mac users. I doubt we'll see firewire connections on future iPods and that was the direct result of there being no benefit to pleasing OS X-running users.
Now, an OS is quite a different thing than a peripheral connectivity, but think about development houses faced with an all-Intel user base. You see that 15% of your users are on OS X and the remainder on Windows. You know of that 15%, at least 75% own Intel Macs. Your research also suggests that more than half of that number dual-boot into Windows (leaving just less that 6% of all users who do not use Windows at all). What do you think such a company might do with its Mac development team especially if the Mac effort was more than, say, 10% of total development cost?
In a PowerPC-based Mac world, 15% of OS X users is 15% (installed base, not market share). In a Intel-based Mac world, that 15% could foreseeably become 6%. The advent of Windows-capable Macs extent jeopardizes the future of OS X as a platform. Whether that jeopardy realizes the erosion of OX X's installed base is a question only the future will answer.
My point is that Apple is not doing direct battle with Microsoft but with Windows-users who use non-Apple hardware. I will admit that this is complicated situation because dual-booting for Intel-based Macs can also be a way to get some Windows users to get OS X for free (as in beer) with their next machine.
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