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Why Microsoft Is Beating Apple At Its Own Game
ttom writes "OSWeekly.com looks at Microsoft's promotional strategy and concludes that Microsoft is beating Apple at its own game." From the article: "Apple is to blame for this, at least to some extent. They just had to go and release Boot Camp, didn't they? By the way, please don't take my sarcastic tone as an expression of my dissatisfaction for the product. I think it's great, and I really never expected to see something like Boot Camp come out of the Apple Camp. I know that users have bombarded them with requests for officially allowing Windows usage on a Mac, and the fact that they yielded to these requests is interesting because they've emphasized the OS X and Windows experiences as being completely separate for quite some time."
I have heard people at my business who never before considered a Mac very excited about getting a Mac because they can run that particular Windows software they have to run and have the Macintosh computing experience all at once. The downstairs computer lab has been switched to all Mac as well because of this. There simply is no reason to own a PC anymore. You can get a Mac and have your PC, too. All in one.
I'd say OSWeekly knows who their biggest advertiser is and are pandering to them.
Take a survey and ask them how many of you paid or for your copy of XP on your Mac (and are not violating MS EULA). Any guesses out there? I will start and say 8%. I think I am high, but figure almost 1/10 users are honest. Most either: 1. Visited there local bay of pirates and downloaded it. 2. Had a copy from a current PC so are in violating the EULA and installing it. 3. Borrowed a copy from the local IT admin and installed it. Most of the legitimate people may have gotten it from work and they have a ELA with MS so maybe they are not violating. I know all of my friends have not paid for a copy of XP running on the Mac or are using a work copy. All of them. They are using it for testing, gaming and occasional software but are not publishing work from it, so MS will not be able to track them down. I bet this over the long term will hurt MS since many people I know used to buy a cheap Dell for testing, which at least had a legitimate OS on it. Now they just need an XP CD, and its different shoving out $200 for a CD vs $400 for an entire computer.
www.IBuyMacs.com
When was it Apple's game to announce groovy new products, then deliver them behind schedule, bereft of compelling new features, in more confusing variations than a cel phone plan, with hardware requirements that will spur the market penetration of GNU/Linux, and at prices that will surely drive ???profit???.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Are people like Dell, HP and so forth.
My next laptop purchase is going to be a Macbook early next year. The reason?
It can run Windows, that simple. There is software for windows that simply isn't available for OS X that I need. Conversely there is software on OS X that I need that I normally run under a VM with Linux. You could say Linux is a loser in this too.
But Microsoft having the beatdown on them? Nope, Apple see Windows as not going away anytime soon and frankly the majority of OS X users will use OS X the majority of the time. Apple are gaining pc users because of bootcamp.
I own a homebuilt pc and a Thinkpad, so i'm currently not a mac user and hadn't considered a Mac until the Macbook.
NB. I haven't read the article as it's not available.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Why not a boot camp designed for Linux layer compatibility on mac hardware. Sure, Yellow Dog covers that ground and so does Ubuntu, but how about the two underdogs banding together coalition style? Call it some thing like Degobah System. A place where 'warriors' can train. See where I'm going with all these neat marketing ideas?
We'd all own piles of dog crap too if some one was smart enough to make us all believe we need it.
-ps: the use of boot camp is cheating, btw, imo. As well, I think Multi-booting is just plain inconvenient. Too much time to take to traverse from OS to OS in time of need. I do it. Done it for years. Linux, Mac, and Windows in many forms on many machines. But it's too time consuimg. A person could be better off owning multiple machines running different platforms. Period. As well have tons less heartaches and oh-shit-this-didn't-work-smacks-to-the-forehead about how much time has been wasted setting it all up only to discover som ething trivial, yet major, like wireless driver failure.
Have you ever written a .NET application? If you're into Objective-C, and can integrate with BSD and Core Graphics, then okay, but it doesn't come close to .NET. Whole system integration (especially in the business arena) is what MS does best. Mod me as you will..
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Please not the "security through obscurity" argument again. It's unsubstantiated waffle. One might just as well claim that the fact that OS X has not been the victim of viruses or malware would spur virus writers and malware creators to be the "first". As it stands, the most recent "terrible breach in OS X security" was caused by a couple of guys who had to cheat to hack a MacBook.
If OS X was to be less of a target because of its marketshare, reasonable people would expect the picture to be the same as it was with the Classic Mac OS. That had a hundred or more viruses IIRC. Of course that's nothing compared to what Windows had at the same time, and you could probably put that down to marketshare, since the Classic Mac OS was not renowned for its security.
But OS X has not had a single virus in the wild AFAIK, nor do OS X users suffer from malware. It stands to reason that there must be other factors preventing the spread of malicious software on the OS X platform. Why can't people simply admit that Apple has released a pretty secure platform?
Microsoft on the other hand has released a Swiss cheese operating system that simply can't compete with OS X security wise, marketshare differences or not.
Now let's be fair. I actually (and perhaps naively) believe that Vista will fix a lot of the security problems the Windows platform has faced. It's not going to be perfect, but Windows users should be quite a bit better off than they were. When this happens, the same marketshare trolls will be trumpeting how superior Windows is to OS X security-wise. People can't have it both ways, no matter how much they try.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
Considering that there are a number of posts suggesting that the Boot camp will promote switching...
After having managed a number of labs (some multi-OS, some OS-specific), I can tell you both from the maintenance and user perspectives, dual-booting will never make anyone a "switcher." If anything it will just end-up being a frustration to those who are partial to one of the OSs involved. As for those who are not very computer savvy, they will end-up frustrating tech support and vice versa. Boot camp is nothing more than a proof-of-concept idea and a marketing ploy targetting the geeky community. Beyond that, adoption will be spotty at best (that is not to say that there won't be adopters, but simply there won't be enough of it to warrant this move as a catalyst for winning over a large market share). Ultimately, the only way you can make multi-platform labs "just work" is to have dedicated machines for each os (parallels et al do not cut it if you need specialized systems since most of the virtualization options usually do not support several important hardware layers)...
At the 3 software development companies I've worked at in the last year, all XP stations, crash frequently. This isn't specifically XP's fault, but the fault of the apps or specific needs of developers. If you leave it running at the login for months, I'm sure it's very stable...and useless.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Where you see less native applications, I see oportunity for new devellopers.
See, If there are two applications that do the same thing, but one runs under CrossOver/Parallels/BootCamp and the other is native,as a user I'll opt for the native version without any doubts.
The Mac is a niche market, it's very easy to loose your userbase if you do something stupid, like offering some lame emulated version of you app. Somebody else will be waiting to offer your users a better alternative.
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
-b.
Do you really care how it works? Darwine has been avalible for Mac for a while now, the difference is since Macs now use X86 processors, Darwine can run at native speed. The only thing that will cause Mac devs to avoid Mac is the lack of backwards compatability. OS9 apps would not run on OS10 without the "classic" environment, and OS 10 PPC apps would not run on OS x86 and it is a pain for devs to compile for both. All boot camp does it give Mac users the ability to use Windows if they choose, and there are GASP, some people who recently switched to Macs because they can try Mac and switch back to Windows if they so choose.
Also I have been multibooting Linux and Windows for a while now, and thousands of people who switch from Windows to Linux multiboot. This has not stopped devs from porting apps to Linux, and there are thousands and thousands of Linux programs avalible. People do not just wake up one day and decide "you know what, I want to drop $1000 on pricy Mac hardware and never be able to do Windows stuff on it." They are much more likely to say "I guess I will pay more for this PC because even though Mac hardware cost a lot more, I can always still use my Windows software on it too." In order to get people to switch over to something, especially when it cost more money like Macs do, you have to be able to say "this can do everything the other PCs can and more!" you can't just say "This can do most of what the other stuff can do but it can do a few things the others can't."
There also will always be the people who don't like Mac and want to go back to Windows. At my school there are a few Macs (most computers are PCs though) and I decided to try one of them out. It had OSX on it and I did not really like it. I found the GUI for Mac obnoxious. It had way too much eye candy for my liking (and I am used to KDE so I like a little eye candy). It's little eye candy seemed to get in the way when I tried to browse the web or write a document. I also hated the lack of a second mouse button. I can see how someone might really like having a Mac. I know there is tons of image editing software and artistic stuff for Mac, and if I were into that I would get one. Mac reminded me of it's BSD cousins. Like most BSD stuff, Mac seemed to be specialized for specific task. Look at the other BSDs. FreeBSD can have increadible amounts of uptime, but it is lacking in the rate of upgrades to it. OpenBSD has better security than most OS's but most stuff has to manually be enabled. PC-BSD has the easiest installer I have ever seen, but there is so little software avalible for it. In Mac's case, it seems like it is really good with video and image editing, but I wouldn't want to do day to day work on one. Of course, I suppose Macs are the only computers that can tri-boot and have Windows, Mac, and Linux on the same platform.
The Gospel according to lolcat
As far as the Thinkpads - here's a little secret: buy used. Many businesses seem to replace the things after a year, so you can find lightly-used examples with plenty of life left in them for significantly less than they'd cost new. (I paid $280 for a Thinkpad T23 - granted, this is was a 3 yr old computer at time of purchase, but it's still working quite well for me and is pretty much bloody indestructable - it basically spends it's life in a backpack going to client sites and being variously knocked about and has nary a crack in the case).
-b.
Here's the list of what is supported in "Crossover":
* Microsoft Outlook
* Microsoft Project
* Microsoft Visio
* Half-Life 2
* Quicken
Not a giant list of supported apps in the end (although many may work without "support"...). One would think the choices are about filling gaps with missing OS X apps that are popular or loved on the Windows platform, but its a funny list:
Outlook is a funny choice, since "Entourage" exists from Microsoft for the same purpose (I don't use it, but those I know who do like it more than Outlook on Windows).
Project does or used to exist in a native Mac port. This is a real cash cow for Microsoft - there is no competitor of note at that price point, and they sell a ton of this to businesses that use it so that people can look at the Gantt chart but don't really do project planning. Much like other Microsoft apps, this one is bought on inertia with little to justify the cost and little enhancement/investment done by the vendor over the years.
Visio is similar. It's a great program (bought by Microsoft), although overpriced for what it does or not sold with a compelling "plug in" story for the real specialty uses it has. Few Mac equivalents exist that get recognition by purchasing departments, and real import/export issues with the non-Microsoft versions when trying to share Visio files.
Half-Life is an incredibly interesting item for them to pick off. I wish there was an equivalent OS X version (since Half Life is the best game ever, IMHO). While there are some good OS X games (or ports of other games) I'm tempted to try this just to get to see Half Life 2. I'd love to hear more about the business justification for this title with the rest.
Quicken is another funny choice, since there is a native OS X port of this one too - although one of the worst looking OS X apps I've seen.
So, for all that development effort they officially support a handful of titles, most of which have an OS X version.
Sleep is for the Weak
I do find it interesting that Mac fans always point to Dell as their preferred price comparision. I mean....Dell? Is that really the space Apple is competing?
It's not interesting, it's predictable. Mac fans have a history of cherry picking which systems they do their price comparison with. And they justify it with specious arguments about what is equivalent and what isn't. Back when the mac fans heavily harped on the macs video capabilities, they would compare them to high end video workstations from specialized vendors. When the dual processor bit started, they compared it to a dual processor workstation from what in the PC world would have been viewed as an overpriced vendor. We all know about Dells...
What I really find interesting is how few people talk about Tablet PC. I just got one about a month ago and all I can say is I'm hooked. This is one of the most useful and powerful convergences of different technologies into an Operating System since the gui's marriage to the OS IMO. But few of my fellow nerds have seem to have caught the fire. The HP TC1100, for example, is an outstanding and truly innovative formfactor, that combined with WindowsXP Tablet Edition, delivers a whole new type of user experience that nothing Mac has to offer right now can match. And it's stunning, because it's so damned useable and innovative, that I would have expected Apple, and not HP/MS to be offering something like this first.
I was hoping that the article would be about that going by the title. Tablet PC has really put MS ahead of Macs in terms of UI and useability. I'm sure people will want to flame me for saying this, and I'll be equally sure that the majority of those people have never touched a tablet pc. If anyone is interested, the TC1100 is the one I recommend checking out, due to the innovative form factor. If you're an IT guy who carries a laptop, palm, and pad of paper, it will likely replace all three. It all depends on whether or not having the palm hanging on your belt is something you can get over, and instead carry around a tablet. I got over it and it's worth it.
I say this as a Linux guy BTW with a strong history of PalmOS use. I don't use PalmOS anymore, but Linux remains the only OS on my dual opteron workstation. I've played around with the linux tablet offerings and it isn't there yet and I've done enough linux testing and bug reporting in my life that right now I need something ready today, so I'll let the young zealots pick up the slack and let me know when it gets there.
You have the Dock, where icons behave totally differently from any other icons anywhere else on the entire system
This is true, but the Dock isn't supposed to be consistent with the rest of the system, it's supposed to be unique and separate. I find the left/top side of the Dock to behave in a very reasonable way. The right/bottom side is a bit weirder.
and where a whole bunch of totally different tasks -- launching applications, monitoring running tasks, etc. -- are all mixed together
Launching and monitoring applications are not completely different tasks. Remember that the Dock was created partly to solve some of the usability problems of Mac OS 9, one of which was that new users were constantly confused as to which applications were currently running.
in one confusing zooming bouncing distracting usability nightmare.
If I'm not mistaken, it doesn't zoom by default, you have to explicitly enable magnification if you want that feature. And the bouncing is meant to be distracting. If you don't like application icons bouncing when the application launches, you can disable that feature, but most people aren't trying to get anything else done while waiting for an app to launch, and the bouncing is better than no visual feedback at all. Application icons also bounce to alert you that the application wants attention, and I think this is pretty effective.
You have Finder windows that flip from brushed metal to Aqua when you merely show/hide the toolbar, and that STILL, after six years of OS X, have not come close to regaining the unparalleled usability of the classic Finder.
Yep, this is dumb. I'm hoping they'll fix it in Leopard.
You have places where drag-and-drop works beautifully inexplicably mixed up with places where it doesn't work at all: why can't I drag a document from the Recent Items list to open it in a non-default application?
Hmm. Which Recent Items list are you thinking of? Are you thinking of the one in the Apple menu? If so, then the answer is obvious: you've never been able to drag anything from a menu on a Mac. Windows sometimes allows it, but the Mac OS never has. However, it would be nice if the Recent Items list worked the way it did on Mac OS 9, where it was actually a folder full of aliases that you could open and interact with the way you normally would in the Finder.
Why can't I assign an icon to a folder by dragging it into the Get Info window?
Good question! I'm not aware that this is a feature that has ever worked either, but it's not a bad idea. You should suggest it to Apple.
Why can't I drag a document from the Dock to the Desktop?
Because the Dock doesn't hold documents, it only holds icons. It's for launching things, not storing things. The behavior is similar to the sidebar in Finder windows. What you can do, however, is right-click (or control-click or click-and-hold) the icon and select Reveal in Finder.
I thought this was supposed to be the One Consistent OS, where everything Just Worked?!
I've decided to be mindlessly optimistic about Leopard. Maybe they'll get it right this time, even though I have seen very few indications to that effect.
And you have limitations introduced in the name of "elegance". Like the crazy file selector dialogs that force you to laboriously click your way through the folder hierarchy, because Apple has decided you shouldn't want to save time by just typing the path in.
Not being able to type the path isn't a limitation they introduced; Mac OS never had that option. However, keyboard navigation is certainly far inferior to what it used to be in classic Mac OS.
Like iTunes, with its "streamlined" interface that just leaves average users upset because they can't understand why there isn't a "stop" button.
Sometimes there is a stop button, depending on what you're playing. Try to figure out how to change the visualizer opt
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I agree that they shouldn't try to compete with Dell, but how have they sacrificed quality or marketing? Their PCs aren't more "Dellish".
What's wrong with Dell as the price comparison? It is the most common.
I just did a comparison with Asus. A nearly equivalent MacBook is a few hundred dollars cheaper, albeit without the graphics card. The Asus is lighter, but the MacBook is smaller, and a lot more nicely made. This isn't taking into account OS X, which is the main reason the MacBook is better.
One thing about Asus that I really despise is all of the different models. They have useless alphanumerical names, and take a long time to look through. Surely a "1.8 GHz AsusBook" would be more helpful than an "ASUS kajf0394jljfsdd09fadfkaj". Car makers (particularly foreign ones) do this too, and it is quite irritating.
But if I ever want a Lamborghini laptop, I'll buy an ASUS. Hooray for useless models.
The only real advantage that PCs have for hardware is being able to build your own desktop, and being able to buy really, really cheap (in price, performance, and quality) PCs. The low end ones also have more customization options (which their buyers won't use). These are pretty big advantages for some people, though.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Each game is a move in the meta game. The move doesn't have to be succesful (e.g., you win). It just has to improve your position in the meta-game.
Microsoft is a master of meta-game. It starts products and initiatives it intends never to win, or to win and stagnate, all the time.
Boot camp is a perfect example of a meta-game move. There is no way that users running windows on Mac hardware is good for Apple. But being able to is valuable. Ideally, people decide that getting a Mac is less risky, because they can always boot Windows if they need to, or even switch back. The key question is how confident they are their operating system is superior to Windows. If the answer is "very", then it's on balance a good thing that dual booting is possible. If the answer is "on par", then it's a bad thing.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, the reason is simple -- every Mac fan online has been bombarded for years by Windows fans using low-end Dell computers to "prove" that Apple's computers are overpriced. Like here, and here.
Obnoxious Windows zealots have been making such a comparison for years -- do you really expect Mac zealots to stay silent now that the opposite is true?
Yaz.
The problem comes in when you want something other than what Apple sells. Don't have any use for firewire, bluetooth or a built in camera? Tough shit, you pay for it anyway. Want the T2300 Core Duo, with it's much better price/performance ratio? Nope, you can shell out for a 2Ghz plus or no Mac for you. Want a key on a North American laptop? Nope. Ergonomic keyboard? No, Apple doesn't care about your wrists. Multiple mouse buttons on the built in touchpad? No, we live in 1978 here.
OS X is somewhat nice. Macs aren't for everyone.
If MS really wanted to pretend to be "more compatible", they could always implement even one of the Linux filesystems on their own. The code is out there, people are even attempting to port it by themselves. Hell, Linux already has an HFS implementation, so what's stopping MS from doing one, really?
Same to Apple, really. You support FAT, but you don't support ext2? Or any of the other ones I've thrown up there in the subject line? Really, Linux is currently the most compatible OS on the market -- even though it isn't "on the market", really.
MS has always abused their market share to be able to implement things however the hell they want, and claim everyone else is incompatible for not using their "standard". Every time someone else implements their own version of it, they are made to look less compatible. Take OpenDocument. If I sent an ODT to someone who didn't already know what it is, they'd automatically assume I was sending some weird, non-standard format. They'd continue to think that once I explained it, even though the truth is, ODT is a standard, and DOC is not. They'd be confused as hell if I sent a DOC back to them and said "I can't read this non-standard format."
So of course everyone has to reverse-engineer and re-implement MS "standards", as well as come up with their own, since the MS ones suck so much -- FAT? In 2006? -- so of course, when you've spent more work reverse-engineering a shitty solution than coming up with your own brilliant one, you have a right, nay, a responsibility to stand up and be proud and say "We're more compatible."
Anyone who wonders why we dare to create real standards that aren't the broken MS Way may kindly go fuck themselves.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!