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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.
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
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.
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.
Good point. Parallels wasn't ready for prime time yet when they originally switched. I recently pointed out to them just what you said. The reasoning for not trying Parallels now is interesting: "We would have to install Windows again on Parallels and Windows is too much of a pain to install and configure. We can't justify the time necessary to try Parallels now. Let's just wait and see what Leopard offers first."
My mother found it fascinating that when they set up her new Mac, everything worked out of the box and she was up and running on OS X in an hour with everything working just like her old XP machine. Getting everything working on the fresh XP install, like it had on her old XP machine, took hours of driver downloads, configuring and multiple reboots.
It's amazing but frequently true, that switching to OS X is easier than switching from one XP install to another.
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.