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."

Comments

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

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 of 100 Bootcamp\Virtualization Users

[mgranit11]

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.

Re:Boot Camp

[Admiral Ag]

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.

Re:Summary headline is incorrect.

[Millenniumman]

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.