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The Forgotten Failure of Apple's PowerTalk
DECS writes "The series of articles Why Apple Will Change TV compared how Apple is poised for success in areas where Microsoft is currently failing. But circumstances are subject to change!
Just over a decade ago, Apple began facing serious legacy problems with its platform, with many parallels to today's Microsoft. Examining Apple's dramatic fall provides a series of notable platform lessons that no company should ignore.
A look back at the forgotten failure of Apple's PowerTalk:
Apple vs. Microsoft in the Enterprise"
Actually, I'd say Google models this pretty well. Products with a real current functionality, like GMail and Google Maps, succeed despite pushing the technological envelope. Products which push the envelope too hard, like their office suite, fail to catch fire. They keep looking for the boundary between "functional" and "futuristic", but there's almost always a market for the things (especially at the $0 price they charge for it) they make when they work.
Either way, Google is all about pushing the "constantly refine it" part. Web apps make for instantaneous, compatible upgrades.
MSFT enjoyed a 7% increase in revenue last quarter alone, while AAPL's growth has been in the iPod area. There are no similarities between AAPL and MSFT in that front.
You probably didn't mean to phrase it that way, but you're totally right. Note the lack of Zune rumour sites, and general lack of enthusiasm over the Zune when compared to the iPod.
Now, as for the marketshare aregument: you're also right. Apple's marketshare has fallen since 1994/5. It has also improved since 1997/8. Moving past statistics, one can look at the Wall Street perception of Apple. In 1996-7 Wall Street saw Apple in a death spiral. Their market share was swirling down the toilet, they were losing ground in the education and enterprise sectors, and Windows 95/98 was generating a much bigger buzz than anything Apple was producing. Then Apple turned around: they got Jobs back at the helm, released a product that created a media sensation (iMac -- for examples, look at Newsweek's and Time's coverage of it) and started inching away from the edge of a financial cliff. Following that with Mac OS X, and the iPod, Wall Streets prediction of Apple's future is pretty damn bright.
You mention Microsoft. I say don't bother. They don't really compete. Apple makes personal computers and iPods. Microsoft makes an operating system and a game console (and soon another iPod "killer"). With the exception of the forthcoming Zune, there's not really much competition between the two. People cite Mac OS X as competing against Windows -- often referencing Vista -- but it's not really. Mac OS X only runs on Macs (officially.) Windows runs on commodity hardware. Apple makes Mac OS X to bundle with their hardware. Microsoft makes Windows because it's the cornerstone of their business. There's far less competition than people think.
The real litigious bastards...
As an email gateway developer, I worked with Exchange since it's inception and I attempted to use AOCE. When I compare that experience with what's going on now, I reach a very different conclusion.
Exchange started out life in the X.400 world. (If memory serves, Microsoft bought an X.400 product from someone else and GUIfied it.) This meant that even before the advent of the Internet Connector you could connect to Exchange using "standard" X.400 protocols. (I say "standard" because X.400 is so large and messy that pretty much everyone who implemented it was forced to deviate from the specifications in one way or another.) Not easy, but doable, and more to the point, doable from any platform able to deploy an OSI network stack. As Exchange shifted towards SMTP things improved to the point where Exchange was able to connect to existing facilities with little effort. (The article is wrong, BTW, in claiming that modem SMTP was around when Exchange first shipped. It was around but Microsoft chose to ignore it.)
AOCE, OTOH, only provided vast, arcane, incomplete and poorly documented Mac-specific API. The underlying protocols weren't documented at all. We tried hard to figure how to interface with this mess, even sitting down to discuss our issues with Apple folks at one point, but eventually gave up. And I'm talking a group of people who developed successful gateways to X.400-1984, X.400-1988, cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail, Novell MHS, and GroupWise among others. Either we are fools who got incredibly lucky several times over, or AOCE was an unmitigated disaster. And I don't think we were lucky fools.
But Apple learned their lesson. As the article points out, they now leverage open standards whenever possible. You can talk to a lot of Apple's new stuff over protocol. Sure, the APis are still there, and some of them are pretty nasty, but in a lot of cases you don't have to use them. Apple is also very active in various standards organizations (I wish they had had more success with Bonjour in the IETF, but that's a different matter).
Microsoft, OTOH, has utterly failed to learn anything from their experience with Exchange. They still roll their own whenever possible. They don't document the protocols they use, only the APIs, and of course those are only available on Windoze. I used to see lots of Microsoft people at standards meetings but not so many any more.
Of course things can change, but once things are headed in a particular direction they tend to stay on that course, even if it is a bad one. Everything I see about Microsoft says to me that they are on the wrong course and aren't doing anywhere near enough reinvention to correct it. The exact opposite appears to be the case with Apple.