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Someday You'll Hate Apple (And Google Too)
jfruhlinger writes "Think today's world, where Apple is the innovative underdog, Google is the company that does no evil, and Microsoft sits atop its throne as ruler of an evil empire. Will this state of affairs last forever? You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstart Bill Gates. Don Reisinger muses on the fickleness of consumer loves and hates. 'It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.'"
One key difference is that Apple and Google's products have always been best-of-breed, while Microsoft has always been the lowest-common-denominator. When you say "quality", Microsoft isn't the company that jumps to mind. (Perhaps "cheap", but now Linux is eating them from below on that, so I'm not exactly sure what Microsoft's "core" is anymore.)
Thus the entire premise of the article is a bit of a straw-man: Apple's corporate goals don't appear to include even TRYING to gain a majority of the market share. Their phone only competes in the "smart" market which is 1% of the total market; their computers have no low-end offerings whatsoever; the iPods, despite having some of the best margins in the industry, are consistently undercut on price-per-feature.
E pluribus unum
Hate Apple? I don't remember anyone hating apple, although they did say their prices were too high in the 1980s.
And Bill Gates:
I never had an opinion about him, but I hated the IBM/MS-DOS empire which symbolized a lack of progress in the 80s (and in some respects still do). While I was creating music on my Ataris and Commodores, the MS-DOS machines were still going "beep" with a mere 4 colors. While my Amiga was running a dozen programs at the same time, Microsoft machines were still limited to just a single task.
By rights IBM/Microsoft PCs should have died while the innovators at Atari, Commodore, Amiga rose to the top with their multimedia machines.
But success and innovation aren't always the same thing.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The big reason that big success companies become hated is that they try to change the way they gained their success and horde everything for themselves. If Google, or others try to do this they too will get the boot from esteem. Most people do not mind a company trying to profit. I don't.
Examples include Walmart. That outfit started out as a country store which got smart in finance but remembered to serve its customers well and and always made sure to involve the local industry in the marketing plan. Then the kids and finance guys took over from Sam Walton and to say the least, instantly the buy local and support your community stuff went the way of the dinosaurs. Bill Gates at the famous evil empire used to brag about making many other people into millionaires. He made a fortune in the USA and hiring Americans to do it. Then he got rich and decided that he should keep all the money to himself. Being as rich as 4 or 5 US States wasn't enough for him. He just had to move on to China, India and the like, forgetting the guys who made him rich. Then he decided to rent his software for developers in the USA for about $2000 a year. At the same time he practically gave it away in India and China. Well it is no wonder the programmers who were living well with him suddenly became the enemies of the empire.
I know a company McKee Baking in Collegedale Tn. This company has made its original owners and heirs quite wealthy. Nobody is anything but proud of them for their pretty successful baking empire. The reason is that they pay well, and have not tried to dump the people who made their fortune possible. If they ever do I assure you their goodwill will go with it. This is pretty simple stuff people. All you have to do if you get big is not to stomp on people and just go on earning your living. It makes friends and deters enemies.
In the case of Microsoft Corporation, they undertook about 10 years ago to begin to completely destroy the careers of American Programmers. They are hated for it now. Their product lines are not growing and are shuddering with competition because they have just about destroyed any rational reason to partner with them. Google on the other hand is for the time being a friendly helpful and cooperative giant. As long as it stays so it will be so. Once burned the good will of such a company is probably not recoverable. Microsoft will be big for some time but it is in decline and it is it's own fault. If I as a programmer could come and pitch a good new idea and get it moved on to production with their cooperation and partnership, they could be winning but they are refusing to do that. Everybody who tries this game with them loses.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Crappy, closed-technology machines. The cult of the single-button mouse. Reseller programs from hell. Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless. Two wire AppleTalk networks with all of the speed of ISDN on a good day. Cute little useless Newtons. Servers that could never rise above simple workgroup needs. Special connections and exceptions needed to network with anything else but perhaps NFS or wicked Novell patches. Wonderful and proprietary (given few others used them) PPC CPUs. I'm sure others can count the way. Others can see the bloom on the rose, and I still have marks from the thorns. Oddly, I still use a PowerBook G4, alongside a heavy-duty (and less expensive) HP core-duo notebook. Only for games, of course....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I myself think that apple could do some things better (being less of a control freak on the gui for one). I buy apple products sometimes because the hardware works with an acceptable rate of failure and their software is usually easier to get running than linux but less irritating to use than windows. These are my opinions, I recognize that not everyone feels the same way. Anyhow, the point is that I'm no apple fanboi even though I buy their products sometimes (e.g., my home PC is a linux box I built from parts) but then I'm not an irrational hater either.
That said, I do tend to hate Microsoft sometimes. Mostly when Ballmer was going on about the "patent infringments" in linux. That pissed me off. Or when I go to an internet site that has some Microsoft only file or plugin on it, although that's getting less and less as the linux codecs catch up.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Huh? Apple has used Intel's CPUs for a long time? Where did you get that from?
The original Apple ][s were based on MOS Technology's 6502 processor, although MOS later licensed the technology to other manufacturers, Intel was never one of them, since they were doing quite well with their 8080 and then later the 80286 and successors in the x86 line. The Apple
The original Macintosh was based on the 68000 chip from Motorola, and Macs continued to be based on that chips successors, the 68020, 68030, and 68040 for several years. Then they switched to the PowerPC family which were designed by IBM and Motorola together. I believe that most of the chips were branded IBM inside the case, but I believe the chips, at least at first, were being supplied by Motorola.
The switch to Intel didn't happen until 2006, although NextSTEP, the OS that OS X was based on, ran on multiple architectures including Intel, and Apple kept making sure that OS X could be used on Intel chips in secret to give them more bargaining power.
I highly doubt we would have seen the bunny suit ads if Apple had been using Intel chips for anything mission-critical.
"Hate Apple? I don't remember anyone hating apple, although they did say their prices were too high in the 1980s."
In the early 90's I hated Apple. The reason why? I had an onboxious Apple-zealot friend. I didn't know much about the machines, but I remember in our programming class I heard him say "too bad, I could do that easily with my Mac"... oh about 1.3 million times over the course of two years. Frankly, I was a know-it-all asshole back then. So yeah, that put me off. The rest of the peeps in the class had PCs, so we all agreed he was just being a zealot and cemented our positions as PC dudes. It didn't matter much, anyway. The Mac was out of reach of any of our price ranges, plus the game selection was a joke (and we cared about that more than anything), so it's not like our doubts about the platform were ever challenged.
Fast foward to the late 90's. Intel was proud of their Pentium 2 chips and Apple was proud of their... erm.. pardon my lack of terminology here, but I think they were using PowerPC chips from IBM. Apple was running ads saying that Photoshop was up to twice as fast on their chips as it was on Intel/P2 chips. I remember reading that that had been de-bunked from a practicality point of view. Something like "yeah, if you did level 80 gaussian blurs throughout most of the day, you'd get your money's worth out of using a Mac instead." The benefits of that processor were enhancements in certain ways it did the math, but were not an overall improvement on the design. Cute. I didn't really hate Apple for this, though. No, what caused this was some guy coming into a chatroom proclaiming "Don't believe what you read in biased sources like PC World, go get the TRUTH at Macfanatic.com!" I cannot believe the irony of that statement was completely lost on that guy! Not long after that, I started seeing posts like that rumbling around the world-wide-web. (This was back in the good 'ol days, when it was called the world wide web.) I remember thinking "yeesh, are these Apple fans under Dogbert's control or something?"
Anyway, yes, I hated Apple. No, I really didn't have a good reason for it... really I hated Apple fanatics, but I didn't draw the distinction back then. For the record, no, I don't hate Apple now. I'm actually about to drop 3k on a Macbook Pro. (I still can't get over Apple's decision to go Intel. Woo!) I cannot scientifically prove this, but I can totally see how there were lots of Apple 'haters' back then. The noise ratio from the fanatics was just too high for that not to happen.
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