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Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into Middle Age
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Briggs writes on MSNBC that the two tech titans are rumbling into middle age as Microsoft marked its 35th birthday on Sunday and Apple turned 34 late last week. But while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime — Apple, in some eyes, looks sleeker and younger — a hipster in a ragtop Beemer packed with chic friends sporting mobile toys. 'The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,' says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps. 'Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional.' On current accounting ledgers, Microsoft overshadows Apple: Microsoft's market cap is $255.75 billion; Apple's is $213.98 billion. But Apple is getting awfully big — awfully fast — in Microsoft's rearview mirror. Consider that a decade ago Microsoft's market cap was almost $590 billion and Apple's was about $16 billion. So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish should Microsoft have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday? 'More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,' says Ayers. 'Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.'"
"The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind," says Casey Ayers
More like Apple comes up with the great ideas and transformational change and Microsoft copies them, badly.
Microsoft is that guy at a dance club hitting on his daughter's college age friends.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
>>>You think that is progress? You think that is good?
Being able to still use my Win98 laptop is good for my wallet.
Throwing-out a clean perfectly-functional Mac is not.
I'm not saying machines should be supported forever, but it's rather ridiculous to have a pop-up say, "You must upgrade to 10.6 to run this (and also buy a whole new Intel Mac for $1000+)". The user should be able to override that warning and install it anyway to see if it works. Many products would work just fine under older 10.5, 10.4, 10.3 versions, but Apple refuses to let you even try.
Look at 10.5 which forbids an install on machines below 800 megahertz. Apple should not have forbade people with 700 or 600 MHz machines from upgrading if they so desired. Microsoft doesn't. If you want to run Win7 on a slow machine, you can - no restriction.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>The fact is, you have unreasonable expectations regarding life expectancy of computers.
3 years is not that old for a PowerMac purchased in late 2006, and which now refuses to run Safari 4 and other recent software, since they require 10.6 or higher. And don't give me that nonsense about CPU transition - Apple continued supporting the old 68040-based OS 7 for many, many years. They could just as easily have made Safari 4 run on both OS 10.6 AND 10.5
The reason they don't is purely because of $$$. They want to force users to upgrade to new hardware, and what better way to do that than to "lock out" those old machines by refusing to support 10.4 or 10.5?
It's brilliant. Also annoying.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
On the other hand Microsoft doesn't BLOCK you from installing an OS either. As I mentioned before you can't install OS 10.5 on a Mac slower than ~800 megahertz or less than 1 gigabyte - it simply forbids you from doing it. In contrast WIN7 doesn't care.
If you want to install it on a 1 GB machine or 1 megahertz processor, Microsoft won't stop you like Apple does. MS allows the user decide, while Apple treats the user like a serf.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Oh yeah? So for how many months were Apple waffling on about the iPad before it was finally released?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The iPad was officially released two days ago yet Jobs was waffling on about it in January in "Keynote" speeches, or whatever it is marketing types call them.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.