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Media Loves Apple and Its Army of Fans
cgriffin21 writes "Apple is getting more media attention right now than any other technology company, including Google. Microsoft, meanwhile, is languishing in the shadows like Cinderella on the night of the ball. That's the upshot of a study released Monday (PDF) by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, which found that Apple was the focus of 15.1 percent of media coverage between June 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010. Google received 11.4 percent of media coverage during the period, while Microsoft garnered just 3 percent."
This is not surprising. Apple and Google cater to consumers. That means the masses, the general public, the hordes. Microsoft's activities the last 10 years and all their successes have been in the enterprise space along with SAP, Oracle, IBM and HP. That makes them boring to most people and that includes the media. Apple creates really cool products that capture imaginations. Even Apple haters want things like what Apple produces - just not from Apple - witness Android phones and tablets. Google touches everybody too. We all use one or more Google services.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
Meanwhile, in Reality Land... Microsoft continues to hold a dominate position in a mature market, targeting business customers Apple doesn't seem to care about. They have a market cap over $211bn and have started paying out dividends. They're in IBM territory now, but the media loves underdogs and sexy startups, and one thing Microsoft has never been is sexy, even when they were a startup. However, I don't really think they care. Not that I really have terribly much use for any of their products, and my personal situation is in no way tied to their fortunes. But to say that only getting 3% of the media coverage is going to hurt them is just kind of stupid. Its almost like Boeing running commercials -- anyone in a position to be purchasing ANYTHING from Boeing isn't going to make that decision off of a 30-second ad. For some companies, media interest is irrelevant, because they're entrenched in their market.
In my view, Apple is the only company focusing on the user experience (and the only company focusing on the user) as opposed to feature lists products that will be close to become unusable. As a result, they release more expensive products, sell more of those than the competition, and then get a bigger revenue. This revenue is invested in R&D. In Apple's terminology, R&D means exploring existing technologies and finding how they can be integrated into end user products.
The users we speak of here are not slashdot readers, they are the general public.
As a result of all that, they get good press. And it seems well deserved.
This is my view on Apple, so you may express your view but you may not say I'm wrong because I don't claim to express a fact.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
> In my view, Apple is the only company focusing on the user experience
> (and the only company focusing on the user) as opposed to feature lists
> products that will be close to become unusable.
Yes. Because no one ever uses "features".
The notion that Apple "focuses on the user experience" quickly seems absurd
as soon as you try to do anything that Apple didn't account for or is actually
trying to prevent.
"plays my movies"
"reads my files"
"installs some random app"
"reads some website"
If another device gains traction, it will be due to the fact that it is good
at doing the things that Apple refuses to do. Being able to ignore Steve's
vision is a great feature for a lot of people.
Apple may have cared for the end user once but now they've jumped the shark.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
When all of these "fashionable" people turn against apple
Wow, cool, I've never, in my life, been called "fashionable" before... pragmatic, sure. Focused on actually Getting Things Done, as opposed to fiddling around with inferior solutions, yes. Matured past the need to paint entire groups of people with the same brush in order to make myself feel superior, yes.
But never fashionable.
MSFT would be even more irrelevant than they are already becoming if it weren't for vendor lock-in.
Seriously, where would they be?
And we see another example of this phenomenon, as news outlets rush to report how news outlets cover Apple.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
First, I'm not an Apple Fanboi.
But Microsoft's illegal practices and the evolution of the market is what allowed them to achieve lock-in. Architecturally, their oil-well-in-the-basement Windows core OS was defective by design, a problem that was partially fixed by demoting user from root in XP SP2. The software QA at Microsoft was abysmal.
And Apple isn't any saint. Their pseudo-open source way of looking at the software world benefits users through a thoroughly controled "experience". Apple's done much QA to ensure comparatively high reliability and application interactivity consistency. But Apple eschews "corporate" or large enterprise infrastructure. They want the user to control the influence and experience. Their resources for large organizations is horrific on a good day. It's all about the end-user.
Does Apple have similar controlling policies? Hell yes. They're secretive and instill paranoia in their employees. Yet their activities so far have skirted most legal skirmishes for anti-trust and anti-competitive behavior. Still you can't use MacOS legally on other hardware, you risk lots by jailbreaking their devices, and they still are completely clueless about the insanity of binding their products to vendors whose performance is abysmal (AT&T as an example).
Microsoft may be the top dog in terms of deployed OSes, but Apple's market cap now exceeds theirs. It's not a very good pool of vendors to pick from. As open source quality matures, Apple and Microsoft will have to change the ways that they do business. Apple's stock price, like Microsoft's, is their holy grail. Remember that it's supported only so far as they continue to satisfy the demands of the buying public. We vote with money.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
>>>try to do anything that Apple didn't account for
You've been modded troll, but you make a good point (IMHO). I still haven't found a player for my Mac (or Linux laptop) that can run songs/movies at double speed without making everyone sound like chipmunks. Also Mac doesn't have any Bittorrent clients approved by Ipodnova/videoseed, so I can't download their wares to my Mac.
Meanwhile on my Windows IBM PC clone, it's as simple as installing "2xAV". It plays double speed and everyone has a normal tone of voice. And it runs the approved client Utorrent. Apple probably never anticipated people wanting to alter the speed of playback, while maintaining normal voice tone, and so it never got developed as part of their tools.
Aside:
Interestingly, Sony anticipated it. Fast playback (1.4x) is included with my DVD player.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
No, what the parent is saying is that the user experience is good as long as you conform to Apple's definition of user behavior. It's not even about including every feature ever, since Apple is notorious for omitting even the most rudimentary industry standard features.
Take copy/paste. Apple allegedly omitted it because for some reason with all their resources they couldn't figure out a way to implement it. I own an iPad, and the implementation they came up with isn't anything special, to be sure. Try selecting a line of text near the top of the screen; the magnifying glass goes over the edge and you can't see what you're doing.
Another example is transferring files from the iPad. This goes beyond the Apple sanctioned usage of the iPad, so they make it really difficult, and it turns out the easiest way to share files is to e-mail them (a function which must be implemented on a per app basis, as the mail application does not allow attachments).
What about downloading a PDF from safari to read in iBooks? You can't do it from safari, you actually have to download it to a computer and transfer it via iTunes (the worst option, as you need the cable due to lack of wireless sync); through e-mail it to yourself (dropbox is a good option too); or download an app like goodreader, copy the link from safari into goodreader, download the PDF, then export it to iBooks. What a great user experience!
Oh, and the calendar app is a dream to use. It can't actually schedule events that repeat on odd schedules, like every Monday and Wednesday. Apple has sanctioned that your events can repeat weekly, biweekly, monthly, bimonthly, or yearly. To solve this I have to create a google calendar, manage my events there, then subscribe to it in the calendar app.
Or what about this slashdot post? typing <p> takes 8 keyboard strokes on the iPad. </p> takes 11.
But yeah I agree, iPad and other Apple products are great if you stay within its narrow Apple sanctioned usage.
Maybe because parent is trolling. I have a MacBook Pro that just works.
And many millions more people have Windows (or Linux) laptops that "just work".
Being consistently right does not make him a troll. I also have a macbook pro and "just works" is a joke if you're going against Steve's vision.
Pro tip: Don't use compatibility with a proprietary format as your argument against lock-in as being a factor.
Pro tip: Don't blame compatibility for open software's piss poor track record in usability from a Human Factors standpoint. Especially when I didn't explicitly mention compatibility.
Pro example 2: GIMP. Another bit of software that has LONG been hobbled by poor design from a HMI perspective.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's easy (that's why I haven't tried to help), but don't fall into the trap of blaming someone else (Microsoft) for putting out a product that is easier to use and then act surprised when people prefer Microsoft's product.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
iTunes isn't fast at all, and it's about as efficient as the United Nations. We're talking about a ~100MB music player app here. It consumes vast amounts of RAM and disk space, has extremely poor support for formats not officially sanctioned by Apple, and for music players not produced by Apple. For its extreme bloat, it's not very feature rich. Oh, and you have to use it if you want to use Apple's latest gizmos. There's a lot of hatred of iTunes out there, jfgi. I thought it was a Windows only thing, but many Mac users seem to agree. Another thing is that iTunes dominates the Mac platform to such a degree that no one has developed a decent mp3 player for it.
Finder: Just not as good as most of the others. Windows Explorer, Dolphin, Konqueror, possibly even Nautilus. How about doing even the simplest things? Slow, sometimes unresponsive w/spinning beach ball.
The BSD subsystem is just poorly done. There's a reason why many of its userspace utilities are replicated by package collections like Fink: the ones in OS X suck. Is python still compiled without readline support?
Hardware support: Yes, let's stick to buying overpriced crap from Apple only. Like any other cult, Apples don't get to hang with the cool guys.
Obsolescence: Now try running this years software on a five years old Mac. It's obsolete.
I'm a hater, yes, but I hate fanboys, not Apple's products. Many of their products are fine (the laptops especially; I've owned one), I just happen to be fed up with the frauds who advertise them at any opportunity. There are tons of those here on Slashdot, often hovering at +5, insightful just for saying they love Apple products. I'm fed up not with their products, but with how they're supposedly "revolutionary" while doing absolutely nothing new, and few things better.
re: market share, we were talking about Apple's supposedly extreme popularity here, which is effectively debunked by their market share. Their profits are entirely irrelevant. You should ask: who cares about their profits? Their stockholders, and the stockholders only, should be the answer. Customers taking joy from the fact that a big corporation makes a profit on them is absurd, yet you see this all the time ... but only with Apple's customers. Why? Because they're fans, rooting for one corporation as if it were a hockey team. But it's a giant tech corporation, and being a supporter of one of them is simply delusional behaviour.
re: massively overpriced tech stock: the stock market is rarely right when everyone has jumped the same bandwagon.