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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."
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.
MSFT would be even more irrelevant than they are already becoming if it weren't for vendor lock-in.
Seriously, where would they be?
In late 90s and early 2000s I managed a university's student computer labs. These weren't some podunk labs with 2 or 3 machines but entire buildings sometimes with 100-200 Windowsmachines and another 30% of them were Macintosh machines. (There were a few linux labs and when I left, we had 2 linux machines per lab)
If you knew the troubles we had getting the students to even use the Macs just for checking email, it could be a lesson in salesmanship. As it was, even when the windows machines were at 100% usage, you would see a long line stretching PAST the Macs while people waited for the windows machines. Hell, I'd see people more likely to use the Linux machines than Macs.
Microsoft may abuse its position through vendor lockin, but to get TO that position it was doing something right. Even now... last night my wife finally convinced me to install Microsoft Office because the slide software for OpenOffice was causing her so many issues.
It's easy to blame Microsoft's dominance on lockin and unfair practices, but that alone isn't why they are the top dog.
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