Apple Isn't the Next Microsoft (and That's a Good Thing)

Nerval's Lobster writes "In a new Gizmodo column, Andreas Goeldi calls it the 'frosted glass' effect: when a prominent tech company's latest upgrade to its flagship operating system features frosted-glass highlights as its primary innovation, you know that company is facing a period of severe stagnation. That's what happened to Microsoft around the time of Windows Vista, Goeldi wrote, and Apple's going down the same road with iOS 7. In light of what he views as Apple's sclerosis, it wasn't difficult for him to abandon his iPhone in favor of a Google Android ecosystem. But is Apple really becoming the next Microsoft? In short: no. Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals. Rumors have persisted for quite some time that Apple is prepping big pushes into wearable electronics and televisions, both of which could prove lucrative strategies if executed correctly. Goeldi faults iOS 7 for its frosted-glass effects, which he compares to those of Vista; but similar graphical elements aside, it's unlikely that iOS 7 will run into the same complaints over hardware requirements, compatibility, security, and so much more that greeted Vista upon its release. In fact, iOS 7 isn't even finished."

Comments

Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum

[schlachter]

It was easy for Apple to innovate a few years ago because they had no momentum in the space. They were agile and free to create. It's much harder to do that when you have a huge codebase that's a decade old, with hundreds of millions of users who have expectations of your product.

Nonetheless, I can't help but think if Jobs was still around, there would be more exciting stuff in the pipeline.

Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Yes, but this is a corporate management problem, not a technical one. Go read the sad history of Xerox where, at one point, they needed the signatures of 47 managers to make a change to a copier, as hungrier companies cranked out modern innovations.

Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum

[CanHasDIY]

Nonetheless, I can't help but think if Jobs was still around, there would be more exciting stuff in the pipeline.

Perhaps... but equally likely, there would be some regular stuff in the pipeline that seemed exciting, because Jobs was hands-down one of the best marketers to ever walk the face of the Earth.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that's a compliment or insult.

Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum

[exomondo]

Frankly the new Mac Pro says to me that they are just about out of innovation (at least in that space). It's a desktop computer where the core components are virtually non-upgradeable, now maybe that's ok but what do you get in return for that compromise? Not much, sure it's smaller but when has that been a problem for desktops? It's basically a more powerful mac mini.

It sacrifices front-facing ports in the name of aesthetics and deals with that compromise by giving you the ability to rotate it to get to the back, now that is assuming you actually enough slack sitting on your desk to pull the cables of all your peripherals around.

That product really is an exercise in being different for the sake of it with virtually no measurable advantage.

Re:Shifting paradigms is easy with no momentum

[rtb61]

Yep, without Jobs, there is no one left around Apple to go wandering around and steal ideas and claim them as his own, quite as effectively as Jobs could.

Of course they aren't...

[Zalbik]

Of course Apple isn't the next Microsoft

Microsoft used shady business practices to destroy competitors and thereby screw the customer.

Apple cuts out the middle-man, and just screws the customer directly.

Agree. Apple isn't the Next Microsoft...

[faragon]

... Apple is the Next Apple without Steve Jobs, again.

apple profits from every product, MS doesn't

[alen]

MS has lost billions of $$$ on bing, x-box and other experiments funded by Windows and Office license sales which are now slowing and decreasing. microsoft has been innovating for years but not profitably. they had commercial tablets before apple, mobile devices and cloud services long before cloud became a buzz word.

apple on the other hand has a rule that every product must be profitable. even the apple tv turns a small profit.

Re:apple profits from every product, MS doesn't

[asmkm22]

This is a good point. People are quick to confuse Apple with a company that actually innovates and pushes boundaries and stuff, when in fact, they just release highly-polished (and sometimes very well-timed) products that are often 5 or 10 years old.

Re:apple profits from every product, MS doesn't

[CAIMLAS]

The problem Microsoft has is that they stopped being a company that has innovative products a long time ago - arguably they never started, because their 'traditional' linear products (OS, Office) had too much momentum.

Look at Microsoft Research, for instance. The one notable product to come out of that is the Kinect and related technologies. We've seen MS ads now for years for something similar to SketchInsight, which looks incredible - but no working POC for anyone to ogle or demo. This would be a Killer App in a heartbeat for pretty much everyone I know - and the missing link that MS has so much needed for Windows 'tablets' for the past decade.

Then you've got things like their AI and machine learning research, as well as OS research projects. Those show promise, but don't see much light in marketable products. Imagine what MS could've done with "Windows Mobile/Phone" had they not focused on changing UI paradigms against peoples' will?

The biggest thing MS has going for them at this point is their vendor lock-in, and it's much worse than we feared it could be back in the 1990s. "Cloud services" were so far in the future they weren't really conceived. Today, we've got everything in the MS stack integrating tightly with Office 365 - and Exchange is most certainly the worst offender in this regard, with much of the traditional functionality available in 2003 and 2008, and fixed greatly in 2008, gone again for O365 integration. If you're a MS shop, you're more or less stuck, and options for migrating that data off their platforms diminishes as time goes on simply by the motion of the machine - regardless of any actual, needed features present in the upgraded products. (When was the last time you've heard of someone upgrading MS products for anything other than 'compatibility with everyone else, and bug/security fixes'?

Re:apple profits from every product, MS doesn't

[tlhIngan]

This is a good point. People are quick to confuse Apple with a company that actually innovates and pushes boundaries and stuff, when in fact, they just release highly-polished (and sometimes very well-timed) products that are often 5 or 10 years old.

Correct. But that discounts the importance of polish and timing.

Polish is very important - a technical feature is completely pointless if people don't use it, can't use it, or are unable to figure it out.

Timing is important in business because, as Apple will see this year, people get bored. Releasing product all at once in the fall seems like a great idea but damn the other 3 quarters where everyone bitches about "not innovating".

The iPod is an example of both - polish in that it was a player with tons of storage, in a formfactor that was convenient for a lot of people. At a time when MP3 players were JUST taking off, Apple produces something that has a slick UI (the wheel makes navigating through huge lists quickly), slick syncing (firewire, when most computers sported USB1.1) and iTunes (making it stupidly easy to manipulate your music library and convert your CDs to MP3s). A couple of years later they tossed in the iTunes store, bringing the music industry into the 21st century, kicking and screaming.

The iPhone brought polish to smartphones. In the name of Mobile Safari. Because until then, most mobile browsers were crap (I had one with Opera Mobile - the better ones, but it was slow and was showing its age).

The iPad brought polish to tablets - because instead of crappy lets-run-Windows, it ran iOS which was more adapted to touchscreens than even OS X is. Sure you could run OS X on a tablet, but the experience was mediocre at best - GUI concepts and designs for mouse and keyboard just don't translate well to pen and touches.

Hell, the iPhone wasn't considered revolutionary - Apple hoped it would maybe get 1% of the market, or 1 million phones. (It took 77 days to hit 1 million). Of course, the 3G sold 1 million opening weekend, despite well know problems.

The iPad was universally panned - it was so bad, Jobs even said they'd cut the price if it didn't sell well.

And the iPod, well. The millionth iPod sold in 2003, and by then it was the 3rd gen iPod with dock connector.

Don't discount polish. When people say things look "inconsistent" or "work poorly", it doesn't matter how big the numbers are on the spec sheet - the user ends up forgoing those features. Open source is primarily bad at this (often because non-programmers are discounted - this includes technical writers, designers, and testers - yes, it's your itch, but when users complain something works badly and could be better, perhaps it could go from "your itch" to "everyone's itch" and not "try this alternative").

Comes to show to trust NO ONE

[Billly Gates]

There was a time back in 1999 in the good old days of slashdot and IT where I had a debate with someone over how evil MS and Bill Gates were.

Back then MS was unstoppable! If investors found out MS was going to compete agaisnt you then your stock would be shorted as no one could stop the all powerful Microsoft!

I mentioned if Steve Jobs won the world would be heaven. No more expensive crap. Free standards galore. No more DRM with .WMV and IE 5.5 dictating the future of computing. Apple was cheered as the good guys trying to stop the DRM madness of RealPlayer and Windows Media Player. Remember?Fastforward today and I think Steve Jobs is fucking a more greedy monster than Bill Gates ever was. True their products are better quality and more UI and consumer data is put into products before being released, but man they charge and lock you in.

What Changed?
Itunes gave Apple a financial incentive for DRM and lock in. Apple monopolized the mp3 market and almost the phone before Android did a quick rescue. Their Macs are falling behind as more effort is on consumer gadgets these days.

Would I want a Google only world? Fuck no equally

Chrome's webkit is not W3C compliant compared to IE and Firefox with its extensions and some sites that only work with Chrome when you turn on HTML 5. If they owned 93% of the market ala IE 6 from 2003, you can bet javascript would go bye bye for whateverthefuck script that they invented, sites would not render properly if you used advanced features, and Google would ignore W3C and put Google Store as the master of the e-commerce universe!

I would not want just Android phones either streaming ads from Google servers 100% of the time, nor would shop owners want to pay 300% more for ad revenue as they would ahve a monopoly on this.

Business and greed is evil. We are all greedy and evil ourselves with a shade of gray. It is our human nature sadly. Competition frees us, though I do have to say I am disappointed in all web browsers recently and kind of miss Firefox when is owned just 15% of the market but maybe that is because IE sucked so bad then it seemed like heaven?

Re:Comes to show to trust NO ONE

[rolfwind]

Itunes gave Apple a financial incentive for DRM and lock in.

Um what, they pushed to get music publisher's to sell tracks without DRM. As for video, where can you get video without DRM? Netflix? Amazon? Huh?

Re:Comes to show to trust NO ONE

[phantomfive]

I mentioned if Steve Jobs won the world would be heaven. No more expensive crap. Free standards galore. No more DRM with .WMV and IE 5.5 dictating the future of computing

I have no idea why you thought that. Remember Steve Jobs was the same one who ripped off Woz back in the day. He sued for UI lookalike rights. He got in a fight with the FSF over gcc. If you thought Jobs would be all roses and heaven it's because you weren't paying attention.

Re:Gizmodo

[rudy_wayne]

Considering the source (Gizmodo) it's not surprising that they think Vista's "frosted glass" effect was its main innovation. Vista had its problems, but many of them were the fault of third party developers who dragged their feet when it came to making their software run properly on Vista. Having used Vista every day for 18 months, it was better than XP. Not as good as Windows 7, but not as bad as most people tried to claim.

Re:Gizmodo

[dan828]

Oh come one, Gizmodo used to be a nice gadget site, now it's just a hipster blog with tech as one of the themes.

Re:Gizmodo

[Anonymous Coward]

3rd Party developers were all to blame? MS created many of the problems themselves; they didn't need help. Many 3rd party developers weren't ready for Vista but they like everyone else didn't think MS would actually release Vista in that level of incompleteness. They thought they had more time. Those developers didn't create the Vista Compatible/Ready fiasco. They didn't make UAC so damn annoying. They didn't cause MS to throw out everything after years of development and start from scratch using a different kernel.

Actually, Vista was the move where Microsoft stopped trying to support the babies. Many 3rd party apps improperly used API calls, long marked deprecated, long warning against misuse in the documentation, were finally culled and the edge cases nailed down. Throwing tentacles into the registry and tweaking hidden and unsupported things were no longer allowed. Dangerous things like writing directly into system directories now needed UAC. Annoying? Sure, but if the apps weren't trying to (ab)use the system, they wouldn't have needed those escalation prompts in the first place.

Apps and drivers that failed to respect the proper models paid the price. The stuff worked in XP despite itself because no one ever thought Microsoft would break compatibility. Well, when you were getting 0-day exploits popping up every few days, it's time to lock that crap down.

It's just like the move from Windows Me. The environment was so polluted and haphazard it was time to clean house. And, if you recall, there were plenty of whining developers back then, too, as none of their stuff worked in Windows 2000 / XP unless they stopped relying on unsafe, crash-happy tricks.

yes, and it's wrong for another reason.

[mbkennel]

"Apple seems to recognize everything that seemed to elude Microsoft's corporate thinking six years ago: namely, that even the most successful companies need to keep breaking into new categories, and keep innovating, if they want to stay ahead of hungry rivals."

Microsoft was not unaware of that at all. They tried very hard for a long time, after all Windows Phone was worked on for many years before iPhone.

Microsoft's problem was that they weren't good at it. Vista was another example. The common problem is internal corporate politics, and the key to that problem is at the top.

Re:Gizmodo

[tverbeek]

He's mistaking the superficial smoke and mirrors for what is/isn't going on under the hood.

Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.
OS X had fresh eye candy, and a somewhat revolutionary software framework behind it. It rocked.
WinXP had fresh eye candy, and a more solid NT kernel underneath. It rocked gently.

The bottom line is that everything new is going to be loaded with new eye candy, because it can be. If you want to determine whether that eye candy is trying to disguise problems with the underlying system software and company behind it ... you need to look at that underlying system software and the company behind it.

Sad no-one realizes how different iOS7 really is

[SuperKendall]

What's really bad about all these iOS7 articles is how off they are about what has changing.

If the person writing claims iOS7 is "flat", they have totally missed the point.

iOS7 has gone DEEP, not flat. It's many layers where before there was just a flat tree. It's added a literal new dimension to UI and UIX design.

When you actually have it in hand you may understand better, but just know until then anyone who says iOS7 is "flat" has no idea what the heck they are talking about.

Re:Gizmodo

[TemporalBeing]

3rd Party developers were all to blame?

Primarily yes, though Microsoft didn't help things by changing the driver API between the last RC (RC2) and manufacturer (RTM) releases, thereby breaking most all the drivers that manufacturers had tested.

MS created many of the problems themselves; they didn't need help.

MS propogated a culture of developers using Administrative Rights for nearly every application. It didn't help that many of their own APIs were broken so badly that you had to have those rights to do many things. However, they also warned developer for years that the change was coming, and developers had the opportunity to test on Vista before its release to make sure that wouldn't be an issue - yet most chose to ignore it. Thus the whole UAC debacle which is primarily a 3rd party issue.

Many 3rd party developers weren't ready for Vista but they like everyone else didn't think MS would actually release Vista in that level of incompleteness.

Vista was quite complete when it was released. That was not the issue. Win8 was less polished than Vista upon release (considerably so); but fairing better because it builds off of Vista (as Win7 did).

They thought they had more time.

No. Anyone that tracked the releases - and you didn't have to be in some secret group - knew the release was coming. The betas for Vista were very public and didn't require an MSDN license to obtain either. The only thing that really caught people off guard was the change in the driver APIs that MS did at the last second which only affected those writing device drivers. Those developers didn't create the Vista Compatible/Ready fiasco. They didn't make UAC so damn annoying.

Their failure to modify their applications to not require APIs that needed Admin Rights was what caused the UAC fiasco and made it so damn annoying.

They didn't cause MS to throw out everything after years of development and start from scratch using a different kernel.

You obviously know very little about the Vista codebase and its evolution and history.

Vista is based on the same kernel series as WinXP - the NT Kernel. It was just the next major version (6.0).
Yes, Microsoft had developed a version of Windows that it had scrapped - 3 years before Vista was released - and restarted the development cycle to produce Vista. But that restart was not a wholesale rewrite. It restarted from the WinXP codebase, refactored the APIs for better modularity, and added new features.

The kernel that got scrapped was never released outside of a couple limited distribution alphas and betas. It never really entered the release cycle - other than demos that Microsoft did of WinFS and other stuff. It was too damn slow to be usable.

The main areas of incompatibility between the NT5 (WinXP) and NT6 (Vista/7/8) kernels were that the sound and video drivers were moved from kernel space to user space to help improve stability. Most all other drivers were still compatible or only had minor changes required.

Re:Gizmodo

[Smauler]

Vista had fresh eye candy, but nuts-and-bolts problems. It sucked.

No, it didn't. It sucked on crappy hardware of the time, and it had driver issues early on. Windows 7 could never have happened without Vista... it is basically Vista, but by the time it was released hardware had moved on.

WinXP had fresh eye candy, and a more solid NT kernel underneath. It rocked gently.

XP rocked because it was based on 2k. There wasn't much different between 2k and XP, in the overall scheme of things. 2k was very good as an OS... it's just a shame it wasn't marketed as a consumer OS.

Vista's problems weren't caused by its eye-candy. They were it being a resource hog, and early driver issues. I'm still running Vista on a system I bought when it was first out (now upgraded RAM to 16gb, because it was going free,and gfx upgrade), and my uptime is basically measured in power cuts. Windows 7 is basically Vista with the hardware caught up.