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How, and Why, Apple Overtook Microsoft
HughPickens.com writes James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he "couldn't imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft's, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple's vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person's desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. "Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories," says Toni Sacconaghi. "Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult." According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. "But in the end, it didn't create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection." Can Apple continue to live by Jobs's disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. "The question investors have is, what's the next iPhone? There's no obvious answer. It's almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing."
Uh. They most certainly did NOT create the smartphone sector. And they sure as fuck didn't do it out of "nothing".
Now I admit, yes, Apple's been disruptive, in a good way, for the industry. But can we stop slobbing the Apple knob?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I have been pretty unhappy with microsoft for years, and not really a fan of apple in any big sense, but lately i think the live translation services, and the holo lens are shining light into where microsofts avdanced research has been going. They're becoming more like IBM, used to be a big name for consumers, now are on the bleeding edge of behind the scene technologies
"Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult."
"Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult." That's why Apple has had its share of failures..."
Additions mine. This is one fact that a simple google search would have shown. One may ask, are the authors of these pieces paid?
Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds are the true visionary.
Gee, it sure is "nice" to mention the "visions" of MS and Apple...but, how about their workers who they conspired to keep at lower wages. Is it only me who realizes that the lower salaries of these people meant that they had less money to start their own companies and be entrepeneurial? How about the "small guys" who they crushed with their own resources and patents...like Stac Electronics (although Stac had the resources to win that battle).
History is written by the victors...the NYT never seems to mention the "small guy."
Microsoft sell to people who want to use computers without learning how they work.
Apple sells to people who want to look richer than they really are.
In reality, Apple is competing with the makers of fake jewelery.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Well, I'd like to give credit to Microsoft for giving Apple its success. People fed up with their shenannigans.
Sure, Apple has made some mistakes that didn't go anywhere ( Newton )
and Apple has also insulted its customers more than once in a severe way
( removal of local sync between iPhone and "mothership" computer was a recent
example of the latter ). And iPads are to me a joke because they lack easy file transfer
and run iOS instead of OS X, but obviously some people buy iPads.
At the end of the day Apple stuff tends to suck less than many alternatives.
Apple stuff is often easier to use and nicer to use as well.
People who compare alternatives notice this and spend money accordingly.
Technically if you adjust for inflation MSFT from 1999 still has the market cap crown. AAPL is likely to pass them later on this year.
Apple Newton was AFAIK, one of their first PDAs on the market in the early 90s. It's not much of a stretch to say that a smartphone is essentially an internet-enabled PDA that can also make calls. While the Newton failed, the iPhone was eventually a big success due to technology advances allowing for a smaller footprint and appealing design aesthetic.
From where I'm sitting, it seems like Steve Jobs is getting credit for Steve Balmer's profound and pervasive ineptness.
....but Steve Jobs has passed on.
Those that follow, are exactly that, followers. Neither Apple nor Microsoft has anybody capable of the vision thing.
My money is on the Next Big Thing coming out of the Maker movement.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Up until 2011 Nokia was the worldwide leader in smartphone marketshare when Samsung took over the top spot and has held that title to the present.
So not only did Apple not invent the smartphone market they have never even been the leader in it.
NTT had them in Japan.
Apple did make smartphones a mas consumer device, added more functionality, and made them easier to use than the others.
And there is their marketing - well, Jobs' - genius.
Jobs made the smartphones sleek, stylish and into a fashion statement and luxury product. Apple's market share is dwarfed by Android's, but Apple's profitability makes the Android people look like peasants.
Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.
Errr, the two conditions may not be mutually exclusive, but perfection is in the eye of the beholder.
The company alpha can control every brush stroke to his complete satisfaction and still be mistaken in his vision.
Eased out of the company he started in a garage, I believe Jobs was just the right mix of had something to prove and accurate vision. Being a hands-on-every-stage individual often implies an inability to delegate to or trust coworkers, so it isn't always a successful way to manage.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Apples customers pay more so they make more money. Desktops with Windows still dominate the market.
But Microsoft is a software company which are plagued by piracy - non paying customers.
If Microsoft could get every Windows user to pay a license cost as low as the OS X cost - their revenue would overcome Apple:s revenue with ease.
Apple on the other hand make software that requires their hardware. They also have become successful reseller of third party software.
Also lets not forget that they are successful at selling music and movies.
If you sum up the Microsoft sphere. Microsoft, Spotify, Netflix, Adobe etc and you will find them a lot larger. Include all "partner" companies and Microsoft becomes quite large compared to Apple.
Apple ships mid and low end tech today - at high commodity pricing. In that, it has won a battle, and its reward is very large profits. But aside from the media conglomerate driven apple store - and both reside largely in consumer/prosumer space - what is apple shipping? Its IPad sale numbers are falling. There are some harsh limits where Apple lives in a box it can't escape just like its users. It relies heavily on others being Mac friendly. The Mac server is an afterthought.
As for a computer in every pocket? No, not on your nelly. Apple have a long long way to go before its an apple that sits in everyone's pocket. It fundamentally hates the 'cheap market' - yet ships ram soldered into the board and disk not much better - stuff you see at chromebook sale level. And aside from the consumer based shop level, Apple is out of the big players the worst placed for cloud.
When it comes to future tech and cloud, Apple doesn't have answers. Its just the end device. While that continues to certainly make good sales money, it means that its potentially at the mercy of amazon, google, azure. Potentially. No one is going to drop support for good end client structures, but it means Apple will be forced to play nice with people it hates.
In the meantime, despite being at farce level in terms of windows - MS is making large steps with azure and the application stacks its working on.
That is precisely what a control freak is - someone who believes that things should be a certain way and refuses to compromise. Everything must bow down to the vision of that person. You can try to spin it as a "passion for perfection" but ultimately it's exactly the same thing.
Love sees no species.
My heading reads like the article. When looking back it's amazing what we can prove. Apple almost disappeared because of that mentality. Apple was the biggest PC maker when they lost the market. Apple was the biggest smartphone maker when it lost the market. The reason they were successful, as well as reason for their downfall is the same. Give the user what they want.
When Apple was leading in PC sales they produced an economical system which allowed the user to own a computer. IBM took that away because they continued on Apples lead and allowed the user to modify the system. With thousands (if not more) people scratching itches Apple could't compete. On one side you had IBM that was less restrictive stole the market and on the other you had Apple who was not permissive in modifications. Again we see the same with iOS and Android. If MS wants to take the phone market all it has to do is open Windows phone and remove all the restrictions, or at the least be less restrictive than Google. If MS would allow any app store it would take the lead. Or even less restrictive allow people to use and modify it as they see fit.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Wind power. Bandwidth. Chinese market.
Artificial intelligence / automation will almost certainly put up bigger numbers than that. As Gates said "A breakthrough in machine learning will be worth 10 Microsofts"
Both companies started in the world of garage built computers. They entered a field dominated by well funded business partners like IBM and DEC and showed that "toys" affordable to ordinary mortals could be fun and useful. Now Apple and Microsoft are today's IBM and DEC, and twenty years from now there will probably be new players in their place.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
> The most successful companies need a vision
Agree. Otherwise people start pulling in different directions. Like Apple in the 1990s.
> and both Apple and Microsoft have one
Disagree.
Apple's early 1980s vision was to put the GUI on the desktop. They did that, and then spend the next decade floundering.
MS's vision was to put the NT kernel everywhere. They did that, and then spent the next decade floundering.
Apple's resurgence may be smart, or it might just be better timing.
show me a quote from 1998 where apple envisioned a computer in every pocket. did they release the first imac that year because they thought a computer + 15-inch crt would fit in my pocket? did they move to acquire numerous digital video editing companies in that timeframe so they could put them in my pocket? why did they wait until 2007 to finally put a computer in my pocket? why, apple, why???
and i don't think apple disrupted the two markets that this guy thinks they did. (hint: it wasn't the mp3 player and mobile phone markets)
"Sorry, but you are, right now, living in the world created by Apple."
4 out of 5 smartphones in the world bought by consumers is made by Google.
Microsoft still dominates the increasingly irrelevant and dying desktop PC market where Apple remains a niche player.
Sony is the absolute king of the console market.
The only place anyone's 'world is dominated by Apple' would be hipsters who spend their days drinking shit coffee at Starbucks.
The difference as I've seen it is Apple has always worked on both the hardware and os. That gave them the ability to control the end user experience very precisely. Microsoft has farmed out hardware, and that has hurt them and created blind spots. Microsoft has never taken the whole user experience seriously. One big problem is Microsoft has never seriously handled the issue of viruses and that has hurt them immensely. I think the service pack for windows 7 has the message on it during install that says 'Free'. (I think they had conversations about charging for it). Every time I see that message I think how crazy MS is to think that making something work right is something the user should pay for. I think Microsoft's surface is and interesting development although is too expensive for me and most of the home users I know.
Jobs' genius and Ballmer's ineptitude are not mutually exclusive concepts.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
The reason Apple makes so much money is simple. They don't cheat themselves on profit margins. Microsoft is not by itself in giving away the store in technology.
Remember how they typically market a new product and if sales are stale they quickly discount the price. This becomes a accepted practice and very soon people expect that prices will drop. Just look at how the PC industry and Microsoft over reacted to Chromebook's. Probably one of the worst margin products in computing.
But Microsoft started to give OEM makers free Windows to combat Chromebook's and meanwhile Apple just continued to sell more Mac's. The business model Apple adopted was Sony's. Make people believe you build a better product and people will generally pay more for it. Sony's failure, in many ways was not Sony itself, but rather its customers who decided the Sony brand was just not special after all. Someday, maybe Apple customers may begin to feel that way too?
Again, the resistance to discounting your product is going to pay off if you can convince consumers to buy. Microsoft seems to fail at creating that quality connection and so has its PC partners. I personally, as Microsoft would not cave to discounting my product to compete with the likes of a Chromebook. It degrades your value and hurts PC makers who basically make both Chromebooks and PC's anyway. If you make a decent Windows version and PC makers make good PC's. They will sell themselves. After all those that buy a Chromebook would probably have not bought a Mac or a pricier PC computer anyway. So why give up margins for them?
So, a few years after Jobs died, how does his cock taste? I have to admit, you sure are game to keep sucking it.
...because of their iCrap phones and tablets. It most certainly isn't because of their computers.
Now, if they released OSX where people could install it on their own non-Apple systems, then the game is afoot!
But, that will never happen because Apple is stupid.
There was NO smartphones before the iPhone. Speaking as a guy that used them all, everything else was utter garbage compared to the iPhone.
Ah. When in doubt, ad hominem it out!
They were garbagephones, not smartphones.
Please provide both qualitative and quantitative differentiation and proof that all the products you're slandering conform to those definitions.
Are you fucking kidding?
Do you want the NICE answer or the HONEST one?
NICE: No. I'm not kidding you.
HONEST: No. I'm not kidding you. And if you weren't so hung up on brand fascism, you'd be adult enough to realize that I wasn't kidding in the first place.
Things like momentum scroll and pinch-to-zoom were made out of thin air by Apple. There was nothing like it.
Yes. You're talking about a singular FEATURE. Yes, the feature helped revolutionize the market. But the market existed BEFORE the feature. Simply because the feature becomes ubiquitous doesn't mean that the entity that introduced it created the original market, or that the market somehow died and was replaced by a similar (but not too similar) market wholly created by the people who brought the feature to you.
THIS is the REAL mobile market that Apple created from scratch.
Oh. Now we're going to go with a "No True Scotsman". Because the market that pre-existed Apple was somehow a "fake" market. But Apple created a "real" one.
I'm just going to laugh at this. That's about all the attention this deserves.
There was absolutely nothing like it, no matter how hard the Android/MS fangirls try to rewrite history to claim that Apple didn't invent the modern smartphone industry.
They didn't. The only revisionism is on the Apple Fanboi end (where you're coming from). They basically helped redefine the modern smartphone market. I'll give them that. And all of the big players in the market owe them kudos. But, getting down to brass tacks, they didn't "invent" it.
If you don't believe me, then explain why Google had to REDESIGN Android after seeing the iPhone introduction?
*Facepalm*
*Deletes the rest of the the Jobsian knob-slobbery as there's no arguing blatant fantasy.*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Maybe it had nothing to do with Apple. Maybe Microsoft just got lazy.
[quote]Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person's desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket.[/quote]
I'd say Microsoft was the better one here. Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person's desk. Apple foresaw a computer in every rich person's pocket. One of these is a far more admirable attempt at business.
How, and Why, Apple overtook Microsoft: the iPod.
> "couldn't imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft's, has won.
You mean, you can't now imagine a situation where Microsoft would ever be bigger and more profitable than Apple?
2. More than 70% of credit transactions are not loans, the balance gets paid every month. Credit card companies are raking in 2% commission on these sales without taking the risk of advancing an unsecured loan. Most retailers are not giving 2% discount to non-credit cards because of contract with credit card companies. Only when the non-credit card usage reaches a critical mass, they will flip and customers and retailers will split that 2% off the credit card companies and banks. Waiting for a company with credibility for mass market adoption.
[*FN1] 100 *( 1 - (15000 miles/year) / (55 miles/hour) / ((365 days/year) *(24 hours/day)) )
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm sure they are working up a neurocannula down there in Cupertino...the iJack
Without Steve Jobs Apple is just like Microsoft
No matter how you hate Steve Jobs, that guy is the one with the radical views
The world already got its walkmans for decades but it was Steve Jobs who knew he could do much better than the Sony Walkman (and all the copycats) and iPod was the answer
There were already smartphones (actually what was available before iPhone should not be categorized as smartphones, they were more like featurephones than smartphones) with the a-z keyboard on the keypad
It was Steve Jobs who moved the keyboard from the keypad to the screen
Let's compare Bill Gates with Steve Jobs
Bill Gates is from a very wealthy family, with a mother who knows people in high places
Steve Jobs is adopted. His birth dad is from Lebanon, and after knocking up his birth mother, abandoned his birth mother and went back alone to the Middle East
That is why Steve was put up for adoption because his birth mother couldn't bring up a son on her own
Steve Job's adopted parents are middle class people. Financially stable, but in no way can be compared to the wealth of Bill Gates' family
Bill Gates was enrolled into the first class university, and dropped out - he dropped out because he has no fear, after all, he got his wealthy family to fall back on
Steve Jobs didn't make it to first class university - there wasn't enough $$$ anyway. His 'university' is Reed College in Portland, Oregon
When Steve Jobs dropped out, he did not have a $$$ filled family to support him, he needed to find the money himself
When Bill Gates created Microsoft he could afford to rent comfortable office space and hire people --- Bill Gates got so much money that he could even afford to buy a program, called QDOS, from Tim Paterson
On the other hand, Steve Jobs started Apple with his pal, Wozniak, in a garage
Bill Gates' successful break was from his mom's link to IBM's hotshot
Steve Jobs' break is based on his ingenuity and determination
Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple once - and without Steve Jobs around, Apple Inc turned into a pool of Apple jam - they actually brought out a dud - the Apple Newton
Only when the Apple Inc was in rock bottom that they brought Steve Jobs back --- and promptly with Steve's Macintosh Apple rebound
Microsoft ? With or without Bill Gates Microsoft will still be Microsoft, because Bill Gates, unlike Steve Jobs, has little or no vision
On the other hand, Apple with Steve Jobs is a jar of Apple jam
Since the departure of Steve Jobs, Apple Inc hasn't come up with any new stuff that make sense - all it got is iteration of the same-old-shit, iPad and iPhone, that's all
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Funny how the Newton gets left off the canonical list of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand then.
sPh
Market capitalization has nothing to do with profit, or even sales. It has to do with stock price, which, again, has nothing to do with profitability or any other measure of success of a company.
I don't respond to AC's.
Microsoft was making fondle-slabs back in 2000, and in 2015 they still haven't figured out how to make one that customers want.
There were Wince phones back then as well, and nobody seemed to want them either.
Ah. Goalposts firmly moved into PDA-land now...
How refreshing...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
IBM Simon: 1992.
iPhone: 2007
Elisha Gray (the guy who actually invented the telephone! Bell beat him to the patent office by a mere twenty minutes) patented an electronic handwriting capture system in 1888(!).
Cadre marketed the first commercial predecessor for the tablet/slate PC (which was just a tablet input device for a desktop) in 1982. The first x86-based tablet that used a commercial OS was the 1985 Pencept. Not having a touchscreen it required an electronic stylus. The first tablet touchscreen (AKA slate) was the Grid in 1989 that ran on DOS.
I still own and use a Fujitsu Stylistic 3500 tablet PC that runs on Windows ME (it originally ran 98SE) from 2001.
iPad: 2010
Oh, and the thing that started it all, the iPod? Sorry, that is pretty much entirely based on a Kane Kramer patent from 1979 called the IXI plastic music box. The Touch, which came out in September 2007, was the direct predecessor of the iPhone - pretty much all they did was throw in a SIM and the actual phone electronics in place of the main storage (heck of a compromise, eh?). The iPad was a forked progression of the 1st Generation iPhone which pretty much just got bigger and bigger screens until it surpassed "phablet" status and became a full-fledged tablet - with the iPod Touch screen interface.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Apple is wrecking any other company in the industry. $18B quarter earnings with a goldmine in sight is the sign of business genius. Most everything they come out with translates into money raining down from the sky.
So yes, they're really a genius. Ballmer was incompetent, but Apple is a powerhouse in the tech industry.
I don't know why you would such an obviously idiotic claim that anyone can see for themselves isn't true.
Apple has never been the worldwide market leader - EVER.
For those of us old enough to have witnessed the last 40 years of computer evolution, I can tell you with 100% certainty that it's all about the user experience and not about low cost or availability. Apple's successful products are a pleasure to use. Apple's failures weren't. IMHO, nothing that Microsoft makes is a pleasure to use. There was a time when the computer nerd in me enjoyed dinking around in the OS or the hardware but no longer. I have work that I need to get done and anything that impedes my progress or is tedious to use gets tossed out. Sadly, I can't do that for everything I need a computer for (are you listening, Intuit?). I have the same view of the entirety of the web. The whole thing is built like the city of Cairo or the postal system of Costa Rica (pre 2007).
Dammit, please. I watched the touchscreen market, via DigiTimes, for years. The geeks in Taiwan who were carving the niche for ATM touchscreen displays were the top of the touchscreen pyramid. Apple was buying IPods (pods not pads) from Taiwan contract manufacturers, who would show other "cool stuff" they had. Apple saw it quickly and wrote software and gets a lot of credit, but designed Taiwanese inventions into it. I was told the small firm Apple claims did it for them in Vancouver was from the Taipei outfit.
Apple basically did to Taiwan what Bill Gates did to IBM. Which is great, I have no problem with it, but please give Terry Gou and Simon Lin (the Jobs and Gates counterparts in Taipei) some credit for what happened. They are the reason the Samsung vs. Apple patents go nowhere - its because Taiwan geeks made the hardware. It's less the invention of the hardware than it is the licensing fees. Control of the licensing fees is what made Gates and Jobs, and that's largely a legal play. Again, fine, but it just pains me to see the actual engineers ignored.
Gently reply
MS gained critical mass as the PC market boomed - that's the only reason they are around. Until a few years ago they were also able to help hardware vendors sell new stuff by deliberately turning each new OS into a performance hog, helping vendors justify selling new stuff. Vendors in turn helping MS push their new OS because of reasons.
That aside, MS is mostly known for stifling innovation rather than bringing it on. The odd kinect or something aside.
Apple on the other hand always did well when the control-freak Steve Jobs was in charge. Say what you want, but the man knew what he was doing. His analysis of the market and his reflection on end-user computing in general were and still are fun and enlighting to listen to. Apple never, or very rarely, wastes your time with broad-strokes and/or half-assed bullshit. When they make a statement on their position or product line and why they have it that way it's usually spot on. With Gates and Balmer it is either boring or bullshit.
Steve Jobs was personally interested in building computers that don't suck. He truly wanted devices that he would use every day. His tantrums when someone delivered crap were feared and his persistance in pushing his people to better output was legendary. MS compared to Apple is like American cars compared to German cars. The German cars where all driven by the CEOs of the companies that built them themselves - in motor city each boss had a chauffeur. Ferdinand Porsche would notice instantly if a product he had was shit - because he used them every day. Crysler? Not so much. Look at Detroit today, and you know where that attitude lead them.
As much as I dislike a company having so much power, Apple deserves to be on top. They've turned tech-stuff into fashion and can ask 800$ for a new iPad from the next guy (and girl!) on the street. I won't fall for it - my Lenovo Yoga 2 is way better in every aspect and cost less than half - but most people will.
How MS can even remain in the market that strong is beyond me. Subscriptions for an Office Package? An OS? You've got to be kidding me! ... I personally expect MS to be squished a little in the next few years, if not crushed. Apple from the high end, Google+Huawei+Xaomi etc. from the low end. No, no, sorry folks, my bet is on Google and the fruit crew and MS losing ground is long overdue IMHO.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
There were cell phone based payment systems before iPay, but now the point of sale terminals are going to finally happen. I think apple Pay is going to be a huge money maker as it becomes wide spread. It's timing is interesting. Credit card makers in the US are on the cusp of rolling out chip and pin and merchants will need to upgrade their point of sale terminals. . No one is excited about this mandated cost since analyses have shown didn't change the total amount of fraud (in the long run), it just shifted it from in-person fraud (where the chip works) to internet sales. However, apple pay, which does work, can just slip stream right along on the mass pos changeover without imposing an extra cost the merchants were not going have to pay anyhow (for chip and pin).
Second, this year at least, apple appears to have the best finger print reader. As motorola noted recently they left finger print ID off the new nexus because all the other vendors of the technology produce unsatisfactory finger print ID. It's either too many false positives or too many false negatives.
The challenge to apple pay of course is the market share of handsets. But as long as there are enough to make it worth making the NFC sensors compatible with Apple's bank authorization schema they will be in stores, giving apple a growing drip feed of cash.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Ineptness? While he is large, boisterous, and a bit of a buffoon, you have to give Balmer credit for greatly increasing Microsoft's market value over the length of his tenure as CEO and for starting many of the initiatives that are coming to fruition under Nadella.
Apple hasn't really overtaken Microsoft. Apple focuses on consumer tech. That takes large R&D budgets, large design budgets, and a lot of risk. It is also a segment where you have to continually invent new markets or else you will become irrelevant very quickly. Microsoft has always focused on the enterprise. There are large dollars there without the huge risk of being a consumer oriented tech company. Sure, Apple has more cash on hand and a larger market cap than Microsoft. That's not at all the same as Microsoft being on the ropes. One or two major flops or missed opportunities and Apple's fortunes will turn quickly. The enterprise isn't going anywhere. Both companies have their market segments identified and are doing just fine in them.
Sometime in 2000 there was a coffee table sized book of non production apple designs with early ereaders, cheque book size computers etc that never made it into production etc.
Those ideas pre internet shopping have now been translated into reality in other things. Microsoft instead looked at pc boxes, ignored the internet and killed its competitors like novell to sell 'servers'. The average apple buyer knows what his/her thing can do, and the cloud and how it powers the naked selfies is something they dont care about.
I use linux and am happy with it- the last mac i used had a motorola processor.
iPhone 4s was a $600 phone. Now you can get a much better device for under $50.
A $50 phone doesn't help if the current versions of applications don't run well on a $50 phone. Sure, applications from roughly the iPhone 4s era would have run well, but these applications have since been replaced with newer versions that expect beefier hardware to be available. (See Wirth's law.)
It's called being profitable.You are inherently more profitable when you mark up your devices 400% higher than your competitor's offerings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
Bill Gates' mother served in the United Way's executive board, where IBM's CEO, John Opel, was also a member
When Bill's mom heard of IBM looking for an OS for their new PC, she told her son that 'insider information' and Bill Gates went out and purchased QDOS from Tim Paterson for $75K, add a Basic interpreter, and presented it to IBM
And the rest, as they said, was history
Nothing could be further from the real reason ' how' and ' why' Apple has overtaken Microsoft. Firstly, it was by deliberate design! Second, the vision is far beyond the " next great thing". Lastly, execution. Tim Cook knows execution. Real developers ship and the numbers speak for themselves.
I don't know, but Tim Cook said it tasted like an Apple. :)
From an engineering perspective, it's not that big of a change
Well that certainly begs the question as to how Blackberry, Palm, Motorola, and Microsoft all missed such a small change...
If Apple did something that was a tiny change then you are inferring every single one of those companies is run by gibbering idiots.
Personally, I think better of people in those other companies - even Microsoft.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Balmer doesn't really have much to do with it.
Fact is, Apple is a behemouth - but not in the computer sector.
Yeah, they have super earnings and revenue, but almost all of it is iphones (for every $1 the earn from Macs thay earn 11, IIRC, from iPhones).
Next up from Apple, half-trillion dollar business and more... Implants.
your sci-fi Borg chip. some say they're already doing it, but that's Alpha 0.11.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
well it wasn't so shifty as that. Digital had IBM over a barrel for the OS. They knew Gates' OS code was purchased, but they wanted someone else to maintain it. They didn't really care about the OS as long as it could handle the basics. they thought the hardware would be the big seller. Gate's best decision was pushing for the OS to be non exclusive... letting Microsoft sell it too.
IBM never thought it would matter one bit of some home brewers could also run the OS...
One word: Yosemite.
Intel does expert mostly level technology
Apple does a marginal amount of that and then has huge factories in china where the workers earn very little and then sells their stuff to people who could care less as long as its trendy and then apple pockets the difference
For me, opening cell companies to reasonably priced data (by jumping in at the right time and locking in with AT&T) is what Apple did to open the market.
At the time, Sprint actually offered unlimited EVDO data (they called it "Power Vision", back then) as a $10/mo add-on. They even had a 500 minute plan as part of their "SERO" offering for $30/mo which even included unlimited data. I had Sprint back then, and while EVDO speeds are a sad joke today, they absolutely smoked the EDGE speeds the iPhone got on AT&T's GSM network. Also, no one was using it back then to post pictures of their lunch and watch Justin Bieber videos, so the data speeds were relatively consistent. Sprint's phones, on the other hand, were fucking awful.
What Apple bought to the market was a smartphone that people actually enjoyed using. But, by popularizing smartphones among the masses, they've opened a Pandora's box of data usage that has truly made $10 unlimited, unthrottled data, a relic of the past.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
If "all apps are web apps" were actually the vision of Mr. Jobs, then Safari would have had photo/video uploads before iOS 6 and WebGL before iOS 8. Firefox OS looks like a far more earnest implementation of this vision.
If in the ideal world of the apple hater, I wonder what version of DOS we would be using on our Blackberry's?
AmigaDOS perhaps?
What is a smartphone if not a PDA with a cellular radio?
Apple pioneered lack of choice and single vendor dominance over whole of hardware and software infrastructure. Congratulations.
Perhaps your problem is the definition of nothing, but to me that part is accurate since Apple did not sell any kind of phone or touchscreen device up until that point... and it really was a dramatically different device than any smartphone sold at the time.
From the standpoint of what Apple had done until then, it was from nothing. Resource wise, they had some money coming in from the iPod at that point, but they were tiny compared to all other companies making smartphones at the time. Lots of people dismissed the chances of Apple's making any kind of dent in the market based on that alone...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The LG Prada was like the other smartphones of the day, but used touch (NOT multitouch) instead of a stylus. There was nothing about it like the iPhone save for superficial appearance (and some of that was obviously tweaked in response to the iPhone pre-launch demo).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How much longer can apple keep spinning iPhones into gold though?
Of course the same argument can be made about office/windows/outlook -- but still. there's a bit more of a lock-in there, and no reasonable competition.
Apple will always have to contend with Android, which is constantly improving -- much like desktop Linux has been constantly getting better, and at a faster rate than OSX / Windows.
that Microsoft lost it is Steve, but not Jobs, Balmer.
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Microsoft got where is through brutal business negations like licensing of windows, bundling of office products and coupling of products like Outlook and Exchange.
Apple got where it is by making products people actually want to use.
We were 90% dumb phones until Apple moved in. What they did was open up the APIs and only charge a 30% cut from the vendors (plus a token $100/year fee for developer access). The dev kits for existing "Smart" phones available in the US started at $20k and the split was usually 60/40. There were tonnes of fees along the way too. On top of that Apple pushed for better and better hardware with slimmer profit margins; relying on volume and add on services (e.g. iTunes) to make up the difference.
Apple didn't create it out of nothing, but they did crack the market wide open.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
^ Obligatory
i don't think apple overtook ms at all, their respective peaks are just shifted in time. proportionally ms has actually had an impact on market and society orders of magnitude bigger than apple has ever had. it's just ms stopped cutting it a long time ago, imho because they started to worry more about maintaining their dominance at all costs than about providing new and interesting stuff for the people. like apple seems to be starting to do now, by the way (if you can say that apple has any dominance to maintain whatsoever, of course).
corporations, you know ... they may have their moments, but in the long run all of them are bullshit.
For all practical purposes Apple invented the GUI-based personal computer, the modern portable music player, the smartphone, and the tablet computer. It is really completely irrelevant that there were similar things in each of those categories that existed in tiny volumes or in a lab somewhere.
The funny thing is, anyone who disagrees with you doesn't remember what PCs were like in the 1980s. Until the Mac came out, nobody on the PC was trying to make PCs with windows and consistent menus. Applications on the PC were like Lotus 1-2-3 - each one completely idiosyncratic and unintuitive. Yes, the Xerox Alto and the Andrew window manager also existed, but nobody in PC land was trying anything like that. What would be the point? It would just be another idiosyncratic interface. Once the Mac came out and showed how different applications could have the same interface, then Windows was created as a knock-off, and it wasn't until Windows 3.0 that it really started to take off. Around that time the DOS-based applications changed over to a Windows-like (Mac-like) interface - e.g., Word 5.5 was the first DOS Word to have a standard interface.
Likewise with the iPhone, yes there were gadgets which technically had a lot of the same features an iPhone, but the UI innovations in the iPhone were enormous. And then as you said, everybody copied the iPhone design - it's not like the tMobile G1 was a world-shattering device.
You are 100% right.
Obviously it wasn't Steve Jobs doing it all himself as a one-man fount of genius but he built the right organization and got them to do the right thing.
To be fair, that wasn't Microsofts vision; it was IBM's. Actually... It was Digitals but IBM felt they needed a "personal computer" too. Microsoft had nothing to do with it except for buying an OS and adopting it to IBM's hardware. (and made bank since IBM refused MS their fixed price and went with royalties. Microsofts business vision is, be lucky as hell!)
ipod and iphone
Call it luck, genius, timing, whatever. But that's why they are so successful.
Oh, and the thing that started it all, the iPod? Sorry, that is pretty much entirely based on a Kane Kramer patent from 1979 called the IXI plastic music box.
Guess what? Technology builds on previous technology. The automobile was a progression of earlier technology. The PC was a progression of earlier technology. So is almost any technology you care to name. Here's the thing. The actual implementation of the idea in a market is every bit as vital and often far more difficult to execute than the initial raw idea. Ford wasn't the first company to build cars but they were the first company to mass produce them in a way we would recognize to this day. Apple wasn't the first company to come up with a GUI but they were the first company to bring one to market in a way that was appealing to folks like you and me. Merely creating an idea is nearly worthless unless you can also turn it into something people can use. Something people want or need. Something that scratches an itch for them. For almost 40 years Apple has regularly figured out how to actually turn ideas into products with wide appeal. The fact that they weren't actually the first to come up with the raw concept is not especially important.
There are almost no non-trivial technologies you can point to in the last 1000 years that did not build directly off of earlier work in some form or fashion. Yes you probably can trace the iPod to work done 30 years earlier. So what? That IXI plastic music box you mention wasn't useful to anyone. The supporting technologies such as flash memory, mp3 encoding, the internet, compact microelectronics, online music stores, etc simply didn't exist in a usable form at that time because the state of the art in technology hadn't gotten there yet. Apple wasn't first into lots of technologies but they regularly have been first to get technologies turned into products that people actually gave a shit about. And that matters. A lot. Apple is the most valuable private company in the world because of that fact.
FTS: "Bill Gates said in an interview that he "couldn't imagine a situation..."
That's all you need to read. Bill Gates has a terrible track record of imagining anything. >640k memory, the Internet, Apple's recovery, etc, etc. Just because he was once a very successful moneymaker despite his inability to predict things should mean you stop asking him to predict things.
The next thing along those lines will be Google Glass. Probably not in the exact form of Google's device, but a box in your pocket with all the electronics of a modern smartphone but using a Bluetooth-connected set of glasses (with a mic/headphone incorporated) for display. Not just a small prism, the breakthrough will be when it can use the entirety of both lenses for coordinated display overlaying the wearer's field of vision and using pupil-tracking to identify exactly where the wearer's looking. Text input would be via voice recognition. We're fairly close to that, the display's the part of the tech where we still need work.
It's not Harvard, but has a reputation as tough if slightly unconventional college. I didn't know Jobs went there, but I'm not surprised at all. Aside from that , pretty much agree with your comparison.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
IMHO, the big difference is that Microsoft has been historically focused on the enterprise. Very boring and business-like. User interfaces and usability have been decent since Windows 95, but still took a backseat to Microsoft's enterprise onslaught. The end users could wait because they were effectively captive customers. And once the web and internet went mainstream, Microsoft spent a whole lot of resources on trying to lock customers into closed Microsoft-only technologies (e.g. Java sabotage attempt, C#, IE, etc) instead of thinking what's going to be the next hottest thing. On the other hand, apple was able to see what's going on beyond the traditional desktop and laptop. Perhaps that was the only route Apple could take considering Microsofts dominance in the traditional PC and server market.
Openmoko did it first, not Apple!
The iPhone was just sticking a GSM modem in an iPod, big f**king advancement.
Apple are just really good at marketing.
They could have made a heap more money, if they had created a religion.
Can someone explain to me how iPod was better than Walkman or Zune or anything else? The early ones before iPod Touch look just as dull, even blank-and-white screen!
People who wanted music everywhere and had too much money could spend on PDAs or early smartphones like those with Symbian instead.
The best thing to happen to Apple was Steve Jobs.
The second best thing to happen to Apple was Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer was so obsessed with imitating Apple that he would copy all sorts of Apple ideas that were good for Apple but made absolutely no sense for the Microsoft product line. Case in point: Apple created Apple Stores because no one else was doing a very good job of marketing Apple products. The stores have been a resounding retail success. So monkey-see-monkey-do Ballmer figured that Microsoft needed their own stores to market Windows, Office, and the X-Box. So MS started following Apple wherever they went. But the big difference is that the MS stores must be losing BOATLOADS of money (though no one at MS is willing to talk about it)-- yet Ballmer and now Nadella are too proud to admit that they are failures. We have a large and busy mall in town that houses both an Apple Store and a Microsoft Store. We were in the mall the other day and went by both stores. The Apple Store was the usual hive of activity. The MS store? Not so much. We counted all of two customers, and several staff members just standing around trying to look busy. You could almost smell the embalming fluid when you walked by! What is this doing for the MS market cap?
My boss got us smartphones back in the Windows CE days, because he's a huge geek like the rest of us. The problem was that while work was willing to pay for the phone part the data was WAAAAY too expensive so we didn't have that. Combine that with lackluster wifi availability and the fact that you had to manually turn it on and off because it drained battery out of range, and we didn't end up using the "smart" portion much. Not because it was too hard to use or any of that BS, but because there just wan't the ability.
Now, data is cheap, and my phone auto roams on and off of wifi, and work has complete wifi coverage. So I use my smartphone often for its "smart" features. It is always on data of some kind and like you, I never get near my cap, particularly because it is usually using wifi.
That is the biggest thing that changed and made smart phones useful to me, and others I know. It because affordable and practical to use the smart features. Data is something that is an included feature in most phone plans these days. $40/month can get you a line with some data.
Another thing that changed is just the progress of technology mainly the processors. Before switching to Android I had a Blackberry, which I loved, except for its slow CPU. Due to the excessive amount of JavaScript and such shit on most websites, browsing with it was slow. Not so much waiting for data, but rendering. However I not can browse whatever I want, my phone has a very high power CPU in it that can deal with all that shit, so it isn't too much slower to load a page than on my desktop.
Touchscreens and such weren't the thing that changed it for me. I still liked Blackberry's real keyboard + scrolly ball interface. It was having an affordable data plan plus a processor capable of handling the BS of the modern web.
Lol. Just waiting on the tech. These will all be many-billion dollar businesses: fully immersive 3D entertainment; electric cars; household robots; sex robots; space habitats; real 3D printers (by which I mean they'll be able to print electronics, mechanicals, hydraulics and so on -- able to print any item you can provide the raw materials for. The "3D printers" we have today aren't good for much yet.)
As to what you could do today and have a chance to meet that metric... all I know is it isn't going to be an iWatch class device.
Of course if we were collectively smart we would have "Manhattan project-ed" solar, solar storage, and the means to pass massive amounts of energy around long before now at a similar level, and we'd already be off the middle eastern tit.... but of course that means the big oil cronyism in congress would have to be reined in, and that isn't happening.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Before Apple was printing money with the iPhone it was printing money with iPods. Microsoft had nothing to do with that.
When Bill's mom heard of IBM looking for an OS for their new PC, she told her son that 'insider information' and Bill Gates went out and purchased QDOS from Tim Paterson for $75K, add a Basic interpreter, and presented it to IBM
Actually, Gates was originally pitching the BASIC interpreter. However, his interpreter ran on an 8-bit CP/M from Digital Research. He needed a 16-bit port (since the IBM PC was 16-bit). He had a meeting scheduled with Gary Kildall from Digital, but Kildall blew him off to personally deliver a product to a customer (which involved flying Kildall's plane, which he enjoyed). Gates was so ticked that he went out and bought the port that Paterson hacked together and sold that to IBM instead.
Originally Gates was going to provide the BASIC interpreter (after all, that's what MicroSoft sold). Digital Research was supposed to provide the operating system. Kildall blew off Gates and IBM, and we've all had to suffer through the consequences. Instead of an operating system built from the ground up by people who knew what they were doing, we started with a hacked up clone and further development was done by compiler designers rather than OS designers.
People have this tendency to view Gates as an evil genius. That's not really it. He was simply in the right place at the right time. He fell into the situation that created his wealth. Because of his mother, he got the BASIC interpreter contract and thus the OS contract. No evil genius. Just a bit of inherited privilege and a lot of dumb luck. Emphasis on the dumb. Oh, and I will give him this. Given the situation, he did make it work. He does deserve some credit for making it work at all given the circumstances. However, we would all have been better off if Digital Research had provided a professionally built operating system instead.
The very reference quoted for cash reserves paint a much grimmer picture.
Of a company getting its shit together but still being far away from standing back up, not yet breaking even but already looking for ways to cut another billion dollars of expenses on top of that goal, sacking thousands of employees, planning further layoffs and actually quite needing those $150 million to pay off a short term debt ($152 million actually) and other debts.
Also, claiming at the time that they didn't need partners nor that they were approached by anyone.
That was July. Next month they announce they're partnering up with Microsoft.
$150 million wasn't just money. MS agreed not to sell that stock for the next 3 years.
It was a guarantee of solvency and trust.
"MS plans to hold on to Apple stock. They must know something no one else does. Maybe it's not the time to get rid of it yet. Maybe it's time to buy more of it."
That's what $150 million and partnership with MS got them. Not just cash in hand.
https://www.fool.com/Calls/199...
FOOL CONFERENCE CALL SYNOPSIS*
By Debora Tidwell (TMF Debit)
Apple Computer, Inc.
(Nasdaq: AAPL)
One Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 996-1010
http://www.apple.com/
ALEXANDRIA, VA (July 17, 1997)/FOOLWIRE/ --- Apple Computer, Inc. released their third quarter 1997 results after the market close yesterday. Revenues for the quarter were $1.7 billion compared to $1.6 billion last quarter and $2.2 billion in last year's third quarter. International sales accounted for 53% of revenues in the quarter. Gross margins for the quarter were 20% compared to 18.9% last quarter and 18.5% in the year-ago third quarter. The company reported a net loss for the quarter of $56 million or $(0.44) per share compared to a net loss of $708 million or $(5.64) per share last quarter and a net loss of $32 million or $(0.26) in the year-ago quarter.
OPERATING LOSS. The company's loss from operations was $60 million representing a significant sequential improvement from the loss from operations of $186 million exclusive of charges for restructuring and writeoffs of in-process R&D. The company's loss from operations a year ago was $160 million. Operating expenses for the quarter were $408 million, down $81 million from last quarter, exclusive of charges for restructuring and the writeoffs of in-process R&D, and down $111 million compared to the year-ago quarter. One analyst noted that they are ahead of their projected expense reduction targets and asked if there were new targets. Apple responded that consistent with wanting to drive the break-even point below $8 billion, they will want to drive the operating expenses, which had been targeted at $400 million per quarter or $1.6 billion, lower.
UNIT SALES. In terms of sales, revenues increased by 8.5% sequentially. Unit sales were approximately 698,000 and represented a 6-8% sequential increase over last quarter. The sequential growth was driven largely by sales in the US education market, as well as greatly improved sales in Japan. Unit sales of Apple-branded entry level desktop products, which they are now referring to as "value product line" internally grew by approximately 27% during the quarter while sales of the flagship PowerMac products grew by 32%. Sequential growth in these two product lines were offset in part by a 29% reduction of Powerbook unit sales. They attribute the reduction in Powerbook sales to both an easing in the pent-up demand for their high-end 3400 series, which was introduced last quarter, as well as general softness in the entry level segment of the Powerbook space.
OTHER INCOME. Other income breaks down as follows: $18 million in interest income, $18 million in interest expense, a foreign exchange gain of about $6 million, and then a couple of other minor items. Claris was a little lower than last quarter at $55 million in
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Apple is currently in the lead, but that's not the same as "winning". 10 years ago it was inconceivable that Apple would overtake Microsoft. Right now, it seems inconceivable to most people that Microsoft could overtake Apple. But that's exactly what "inconceivable" means -- it means you can't imagine it happening. Apple isn't perfect. And Microsoft isn't nearly as stupid or slow or doomed as your average Slashdotter would like them to be.
Microsoft's investment amounted to a 7.5% increase in Apple's liquid assets at the time. It was a settlement of a lawsuit, nothing more, nothing less.
Simply weak sauce. Just to pick one, the 20th Anniversary Mac was never intended to be a mass market product, but a limited release for those with the interest (and couch money) to buy one. To pick another, the Newton was a profitable spinoff until Jobs axed the product line. But not before it birthed PDA's, which birthed smartphones.
"making great profits with messes": Microsoft cared for profit, "making great techs for the masses" was Job's motivation.
Even though Apple has made a fortune leading the public to believe otherwise, Jobs didn't design or make the changes to Apple's products himself; engineers like Wozniak, Hertzfeld and Ive did. (He has patents on record, but they're not for any of Apple's actual products.) Likewise, *his* choices were what almost destroyed Apple, and would have if John Sculley hadn't worked hard to limit the damage he could do. (Some good articles: Showdown at Apple, this Forbes article. The "Father of the Macintosh," Andy Hertzfeld, also wrote an article on the events leading up to it.)
Jobs' genius was actually in presenting items to their best effect and persuading people — intuitively knowing just what to say, how to say it, what appearance or impression to give, how to use his charisma, and so forth. That's why it was his original job with Wozniak: one Steve created the product, the other found buyers & investors. Apple, which had little left to lose by the mid-90s, thus hired Jobs so he could play the role of the long-lost genius behind Apple who had returned to "save" it, somebody that they could use as the face of the company for the public to latch onto.
Apple isn't innovating any less than before: they were already bouncing between phone & tablet prior to Jobs' death. It just seems to be doing more poorly now because — well, much as "Dumbo" was led to believe he could fly due to a magic feather and that he'd fail without it, Apple led its iDevice-era fans to believe that Jobs exerted some magical force on the company that produced near-miraculous tech, and that it will fail without him. You're just now seeing the company from the outside perspective of people that were never affected by Apple's/Jobs' tactics — very much like the Apple II-era/Woz fans (including me) came to in the early 1990s.
FWIW I don't have anything in particular against Jobs, but it drives me batty when a company or individual is given a great deal of credit for other peoples' work. Give him credit for his incredible talent at persuasion & salesmanship, and for the role that trait played in directing the industry — but let the unsung engineers, artistic designers, etc. behind the actual products have their due as well.
Throughout the history of personal computing the landscape is littered with companies that have missed the boat. Back in the 70's IBM had built a very successful business selling big iron to huge companies. Personal computers? Those are for hobbyists, thought they. So along comes Microsoft, who did see how important personal computers were going to be and struck a very lucrative deal to license the operating system (DOS then, Windows now).
Fast forward to the 2000's and along comes Apple with this little gadget called the iPod. Apple didn't invent the portable music player. Lots of them were already on the market and they all had one thing in common - they sucked. All Apple did was come up with a slick interface and an easy way to synchronize your music from your laptop to the iPod (iTunes). Then came the iPhone and the iPad. Both devices extended on the slick interface and offered superior vertical integration between devices and OSX.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is twiddling it's collective thumbs. They completely missed out on the music player/smartphone/tablet revolution. Sure, they have products in all those areas but market share remains in the single digits. Now they are playing catchup to everyone else.
Around the same time, Google seizes on the void left in Search. Microsoft could have had this market too but let it slip.
Finally comes Facebook and the whole "Social internet" thing. Google was perfectly positioned to control this market but, once again, big company misses boat.
So it seems to me that all of this is just part of the evolution of business. Someone comes along with a clever idea and quickly grows into this massive company. Then they rest on their laurels and miss the next big thing. Big companies are good at making money - at milking the corporate cash cow. Not so good at real innovation.
John Sculley's vision has been proven correct.
"and iPod was the answer" B.S. Yeah who can forget every 'search' or porn you tried to come up with was a picture of the "new" overpriced Apple MP3 player? HATED IT! Damn apple geeks. And I have hated it ever since he hired a few 1000 slack-time employees to rename that picture of an iPod over and over again... Some innovation a little screen and a "wheel." Oh and it was white! So hard to clean and keep clean white. Never mind that people were listening to MP3s on other perfectly functional flash players, CD players and making their own car stereo out of old supermarket i486 machines and 7"TFT screens. (I wanted to do that but never got around to it.) Too cool. Yet the iPod name was substituted for all mp3 flash memory players in the news and TV articles. How did that happen?
Bad software, sold by monopoly, had to be vulnerable to *nix. Macs are for "dummies". PCs with Linux are cheaper, work like Macs, and if you get the right distro installed by a geek, are great for "dummies". So MS is reduced to giving away their OS for free to keep their market share. Google's has a negative price (subsidizes Chromebooks) so they get your eyeballs.
That maybe it has to do that Apple just makes a better product? If you make a shit product no matter how much maketing you put on it people sooner or later figure out your product is shit and go to the other guy that makes a better product.
No matter how much you polish a turd. It is still a turd.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Microsoft believes in iterative refinement, They let the users bang it into shape. Pure waterfall.
Apple gets it pretty much right the first time THEN refine it.
They sold me a phone with the RAM SOLDERED IN?
Good grief, next you'll be telling me that I can't swap out the L2 cache in my CPUs any more...
The smartphone market is NOT simply a larger version of the desktop or laptop computing market. The priorities of the consumers making it up are quite different. You're comparing apples and ... whoops, okay, I'll stop that pun right here.
And seriously, if you think the iPhone 6 or the Macbook Air is "mid to low end tech" ... well, I don't know how to help you. The build quality of the Chromebook is an absolute joke compared to the Macbook Air, and the iPhone 6 ranks at the top of every common smartphone metric.
Oh hang on, ... perhaps I just fed a troll.
Two things:
Thing 1:
Text input via voice is garbage for anything you don't already do in direct, live conversation with another human. Instant example: Mispronounce something, then try to correct it. What we need is a novel new pointing device. My idea of the future tech involved is: Very very f*%^ smart radar, bounced off your skull, that tracks the location of your tongue in your mouth.
Thing 2:
For a long time, these things will need to NOT have an obvious camera on them. The cultural zeitgeist is against it. They'll just have to do augmented reality some other way.
The 4s didn't support 4G and CDMA 3G is horribly slow - 1.5mbps. It did support much faster GSM standards like HDSPA.