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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."
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.
right and touchscreen smart phones were widely used before the iPhone? yes you had business phones. they had shitty web browsers, could barely display one email at a time, and were a joke.
The apple introduced the iPhone, and all those companies what had smartphones before are either gone, or fading away. So yes you are technically correct apple didn't create the smartphone sector. Apple turned a tiny niche, into a massive piece, showing companies how doing something right all the way through can lead to massive profits.
So when you turn a few thousand units a year into a few billion units it is building it out of nothing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Did you notice how most of them were before the return of Jobs at an older and wiser stage of life?
I don't think the U2 ipod represents a huge flop given all the other ipods were doing well, and the cube is a fantastic design that was just too expensive (some would say it birthed the current Mac Mini).
While there's no denying Apple helped build the sector into $140B (or whatever it is), the real innovation was bringing data to users at a reasonable price.
I had some lame windows smart flip phone prior to the iPhones coming out. But, it wasn't subsidized by my employer. The browser was garbage, and the email was rudimentary. I lived in fear that something would misbehave and I'd get slammed with $100's of dollars in data fees from AT&T. I bought an early iPhone and lost that fear. Ultimately, the closed ecosystem drove me to Android. Now, I struggle to get to 10% of my monthly data cap.
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.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
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 !
Microsoft still dominates the increasingly irrelevant and dying desktop PC market
Fallacy. The desktop is, and will remain relevant.
Fallacy. The PC market is NOT dying.
The PC market is in the midst of a correction.
Prior to the latest rounds of smartphone/tablet introduction, people were primarily using PCs in situations where a full-blown Wintel system was complete and utter overkill.
With touchscreen smartphones and tablets becoming more or less ubiquitous over the last 3-5 years, we're seeing people looking to replace their older desktop/media/laptop PCs with something, and finding that tablets and the like fit the need better and at a better price point than a full-blown desktop/laptop.
Additionally, in business, we're seeing virtualization starting to make inroads into reversing the trend of moving from centralized resources to localized resources.
As noted, modern Wintel hardware is GROTESQUELY overpowered for most office productivity uses. And in lots of businesses, servers are wasting massive power on idle cycles. On top of that, the support costs, even with dedicated personnel, can be astronomical.
So, instead of dropping a $500-1000 system on everyone's desk, they're virtualizing. Users get a thin client or RDP into a terminal server and work from there.
This way, the business can lock down their platform, deliver only the software needed for the business (saving them money), and allows them to be more agile, since they can set up an office pretty much ANYWHERE, so long as they have internet connectivity.
Now, neither the virtualization market, nor the smartphone/tablet markets have hit critical mass yet. So there's likely to be a bit more of a drain from the desktop PC market for a bit. But it'll eventually peter out and the PC market, while smaller, will still be there. Additionally, it'll allow PC manufacturers to better utilize their resources to deliver products that fit their new market. Rather than shotgunning product all over the place.
So, anyone who's trying to sell you the "The PC is dying" line, basically doesn't know what they're talking about.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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
It's like Apple took the world of steam powered cars (BlackBerry, Nokia, Ericsson) and gave us a Porsche/Lexus/BMW at a Toyota Corolla price in one iteration. You'll note that all 3 of those giants have all but disappeared, much like all the steam car companies, and almost as fast, which is remarkable given that those three were already the "winners" of the cell phone market consolidation and had global markets.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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...
You're confusing inevitable industry evolution for copying Apple. The LG Prada did those things before the iPhone, because that's the way the industry was headed whether Apple ever released an iPhone or not. Apple won their case against Samsung only because the judge disallowed evidence Samsung had prepared showing phones they had in the design phase before the iPhone was announced, because they missed a filing deadline. Like I keep telling people, just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean Apple invented it. And likewise just because other companies started doing it after Apple, doesn't mean they copied Apple.
Wow, talk about Reality Distortion Field. Apple just had the biggest quarter in history. It came after they abandoned Steve "no one is going to buy a big phone" Jobs' arbitrary and damaging restrictions on what products the company could make. His ego was so inflated, he thought everyone should use the same product that best fit his needs. Since his death you've gotten an iPhone with a wider aspect ratio (something Jobs opposed), a smaller iPad (something Jobs opposed), giving buyers a choice of two different iPhones and iPads (something Jobs opposed - he thought you were so stupid you'd be confused by two choices), and a phablet iPhone (something Jobs opposed). And that's just on Apple's product lineup. If you don't see other changes and improvements in the market, it's because you're willfully ignoring them. (BTW, the MBA has one of the worst screens on any laptop above $500 - not sure why you're holding it up as your champion. The MBPs are much better.)
Most of us who don't like Apple dislike them not because they're Apple, but because they artificially restrict market choice. But Cook has been doing a good job giving users back the choice that Jobs took away. And as long as they continue down that path, there's little reason to continue to hate Apple. You folks who love Apple so much that you hate everything else OTOH...