Except Google really isn't selling services, they are giving away services and selling the eyeballs that use them.
All of these IBM/Microsoft/Google comparisons collapse when you realize that Google's business model is entirely advertising-driven, and thus largely orthogional to companies like IBM/Microsoft/Apple/Novell who are actually selling the utility of computers. Google is a content/media company. And thus Google's stuff tends to integrate or co-exist with Windows rather than attempt to replace it. You might like Gmail, but it hasn't hurt the sales of Outlook, nor is it ever likely to.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider Yahoo a serious threat to the MS Monopoly, and I can't see how Google is anything more than a sexy version of Yahoo. From Google/Yahoo's POV, the ROI of selling celebrity gossip outweighs providing a spreadsheet service.
And finally, I find the idea of a "Googleplex" where your network activity is being monitored, categorized, and "monetized" (ie, sold) by Google a rather dystopian vision and probably something not worth trading Microsoft for.
First of all, I don't think bringing up North Dakota helps your argument. It's basically a welfare state which hasn't been completely depopulated only because of federal farm subsidies.
Furthermore, you have to agree that it is certainly more efficient to provide emergency services to a large city, even if it is more expensive. A large city may have one or two police forces, while in rural areas every city and county has their own little fifedoms. Compare the official response to 9/11 versus Katrina (NYC: Mayor's in charge. LA: Noobody's in charge.)
But, if you actually broke out the numbers, it probably boils down to how you define "urban". An urbanite may see the exurban suburbs (usually created with massive transportaion and utility investment) as "rural", while an authentic farmer would probably see them as "urban".
OK, let's pretend the central planning clique lays out bus routes in a "web" pattern across the suburbs. Would you take it? No -- you'd still vote with your car. I've seen the economics for cross-town suburban routes where it was significantly cheaper for the government to just buy cab fares for each rider. No, it's not a conspiracy, the busses run to the central city because those are the only busses people will ride.
You also assume that OpenOffice will be as easy to train for as MS Office 12.
Almost everything added to MS Office over the last 10 years or so has been an attempt to make the software easier to use and to reduce training costs. But at the same time, there's a lot of old fundemental UI problems which they have refused to fix because of training considerations. (Such as the modal super-tabbed dialogs from 1994).
Meanwhile, OpenOffice 1.x (haven't seen 2.0) strongly resembles your average 1995 menu-heavy Windows app, and shows almost no consideration for making things easier at all.
I don't really understand the tab bar shown in the MSOffice screenshots (maybe I need training!), but overall it seems that they are moving towards a Pallette-based interface, as seen in Mac Office, while still keeping the "task oriented" stuff from O2003. So, I'm fairly optimistic they can make things both new and easier at the same time.
As you say, the big problem with MacWord 6 was the slowness/bloat/crashing. They went from a program that ran fine on a MacSE to something that basically required a PowerPC to do the same thing.
The "Windows GUI" critique I thought was always overrated. It really just boiled down to the fact the dialog box font was Geneva instead of Chicago. Otherwise, it generally did look and work like a Mac program.
Also, Word 6 included a number of GUI elements such as customizable toolbars and tabbed dialogs that simply did not exist in the Mac GUI calls at the time, so there was simply no option other than custom coding.
Wrong. The perception is that NT management is significantly easier than Unix, and that's why they still own the small/mid-sized business segement despite Linux.
It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is.
Now that's the Microsoft thinking that many of us remember! Probably their loss you don't work there anymore.
But, yeah, Gates is talking about beating OS/2 and WordPerfect, but he's apparently forgotten how. It was the Checkbox Marketing principle -- copy every competitor feature and make it better, and then add your own features on top. Except going up against Linux, MS has left a lot of empty boxes on the comparison chart.
However, as to your point about MS Consulting vs Partners, I would say the current arrangement is the most significant reason MS is attractive as a vendor. They deliver complete products designed to minimize the amount of help needed versus maximize it. I've read a ton of slashdot posts spooging over IBM's services model, but none of these people are running out and buying Lotus Notes. Ultimately that Services focus limits Linux to it's core markets where the Unix talent pools are.
I think you missed the point that there's widespread reports that the red arrow simply never appears for some people. I know my work computer sat at 1.04 until I finally bit the bullet and did a manual upgrade. (Occassionally the red arrow would appear, but mousing over it would make it disappear. ?)
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor. This is fundamentally different than things in the past.
I question how much Microsoft's lack of success against Linux has to do with Open Source Magic(tm) verus just poor product positioning.
For years, Microsoft had great success with NT selling it as "Not Unix", but what they failed to realize was that in certain segments (finance, ISPs), there's a huge demand for something that "Is Unix", and Linux fit that bill on commodity hardware. When MS attempted to sell to these markets, they largely failed because they couldn't understand why the customers didn't see NT as the obvious replacement for something supposedly obsolete like Unix.
As a tangible example, SFU/Interix has been around since 1998 or so, but they've only recently started integrating it into the base OS. Had they seriously provided a Unix application environment years eariler, they would have cut off a big chunk of Linux growth.
Sorry to pop your RMS bubble, but software will always cost money to package, market, and support. That's why Linux is marketed towards wall street banks and not ghetto school children, and MS and Apple are making record profits selling something as commoditized as Operating Systems.
Sure, Apple has and will take advantage of customer loyalty and lock-in to keep it's margins high, the long term trend point the same way. 20% of $300 is much less than 20% of $1500.
Furthermore, the Mac market has grown much more slowly than the PC market as a whole, so it is questionable how much Apple can make up with volume. My theory is that under the Jobs II reign they haven't felt there's a wider market for the Mac, so they've kept prices high and only sold to the faithful. But, who knows, maybe they've changed their mind.
Not to mention that moving to Intel will certainly place a significant downward pressure on margins, as customers can make direct comparisons. Yes the Intel hardware will be better and easier to produce, and that will probably sell more machines. But at the same time, Apple will be hamstrung in it's ability to sell ridiclously overpriced machines (like the old single-CPU PMac). People will catch on if Apple's trying to sell a fancy case for $500.
There wont be much market for OSX subscriptions if piracy of it isn't curbed
Isn't that what the TCPA chip is for? Besides, OSX is already pulling down huge profits with pretty massive piracy in the Mac userbase. It might not formally be a subscription, but Apple has proven they have the brains and marketing to sell annual upgrades.
The bottom line is that if the bottom falls out of the hardware market, Apple is now very well positioned as a software/services company and would survive. That wasn't true 5 years ago.
If Apple lets the situation get out of control it will put it's hardware business in jeopardy.
Apple's hardware business is already in jeopardy -- PC margins are extremely low and getting lower. The $100 PC is only a matter of a couple years away. Bill Gates is even predicting that PC hardware will be given away for free with software or services.
I think Apple's move to Intel really is not predicated on performance or watts (Macs sell just fine without them), but survival in a profit-free hardware market. When HP and a few other vendors crater, Jobs will come out of this with millions of OS X/.Mac/iTunes subscriptions and looking like a genius.
Back in the day, the video game press referred to the Colecovision and Atari 5200 as "3rd Generation consoles". Personally, I think there was a big enough difference in graphics to qualify.
I'd also wedge another generation in there for 3DO/CDi/Jaguar between SNES and Playstation.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but OS X Finder has built-in ZIP support, and no support for Stuffit (due to it being totally proprietary and patented.) Tiger no longer ships with Stuffit Expander.
> I've seen IT people for some major companies who haven't even heard of anything other than zip
Note that "major companies" tend to run very standardized PC environments, making it nearly impossible for someone to install something like WinRAR. You may even have email gateways that just dump RARs because they can't scan inside of them.
And ZIP is the industry standard for DOS/Windows compression, so they're right -- there's very few use cases in an IT environment which would justify a far less widely supported format like RAR.
I like OS X, but don't think your comment is based in reality. OS X is loaded with old backwards-compatibility bits, from NeXT stuff like NetInfo, to ancient BSD/Mach bits, and a ton of obsolete transition APIs.
This is just another variation of the "MS Linux" conspiracy theory. Even though it's a pretty retarded hypothesis, it's been a Slashdot and Linux Zealot mainstay for years. The baseless assumption is that the Windows kernel is so technically flawed that only Linux could save the OS.
Just on a technical level, it would be much easier for MS to put a Linux/Unix-compatibility layer on top of Windows (and they already have to a certain extent), rather than attempt to run all of the Windows infrastructure on top of Linux.
Commodore had a different idea of the Amiga than many of it's users. Commodore either couldn't or didn't want to spend much on R&D -- they would just throw a home system onto the market and let other developers support it. They seemed to ignore the serious applications.
While you and others were buying all of these pricey add-ons, Commodore was trying to turn the Amiga into a 2nd-Rate game console. Which sums up how they percieved their platform.
While they're at it, they might as well add a button to clear session cookies, as well as 200 other options nobody understands.
IMO, the Internet Explorer approach makes more sense on a UI level. "Browser sessions" are usually associated with the window and are generally much shorter. Want to log out? Just close the window. (Of course tabs change that mechanic.)
WebDAV has an Index command and a "real PUT", so I'm not clear on why it doesn't solve your problems. Futhermore, WebDAV has excellent client support in most GUIs, on the same level as FTP.
The only real problem with WebDAV is poor integration between web-server security and OS security with Apache, but there are products that can do that right (IIS).
I was also amazed by the video-capability of the Amiga, but at the same time I'd worked with Sun and Apple systems with beautiful huge bitmapped displays, and it was clear that building a system around Standard-Def NTSC/PAL video maybe wasn't the best approach.
In about 1993, I stumbled across a Quadra 950-based Avid, which did non-linear editing completely digitally. After that, the Amiga Toaster seemed quaintly obsolete.
The other company fighting for Amiga was Atari, who made Commodore executives look lika a bunch of business geniuses.
The biggest problem with the Amiga, business-wise, was that the profit margins for home computes were terrible. Apple survived by going into DTP and graphics, and Commodore tried video editing -- but for the most part Commodore was stuck trying to keep an entirely custom software/hardware platform alive by selling incredibly cheap machines to the video game crowd.
Most FOSS software is not developed because somebody has a "vision" of "taking over the market" or something similar;
Except for KDE and Gnome. Both of them were developed with the intent of taking over the market and becoming the "standard" Unix desktop. And as a result, you have two monoliths that don't really interoperate very well.
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Except Google really isn't selling services, they are giving away services and selling the eyeballs that use them.
All of these IBM/Microsoft/Google comparisons collapse when you realize that Google's business model is entirely advertising-driven, and thus largely orthogional to companies like IBM/Microsoft/Apple/Novell who are actually selling the utility of computers. Google is a content/media company. And thus Google's stuff tends to integrate or co-exist with Windows rather than attempt to replace it. You might like Gmail, but it hasn't hurt the sales of Outlook, nor is it ever likely to.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would consider Yahoo a serious threat to the MS Monopoly, and I can't see how Google is anything more than a sexy version of Yahoo. From Google/Yahoo's POV, the ROI of selling celebrity gossip outweighs providing a spreadsheet service.
And finally, I find the idea of a "Googleplex" where your network activity is being monitored, categorized, and "monetized" (ie, sold) by Google a rather dystopian vision and probably something not worth trading Microsoft for.
First of all, I don't think bringing up North Dakota helps your argument. It's basically a welfare state which hasn't been completely depopulated only because of federal farm subsidies.
Furthermore, you have to agree that it is certainly more efficient to provide emergency services to a large city, even if it is more expensive. A large city may have one or two police forces, while in rural areas every city and county has their own little fifedoms. Compare the official response to 9/11 versus Katrina (NYC: Mayor's in charge. LA: Noobody's in charge.)
But, if you actually broke out the numbers, it probably boils down to how you define "urban". An urbanite may see the exurban suburbs (usually created with massive transportaion and utility investment) as "rural", while an authentic farmer would probably see them as "urban".
OK, let's pretend the central planning clique lays out bus routes in a "web" pattern across the suburbs. Would you take it? No -- you'd still vote with your car. I've seen the economics for cross-town suburban routes where it was significantly cheaper for the government to just buy cab fares for each rider. No, it's not a conspiracy, the busses run to the central city because those are the only busses people will ride.
You also assume that OpenOffice will be as easy to train for as MS Office 12.
Almost everything added to MS Office over the last 10 years or so has been an attempt to make the software easier to use and to reduce training costs. But at the same time, there's a lot of old fundemental UI problems which they have refused to fix because of training considerations. (Such as the modal super-tabbed dialogs from 1994).
Meanwhile, OpenOffice 1.x (haven't seen 2.0) strongly resembles your average 1995 menu-heavy Windows app, and shows almost no consideration for making things easier at all.
I don't really understand the tab bar shown in the MSOffice screenshots (maybe I need training!), but overall it seems that they are moving towards a Pallette-based interface, as seen in Mac Office, while still keeping the "task oriented" stuff from O2003. So, I'm fairly optimistic they can make things both new and easier at the same time.
As you say, the big problem with MacWord 6 was the slowness/bloat/crashing. They went from a program that ran fine on a MacSE to something that basically required a PowerPC to do the same thing.
The "Windows GUI" critique I thought was always overrated. It really just boiled down to the fact the dialog box font was Geneva instead of Chicago. Otherwise, it generally did look and work like a Mac program.
Also, Word 6 included a number of GUI elements such as customizable toolbars and tabbed dialogs that simply did not exist in the Mac GUI calls at the time, so there was simply no option other than custom coding.
Wrong. The perception is that NT management is significantly easier than Unix, and that's why they still own the small/mid-sized business segement despite Linux.
It was based on the no quarter principle-- the idea that if Linux has any protected market, it will continue as a strategic threat. This means that one has to target every single one of Linux's markets regardless of how unprofitable or uninteresting it is.
Now that's the Microsoft thinking that many of us remember! Probably their loss you don't work there anymore.
But, yeah, Gates is talking about beating OS/2 and WordPerfect, but he's apparently forgotten how. It was the Checkbox Marketing principle -- copy every competitor feature and make it better, and then add your own features on top. Except going up against Linux, MS has left a lot of empty boxes on the comparison chart.
However, as to your point about MS Consulting vs Partners, I would say the current arrangement is the most significant reason MS is attractive as a vendor. They deliver complete products designed to minimize the amount of help needed versus maximize it. I've read a ton of slashdot posts spooging over IBM's services model, but none of these people are running out and buying Lotus Notes. Ultimately that Services focus limits Linux to it's core markets where the Unix talent pools are.
I think you missed the point that there's widespread reports that the red arrow simply never appears for some people. I know my work computer sat at 1.04 until I finally bit the bullet and did a manual upgrade. (Occassionally the red arrow would appear, but mousing over it would make it disappear. ?)
Also, the emerging competition from Linux is not like you had with DR-DOS, OS/2 or anything like that. This is the one competitor Microsoft has ever had which is both serious and cannot be destroyed by targetting the vendor. This is fundamentally different than things in the past.
I question how much Microsoft's lack of success against Linux has to do with Open Source Magic(tm) verus just poor product positioning.
For years, Microsoft had great success with NT selling it as "Not Unix", but what they failed to realize was that in certain segments (finance, ISPs), there's a huge demand for something that "Is Unix", and Linux fit that bill on commodity hardware. When MS attempted to sell to these markets, they largely failed because they couldn't understand why the customers didn't see NT as the obvious replacement for something supposedly obsolete like Unix.
As a tangible example, SFU/Interix has been around since 1998 or so, but they've only recently started integrating it into the base OS. Had they seriously provided a Unix application environment years eariler, they would have cut off a big chunk of Linux growth.
Sorry to pop your RMS bubble, but software will always cost money to package, market, and support. That's why Linux is marketed towards wall street banks and not ghetto school children, and MS and Apple are making record profits selling something as commoditized as Operating Systems.
Sure, Apple has and will take advantage of customer loyalty and lock-in to keep it's margins high, the long term trend point the same way. 20% of $300 is much less than 20% of $1500.
Furthermore, the Mac market has grown much more slowly than the PC market as a whole, so it is questionable how much Apple can make up with volume. My theory is that under the Jobs II reign they haven't felt there's a wider market for the Mac, so they've kept prices high and only sold to the faithful. But, who knows, maybe they've changed their mind.
Not to mention that moving to Intel will certainly place a significant downward pressure on margins, as customers can make direct comparisons. Yes the Intel hardware will be better and easier to produce, and that will probably sell more machines. But at the same time, Apple will be hamstrung in it's ability to sell ridiclously overpriced machines (like the old single-CPU PMac). People will catch on if Apple's trying to sell a fancy case for $500.
There wont be much market for OSX subscriptions if piracy of it isn't curbed
Isn't that what the TCPA chip is for? Besides, OSX is already pulling down huge profits with pretty massive piracy in the Mac userbase. It might not formally be a subscription, but Apple has proven they have the brains and marketing to sell annual upgrades.
The bottom line is that if the bottom falls out of the hardware market, Apple is now very well positioned as a software/services company and would survive. That wasn't true 5 years ago.
If Apple lets the situation get out of control it will put it's hardware business in jeopardy.
Apple's hardware business is already in jeopardy -- PC margins are extremely low and getting lower. The $100 PC is only a matter of a couple years away. Bill Gates is even predicting that PC hardware will be given away for free with software or services.
I think Apple's move to Intel really is not predicated on performance or watts (Macs sell just fine without them), but survival in a profit-free hardware market. When HP and a few other vendors crater, Jobs will come out of this with millions of OS X/.Mac/iTunes subscriptions and looking like a genius.
Back in the day, the video game press referred to the Colecovision and Atari 5200 as "3rd Generation consoles". Personally, I think there was a big enough difference in graphics to qualify.
I'd also wedge another generation in there for 3DO/CDi/Jaguar between SNES and Playstation.
HTH.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but OS X Finder has built-in ZIP support, and no support for Stuffit (due to it being totally proprietary and patented.) Tiger no longer ships with Stuffit Expander.
The standard Mac format is now Disk Images.
Won't work on Unix. I'm pretty sure the old PKUNZIP program supported wildcards.
> I've seen IT people for some major companies who haven't even heard of anything other than zip
Note that "major companies" tend to run very standardized PC environments, making it nearly impossible for someone to install something like WinRAR. You may even have email gateways that just dump RARs because they can't scan inside of them.
And ZIP is the industry standard for DOS/Windows compression, so they're right -- there's very few use cases in an IT environment which would justify a far less widely supported format like RAR.
At least Apple supports their hardware. How late to market was a 64-bit Windows for AMD? (does it even offer driver support competitive with Linux?
To this date, Apple has not released a complete 64-bit OS for G5 machines, and given the switch-over, they may never will.
Whatever point you were trying to make, you really chose a poor example.
I like OS X, but don't think your comment is based in reality. OS X is loaded with old backwards-compatibility bits, from NeXT stuff like NetInfo, to ancient BSD/Mach bits, and a ton of obsolete transition APIs.
This is just another variation of the "MS Linux" conspiracy theory. Even though it's a pretty retarded hypothesis, it's been a Slashdot and Linux Zealot mainstay for years. The baseless assumption is that the Windows kernel is so technically flawed that only Linux could save the OS.
Just on a technical level, it would be much easier for MS to put a Linux/Unix-compatibility layer on top of Windows (and they already have to a certain extent), rather than attempt to run all of the Windows infrastructure on top of Linux.
Commodore had a different idea of the Amiga than many of it's users. Commodore either couldn't or didn't want to spend much on R&D -- they would just throw a home system onto the market and let other developers support it. They seemed to ignore the serious applications.
While you and others were buying all of these pricey add-ons, Commodore was trying to turn the Amiga into a 2nd-Rate game console. Which sums up how they percieved their platform.
While they're at it, they might as well add a button to clear session cookies, as well as 200 other options nobody understands.
IMO, the Internet Explorer approach makes more sense on a UI level. "Browser sessions" are usually associated with the window and are generally much shorter. Want to log out? Just close the window. (Of course tabs change that mechanic.)
WebDAV has an Index command and a "real PUT", so I'm not clear on why it doesn't solve your problems. Futhermore, WebDAV has excellent client support in most GUIs, on the same level as FTP.
The only real problem with WebDAV is poor integration between web-server security and OS security with Apache, but there are products that can do that right (IIS).
I was also amazed by the video-capability of the Amiga, but at the same time I'd worked with Sun and Apple systems with beautiful huge bitmapped displays, and it was clear that building a system around Standard-Def NTSC/PAL video maybe wasn't the best approach.
In about 1993, I stumbled across a Quadra 950-based Avid, which did non-linear editing completely digitally. After that, the Amiga Toaster seemed quaintly obsolete.
The other company fighting for Amiga was Atari, who made Commodore executives look lika a bunch of business geniuses.
The biggest problem with the Amiga, business-wise, was that the profit margins for home computes were terrible. Apple survived by going into DTP and graphics, and Commodore tried video editing -- but for the most part Commodore was stuck trying to keep an entirely custom software/hardware platform alive by selling incredibly cheap machines to the video game crowd.
Most FOSS software is not developed because somebody has a "vision" of "taking over the market" or something similar;
Except for KDE and Gnome. Both of them were developed with the intent of taking over the market and becoming the "standard" Unix desktop. And as a result, you have two monoliths that don't really interoperate very well.