Since Apple’s market cap eclipsed Microsoft’s, we’ve been treated to Internet-wide bloodlust for Steve Ballmer’s head. Here’s a typical example:
Microsoft is undoubtedly full of very smart people, but as long as they are being run by Steve Ballmer, they’re going to be shackled by his ineptitude.
I wish Microsoft had their evil genius back.
Ballmer isn’t setting the world on fire, but a lot of the anti-Ballmer tirades I’ve seen are mining the same vein as the “Obama hasn’t fixed it yet” coverage we hear whenever there’s a government fuckup. These writers tend to exaggerate the power of the great leader, and underestimate the difficulty of changing entrenched institutions strapped to a particular system of rewards.
In Ballmer’s case, Microsoft is ruled by Windows and Office, because those products make all the money. Without extraordinary intervention, every innovation is subjugated to those products’ needs. We can argue all day about the quality of Windows or Office, but I think we’ll all agree that any subsidiary product that has “Windows” or “Office” in its name is shit. When Microsoft finally takes “Windows” or “Office” out of a product’s name, it’s a powerful signal that the forces of quality have won a hard fought battle over the status quo.
The prime example of this is Bing, which became competitive only after it stopped being called Windows Live Search. Compare Google Docs with Microsoft Office Live. The former is a decent, if limited, web-based word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. The latter is just an enticement to get you to buy a copy of Office. And then there’s Windows Mobile.
Microsoft understands how much they’re ruled by the needs of their marquee products, so they build walls around products they want to succeed, like Xbox and Zune. Both are technical, if not financial, success stories.
Steve Ballmer is like the captain of the Titanic. He might have made some mistakes, but even if he wants to turn his ship, the rudder is just too damn small to overcome the ship’s momentum.
frankdawg
Having worked on a couple of Titanics I want to tell you you got this just right! Fantastic explanation.
Whats funny is that, from the inside, they actually see this as a good thing because you can’t lose focus on the money makers.
sbjules
I’m a tax preparer and bookkeeper and I will always need windows because Apple’s accounting programs are shit.
dmsilev
Windows Phone 7, I believe it’s been redubbed. Since you brought up the Titanic metaphor, I believe this can be filed under “Deckchairs, rearrangement of”.
dms
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
They also tend to expect that these difficult and complex changes will occur in a very short timespan that’s completely unconnected to reality.
Bill Murray
Steve knows that doing stuff is overrated. Hitler, he did stuff, but don’t we all just wish he’d stayed home and gotten stoned?
Unabogie
The Tao of Steve for the win!
OT, but that movie inspired my Overarching Theory of Politics.
It states that in any given Presidential Election, one third of the people will always vote Democratic. One third will always vote Republican. The remaining third, that malleable squishy middle, will look at both candidates and ask themselves which is a Stu, and which is a Steve, and elect Steve. Go back to every election since the dawn of the TV and see if I’m right. Decide which candidate is the Steve and he will have won.
Kennedy/Nixon
Nixon/Humprey
Reagan/Carter
Bush/Gore
Obama/McCain
It seems to fit.
mistermix
@Unabogie: You left out the Ford/Carter Stu vs Stu battle.
Unabogie
@mistermix:
Ford fell down, therefore Ford was the Stu.
Zach
@Unabogie: “The Tao of Steve”
What fraction of the Internet actually catches this? Has that movie caught on in syndication or DVD or something, because I don’t think anyone saw it in the theaters except for me.
Cain
I’m not sure if xbox is that great a success. I thought they lost money because they sold it at a loss? In the end, wii came in and blew all the other consoles away.
cain
John Cole
@Zach: I love the movie, although painfully, much of the movie hits a little too close to home.
henqiguai
What the heck’s a “Stu” (‘stupid’ perhaps) ? And no, I am not a follower of pop music in general, and rock in all its guises in particular (in case this is another of the many many song title references I always miss).
More on topic – yes, turning a big enterprise (except downward) is time consuming. But Steve Balmer seems to be carrying out the classic marketeer/finance specialist in charge of a technology company screw up. The products are coming out too soon and with mediocre support (of course, that could just be my impression, having to deal with figuring out what the hell Microsoft is actually doing so as to facilitate end users getting on with their business simply using MS applications).
Awaiting moderation ? Really ? Was it “stupid” ? Who’d I piss off, this time ???
The Dangerman
Microsoft is well and truly fucked and will remain that way until they are once again innovative (although one can make the argument that they have never been innovative, but have simply used their market power to push their copying of other peoples work).
I’ll never go back to Office; OpenOffice is now my choice. As for Windows, well, it is my OS of choice, but I still run XP. I expected Vista to be a disaster and don’t much know or care about Windows 7 (other than the marketing campaign is shit, as if I give a fuck about the OS choices of people narcissistic enough to think they were actually behind Windows 7).
Bill Murray
@John Cole: for me, the Stu parts are especially close to home
Unabogie
@Zach:
No, that’s my kind of flick. The “quirky indie movie”. Saw it in the theater.
El Cid
What I can say for Microsoft is that every single time I’ve had an issue with Windows or Office and reported it, they very quickly and diligently pursued it with me until the problem was solved. I never had to pay a dime for it, either.
Steeplejack
@Zach:
I saw it in the theater, during a period when a group of us were making it a point to see some indie/foreign film once a week. Saw some clunkers, but a surprising percentage of good stuff.
mistermix
@Zach: It’s on IFC every so often.
@John Cole: It’s one of my favorites, too. Apparently it was based on a real character.
burnspbesq
@sbjules:
Apple doesn’t publish any accounting software of any kind, AFAIK. You’re conflating unrelated publishers and Apple.
You’re not locked out of Apple hardware. Apple makes the best Windows machines on earth. You just need an additional piece of software, either Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion.
Office for Mac is far superior to Office for Windows. The floating formatting palette is worth the price of admission all by itself.
The single most important reason why Macs are superior to Wintel boxes for small business users is Time Machine. Idiot-proof backup will save your ass someday.
EDantes
@El Cid: Really? My wife’s copy of word crashes 5 times a day if she’s forced to use it on a project. What number are you calling?
mikey
Hey, if one is to be fair, Microsoft has had a remarkable thirty year run. It’s pretty hard to name another company that invented an industry, made the right product and marketing decisions to position themselves at the top of that industry and dominate it for a quarter century. It’s time for another company to come along and replace them – they’re still making a ton of money and as a mature product line are stuck – they can’t really innovate without damaging sales and revenues, so they don’t.
I don’t even USE windows or office anymore, and nobody is more disdainful of either than I am, but I’m surprised that there’s something you never hear said. How many of you remember the PC universe BEFORE windows? Every program had it’s own interface, it’s own menu structure, it’s own terminology. What Windows did was bring about a kind of standardization of operation, so when you got a new program you could actually USE it. That was a very big breakthrough for the widespread adoption of the PC platform, and shouldn’t go unremarked…
mikey
Jenn
@The Dangerman:
Huh. Do you use the spreadsheet program much? I rather like the OpenOffice word processing program, but I HATE their spreadsheet for anything more than casual use. I spend an insane amount of time doing data entry & manipulation in spreadsheets, and I find Excel far more user-friendly (note that’s Excel 2003, I have so far managed to avoid Office 2007).
El Cid
@EDantes: I’ve never had an Office crashing problem. I learned that Excel files which become huge in memory (i.e. having many images) in 2007 would basically empty out all the images. I just e-mailed customer support, and they tried to help via e-mail, then escalated to calling me and then doing remote administration to investigate directly. They never had a true fix, it just was necessary to save it as the older Excel format instead of the 2007 version. On very, very large files.
sbjules
@burnspbesq:
I know Apple doesn’t publish any accounting software and I completely disagree that Office for Mac is superior. I’ve used both. If you’re an accountant you cannot use a Mac except for “fun.”
PeakVT
Steve Ballmer is like the captain of the Titanic.
I’m not buying this. One could have said this about Ford a few years ago, but Alan Mulally has turned it around without the shock therapy of bankruptcy. And Ford has about twice the number of employees as Microsoft. Microsoft could afford a major makeover if that was what Ballmer wanted, as it’s cash pile is enormous.
arguingwithsignposts
Okay, someone tell me what the “Stu” is referring to?
Zach
@Steeplejack: “a period when a group of us were making it a point to see some indie/foreign film once a week”
Did you see Shadow of the Vampire during this period also? I can’t decide whether that falls under clunker or good stuff.
Ahasuerus
As I seem to be lacking sufficient awareness of All Internet Traditions, would someone please be kind enough to enlighten me about the Steve vs. Stu reference? Thank you.
As for Microsoft, please remember that they were actually found guilty of anticompetitive abuse of their de facto monopoly in at least two instances, and I am not convinced those instances were unique. Sometimes success is due to hard work and innovation, and sometimes it is due to simple thuggery.
mistermix
@PeakVT: That’s exactly why it can’t have a makeover. MS is successful being what it is, so the internal constituencies lobbying on behalf of the status quo have a powerful argument in their corner.
Ford, on the other hand, was failing, so the supporters of the status quo can’t point to a pile of cash to justify its arguments.
Zach
@arguingwithsignposts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UefQYjG7rM&feature=related
mistermix
@arguingwithsignposts: @Ahasuerus:
In the movie “The Tao of Steve”, the main character argues that you want to be a Steve (like Steve McQueen) rather than a Stu. Steve = cool, Stu = loser.
Steeplejack
@arguingwithsignposts:
Character in the movie The Tao of Steve.
ETA: Niblet here.
Bill Murray
@arguingwithsignposts: The movie “The Tao of Steve” Steve is Steve McQueen and the essence of being cool while Stu is the opposite. My quote at 5 is from the movie.
@mistermix: One of the main writers Duncan North is more or less the source for Dex
arguingwithsignposts
@Zach: Thanks, actually never heard of that film. Guess that makes me a Stu.
RSA
The two charts on the linked blog are ridiculously misleading. Is the blogger unaware of the dot com bust, which happened to coincide (in 2000) with Ba.lmer taking charge at Microsoft? A chart covering the NASDAQ Composite index of the time shows a much steeper drop off than Microsoft’s, which could just as well be used to argue that Ballmer’s a genius. And of course the chart showing Jobs’s return to Apple starts just after the bust. Not only do people “exaggerate the power of the great leader, and underestimate the difficulty of changing entrenched institutions strapped to a particular system of rewards,” they tend to ignore broader trends that affect almost everyone, including those great leaders and institutions.
stormhit
@dmsilev:
WM was quite successful, and is only hemorrhaging market share now because they basically retired it. Yes, it eventually became antiquated in the face of other OS’s but have you even looked at Windows Phone 7? It’s been “redubbed” because it’s completely new- plus it’s not even out yet.
Steeplejack
@Zach:
Yeah, I saw Shadow of the Vampire, and I liked it. Probably helped that I saw the old German movies that it referenced in theaters as well, in the dark days before DVDs (or even videocassettes–eek!). I still chuckle about Eddie Izzard’s small but great part when I think of that movie. Haven’t seen it in a long time, maybe since it first came out.
But I like foreign movies and “quirky indie” movies in general.
I am somewhat surprised to see how many Americans, especially young people, seem generally resistant to foreign movies or even non-mainstream American movies. (Not saying that more young people are like that; I mean I am more surprised to see it in young people.) People who think nothing of exploring that cool new Thai-Greek-redneck fusion restaurant are suddenly like: “What? A foreign movie? You mean like with subtitles? Forget it.”
Bill Murray
@arguingwithsignposts: I think it makes you more likely to be a Steve. Steve’s have lives, Stu’s live vicariously through the Steve’s they know
Martin
No, I have to agree that Ballmer needs to go.
Windows has cleaned up its act quite a bit, but MS is now all-in on the desktop strategy. Windows is an awkward fit on netbooks and is barely usable on tablets. Microsofts problem here is exactly as Gruber describes it – their business is not selling operating systems, or smartphones, it’s selling Windows more or less as-is.
MS had a great opportunity to take .NET and all the great work (and it really is great work) around it and make it the portable API that would take developers to a different OS for tablets and smartphones – which is exactly what Apple did (iPhone and iPad and iPod Touch just run a scaled down and swizzled version of OS X, but the APIs and tools are almost exactly the same as for the desktop OS even if there isn’t binary compatibility there). But MS was too focused on the ‘put Windows everywhere’ strategy that they let Windows Mobile languish in the face of broad criticism and accepted the poor sales of tablets as a problem with tablets and not a problem with Windows running on tablets.
As for Office, Office only has one compelling feature for users – it’s compatible with Office. Excel is an embarrassment today. Sure, it’s useful, but it hasn’t broken from the metaphor that debuted with VisiCalc on the Apple II. Doing large projects in Excel is ever more painful because of the one table per view limitation and any decent looking report either requires crazy shenanigans with formatting or exporting the whole mess to, of all things, Word. None of these products excel at anything. Word is terrible for long document work because it has no concept of a discrete page. Everything is in this long scroll which you can put some forced page breaks into, but if you decide that section 2 needs to be after section 3, it’s a painful copy/paste adventure loaded with a mountain of reformatting (and yes, I know precisely how to use styles and all that – Word’s implementation is flaky at best and broken if I want to be more accurate). Again, it’s locked to a 25 year old metaphor that MS can’t manage to break out of.
MS simply isn’t innovating any longer. They aren’t taking risks like they used to (and they were always pretty timid on that). They have a lot of great talent but their culture and management is really fucked up. They need to throw products like Office out the window and introduce a new breed of products, better suited to the power that computing offers, the needs of users, and to the quality of results that people expect. If they can still deliver that 100% compatibility with old Office files, they won’t lose their place at all, but at some point someone is going to introduce a new approach to these functions that is just better enough (or cheap enough – Office is fucking expensive) that MS starts losing that dominance.
And I think MS is already fucked on the OS side. Chromium is going to eat their lunch on the netbook side because it’s free, and cost is what rules the day on netbooks, and Apple has already put MS so far behind on smartphones and tablets that MS is going to have to put something truly revolutionary out there to get it back. I don’t think they have that in their culture under Ballmer. I think they have the talent, but nothing is being done with it.
BFR
@stormhit:
MS had decent market share in the mobility market as of a few years ago. Then they decided to staff the E level in the org with folks from the server side of the business who insist on running the business on enterprise level release cycles. On top of that, they’ve culturally been super-dismissive of the consumer side of the market (see Ballmer’s 2007 iPhone comment for an example).
So to the analogy about the Titanic and the tiny rudder, it’s not the case that Ballmer doesn’t realize the rudder is too small, it’s that he isn’t aware that the ship even NEEDS a rudder.
Martin
@RSA: Well, Jobs took on the interim CEO title in 1997, pre bust. And Apple was every bit as entrenched an institution as Microsoft was being as old as MS is.
One advantage Apple had was that they had nothing to lose. They could take risks and they pretty much had nowhere to go but up. MS was just the opposite – they had nowhere to go but down.
That said, Apple grew despite the .com bust. Apple opened their first stores in 2001 when Gateway and Dell were closing theirs. When everyone was scaling back, Apple was expanding, and the analysts thought every step was a mistake. They blasted Apple for opening them because Apple had no retail experience and Apple had virtually no marketshare. Today 1/2 of all Apple employees are in the retail stores, they’re the highest revenue per square foot chain in the nation, they have the highest revenue store in the country, and they are ranked as the best executed retail experience in the country in surveys.
Now, that happened in spite of the bust. It happened in spite of everything Apple had going against it. It happened quite simply due to great management and execution. There’s nothing in that story that MS couldn’t have done – and in fact, done better because they had more money and ability to attract talent than Apple did. But Apple (likely Jobs personally in this case) set a vision, accepted the risks, made the investments (and they invested a LOT), and took a long view of the effort (they only opened a few dozen stores per year) and kept coming back and refining what was a successful plan into something better – they didn’t sit back and be happy with a small success. Hell, what Apple did could have been *any* company – from GM to WalMart winning those awards and sales records. There’s nothing special about Apple that should have led to this.
To MSs credit, they’ve started doing their own outlets but they’re unfortunately too reminiscent of Apple’s and don’t give a sense of what MS is trying to accomplish of their own accord. The most brilliant thing that they’ve done – and they should have done this 15 years ago – is you can buy a PC from their store (an HP, etc.) and they’ll take it in the back, strip all the shit off of it and install a clean, no crapware, no special restore version of Windows 7 on it and give you the full Windows 7 media. They could have head off a decade of bad expectations toward their products had they done this back in the 90s. But now? Those expectations are entrenched. It’s good for customers, but I don’t think it’ll change anyones view of MS.
Robert Sneddon
The key thing for Microsoft’s products and the reason companies buy them is continuity. I’ve got programs written in the 1980s for old old versions of DOS and Windows that still run under WinXP and maybe even Windows 7 (haven’t tried that experiment yet, maybe I should do). Apple, not so much but for Apple the Shiny! is what drives sales, the newest and latest gadget and by the way that version of Adobe PhotoShop for PPC Mac you bought five years ago won’t run on our new hardware because we swapped processors on you (again).
There are some more things that make MS the first choice for companies — Active Directory, for example makes managing computers, servers, printers and users a heck of a lot easier than anything Apple or the Open Source world provides, especially when the device count gets high.
The home market for MS is mostly driven by the gamers and the folks who drive a Windows PC at work shuffling data around a spreadsheet and bolting boilerplate text together in Word (probably Office 2003 since the CIO thought there was no point in upgrading when 2007 came along). That’s a good earner but for MS the key market target has always been the corporate world.
MNPundit
Huh. So I’ve tried all the other word processor and office type products out there and the one I feel most comfortable with is…. MS Office. I actually don’t have a chance to use it much, but I really miss it. Currently I use Abiword.
Also the next time Apple makes a product I am interested in will be the first.
Incertus (Brian)
@burnspbesq:
It’s saved my ass once, and made it super easy to transfer my data once I’m bought a new computer. Time Machine is worth the extra price of an Apple, as far as I’m concerned.
henqiguai
@El Cid (#23):
Probably due to their openXML file format (which they’re sort of walking back a little bit); openXML, the standard to which even Microsoft doesn’t adhere and they wrote the thing. Saving in the older format reverts to the original binary format which doesn’t choke on images.
Martin
@BFR: Yeah, I have a Windows Mobile device (Dell Axim) and it’s not bad, but you can’t upgrade the OS, and getting software on it is such a painful experience that after about 2 weeks I stopped adding anything.
People don’t realize how much of the iPhone’s (and iPads) current success is due to the ability to know exactly where to go to find a type of app, and the ability to click on it to purchase and install it is. It’s a simple recognition that the buying experience for mobile device software sucked and a solution to it was needed. Why didn’t MS do that? Or anyone else for that matter? It’s a retail problem, not a technology problem.
Barry
mistermix: “Ballmer isn’t setting the world on fire, but a lot of the anti-Ballmer tirades I’ve seen are mining the same vein as the “Obama hasn’t fixed it yet” coverage we hear whenever there’s a government fuckup. ”
The one that you quote points out that Steve Ballmer has been in charge of MS for 10 years now. If one can’t fix even a large company in 10 years, it’s questionable whether or not it’s fixable.
RSA
@Martin:
Right, I was oversimplifying the Apple situation. Not to downplay Jobs’s risk-taking; I just think that there were lots of other factors (company size and positioning, the overall economic climate) that were just as important.
Martin
@Robert Sneddon:
I don’t think anyone disputes that or thinks less of MS because of it, but MS is going to be a MUCH smaller company if that’s all that’s left of their marketshare.
But I think it also says something about MSs ability to execute if the CIO didn’t find anything of value in Office 2007. If the corporate world is their key market, and Office is their key revenue driver in that market, why the fuck isn’t there 100 things in Office 2007 to make CIOs jump up and down about? Wouldn’t that be the #1 goal? Either they failed on vision, on recognizing who the customer was, on execution, or on price. Take your pick. I hear countless stories about how enterprise customers don’t upgrade OS, don’t upgrade Office, don’t upgrade their backend solutions – Exchange, Windows Server, etc. And they don’t do it for stupid reasons – it’s too hard to roll out, too many incompatibilities, too expensive – these are all things that MS can control but doesn’t. This has been a longstanding issue – why can’t MS fix the upgrade effort if they are supposedly so good at things like Active Directory?
arguingwithsignposts
MS isn’t the only Titanic out there. Innovation is littered with companies that got too bloated and bureaucratic and greedy to match their competitors. Look at Yahoo/Google. Look at Quark/InDesign. Look at Avid/Final Cut. MySpace/Facebook. AOL/the open Internet. And the latest, IMHO, is Adobe. CS gets updated every 18 months whether it needs it or not. And it’s become bloatware.
stormhit
@BFR:
I’m not defending Ballmer for certain, or the way that WM hit a wall and stuck there for a couple years. And It certainly looks like whatever happened to the Courier is a damning enough indictment of what he’s doing. That seemed like a product that had a chance to answer a lot of the claims that Martin made above, but no dice.
I still see potential in some of their more recent consumer offerings though. At least when it comes to the way that they address the user experience. For an example that goes against what the original post suggests, Windows Media Center really is one of the few pieces of software that does what it does. There’s a couple of comparable open source solutions too, but Media Center has its advantages especially if you have other MS devices. So when I see things like that, Windows 7, and the aforementioned Zune and Xbox- and whatever Phone 7 turns out to be- it seems like things are going in the right direction, at least when it comes to how enjoyable their products are to use. And for MS as of late, that’s a big step.
At least it would be if there’s a rudder, anyway.
Platonicspoof
@henqiguai:
WP spotted your covert drug peddling.
Spec1al1sist.
When stupid gets a trademarked name, then it might be the reason for getting moderated.
Martin
@RSA: But at the same time, Apple didn’t have resources in 2000. They were still performing major restructuring of the company. Mac OS X shipped in 2001 and wasn’t really usable until late 2002. iPod shipped in 2001, but didn’t take off until the music store launched in 2003. Not until 2004 did Apple really start to move. They were low on resources and struggling to get any serious momentum going. Where was MS during this time? Why weren’t they laying foundations for new directions?
Apple started the Intel transition in 1998. It was finally executed in 2005. They started iPad development in 2004 and it just shipped this year and is currently outselling the Mac, with the iPhone splintering out of that effort. There are other efforts at work at Apple that we won’t see play out probably for 3-5 years, assuming they live the duration.
MS squandered its advantage. When it was cash rich and sales were solid, they should have been reinventing their own products. They assumed they would be without major competition. The took their future monopoly position as fait accompli and Ballmer assumed the role of trustee rather than CEO. Rather than tackle the obvious longstanding problems, that again, everyone assumed was inherent in the segment such as security, upgrading, buying experience, product consistency, MS themselves assumed they were inherent in the segment and simply decided to manage their role in it rather than invest any effort in solving them.
Fuck, even today everyone assumes that the only reason the Mac has no viruses is that their share is small. There is a base assumption that malicious software is inherent in the industry. There are 90 million iPhone OS devices out there and growing fast. Where are the viruses? Apple didn’t assume that it was an inherent problem and when they saw what scary shit Conflicker was, they came up with a system (the app store) that allows Apple to (theoretically) manage a problem like that. So far, nothing has gotten around the app store. Nothing has gotten through the app store. And Apple hasn’t even had to try the remote kill ability in the OS if something were to get onto devices, or to test if a virus could get on there and disable that. Why didn’t MS try any of these things? Of course, MS is planning to do precisely this with their new Windows Mobile platform. Lesson learned, but now MS is chasing Apple rather than the other way around.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
I’ve actually been looking at buying a new netbook, and all the ones at stores I’ve been looking at all have Windows 7 Starter; a small number of older ones have XP SP3 or Vista.
Not a single Linux or other OS in sight.
My two year old Asus came preloaded with Debian, but just looking at fairly mainstream stores (Frys, Best Buy, some local shops) Windows 7 Starter seems to rule the netbook world.
*To be fair, Dell has some pre-loaded Ubuntu machines you can order online.
Amanda in the South Bay
Ack, everytime these discussions happen I always get a sick feeling in my stomach.
Yeah yeah Microsoft has big problems and Windows isn’t my OS of choice, but the problem with Apple is that it is for upper middle class folk; even the cheapest Macbook is twice as much as a decent laptop running Windows 7, not to mention a netbook.
If I had a decent job and could afford it, I’d never go back to MS anything, but that’s a long time (if ever) in the future. For a lot of us, i-anything is not financially doable.
PeakVT
@mistermix: True, but there are more than enough signs that Microsoft is struggling. And it’s Ballmer’s fault if he allows groupthink to take hold in the executive suite.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: Linux is not a solution to Windows. Google’s Chromium is directly aimed at the netbook market. I don’t know if it’ll take off or not, but I think Google will pull it together well enough to give MS a bit of a run here, at least on the lower end products.
From what I can tell, the netbook market pretty nicely overlaps the iPad market in terms of what they want to use the device for. I think Google can pull this off. We’ll see this Christmas or early next year. If I were MS I’d be worried.
Amanda in the South Bay
@Martin:
Well, I remember a poll somewhere saying that a ridiculous number of netbook owners never take their netbooks out of the house. That doesn’t seem like a very sophisticated bunch of users-it seems like people who just want a small cheap computer. And since most netbooks come pre-loaded with Windows 7 Starter, I’d think herd mentality+ people not very sophisticated about OSs means Windows rules the day on netbooks.
Cat Lady
@John Cole:
Solipsist.
Martin
@Amanda in the South Bay: And this is an interesting view on the problem. The cost of technology is one of the few things that drops over time, which is what Apple banks on. Today’s iPhone hardware will be 2015s generic cheap-ass phone.
A $999 laptop isn’t upper middle-class class. Hell, it’s cheaper than what most middle and lower middle class people spend on a TV. It’s 1/15th cost of a new car. It’s less money than most people spend on a cable subscription. And $999 is what a bare-bones laptop sold for just a few years ago.
I’m not suggesting that you personally can afford it, but $999 is a pretty good price for the amount of functionality it provides and the amount of time people spend with it. It’s not overpriced from that viewpoint. If you had $999 to spend on a piece of electronics or furniture or other discretionary thing, you’re almost certainly going to get more mileage from the computer over anything else.
$999 seems like a lot because HP and Asus and the rest have sold their future welfare for the sake of $499 laptops. Relative to what you can buy from other vendors, $999 is a lot, but relative to what you get out of it, it’s really not. But the very cheapest wifi fully internet enabled device out there is the iPod Touch at $199. There’s no shortage of people – particularly teenagers that have figured that out. I wouldn’t want it as my primary device, but there’s no equivalent to it on the market, particularly at that price point.
Bubblegum Tate
And Google knows this, too–in fact, its latest sales pitch for Google Docs is don’t upgrade Office with more Office, upgrade Office with our stuff for free!. Google knows that if you cut people off from the MS upgrade cycle, they’re more likely to jump ship altogether later on.
Gromit
Microsoft does innovate, they just don’t do so with consumer-marketable products. Remember how cool Surface looked in 2007? Well, I’ve yet to see one of these in operation outside CNN’s tactical command center, and my iPad is now a thousand times cooler, sitting on my lap as I type this, because I don’t have to go to Disneyland (or wherever they have these things) to use it. And Photosynth looks incredible, but how do you get it into consumers’ hands? Google can just give away amazing technologies like this, because they don’t sell products, they sell ads. Microsoft doesn’t have this advantage.
And Natal looks remarkable from the demos so far, and, unlike the Courier, has actually made it out of the conceptual rendering stage of development, but Natal also shows a high risk of over-promising and under-delivering, at least in my mind.
Of course, it also doesn’t help when you give your product lines names like “Zune”.
RSA
@Martin: You make a good case, and you obviously know a lot more about this piece of history than I do. Thanks for the insights.
Ben
Most of you people don’t have a clue about software or IT. Microsoft is a victim of its own success. There products have progressively gotten better and more stable. There was a day when people couldn’t wait to upgrade (see Windows ME) strictly for the improved stability aspect of the new product. MS’s products are now mature, stable and, while new releases feature greater functionality and new “toys”, they aren’t really necessary… a good example is how pissed people were when MS was going to end of life XP. XP is stable and there is really no reason to upgrade, particularly for corporate/government IT shops. Gates missed on search engines early on and that has also hurt. They may not rule the world forever, but they are as entrenched as any software company in history. Apple is coming up with the 4G iPhone… what do they beyond that? No corporate presence and people can only busy so many iPod’s. No, I’m not an Apple hater as I have several of their products as well.
Mr Furious
Watch a couple of the videos from the D8 conference last week and tell me which captain you want on your ship—Jobs or Ballmer.
This video of Ballmer contesting an assertion by Jobs about a shift away from desktop/PC computing to more portable devices, seems particularly revealing. As someone mentioned upthread, Microsoft is still too “all in” on the desktop format, and cannot adapt quickly enough. If I have to put money on whose prediction will come true, Ballmer or Jobs, I know where I am putting my money.
Whereas Jobs (for better or worse for his consumers) is much more willing to toss product or systems overboard—even when still current or functional in pursuit of what Apple believes will be the future, or will serve the experience of his consumer better.
In short:
Google and Apple = active.
Microsoft = reactive.
There are multiple videos from each, but I want to keep the links down to avoid moderation.
[/Jobsbot]
Ducktape
This IS the problem at Microsoft, where your ONLY success is in how well you are evaluated as meeting the objectives that were given to you by your boss. Despite their belief that they’ve got all the bright people in the world working for them (the reason they give to each other for not listening to the outside world, like customers), it’s a very top-down organization at its heart.
Ballmer has been at the top for a long time, including when Gates was still there. HE is responsible for the organization, and letting him off as just arriving recently is wrong. On top of that, he’s quite a bully whom no one (other than his pets and Gates) likes or trusts. I don’t see him ever being able to do anything different than what he does now, and I think he’s a failure. A rich failure, yes, but really the only guy he’s ever had to please is Gates.
Gromit
This might not be what you meant, but Jobs isn’t tossing the Mac overboard anytime soon, he’s just acknowledging that it is no longer his core business. Apple is pulling the “Get a Mac” campaign. The iPhone OS is the breadwinner from here on out.
The iPhone OS’s Achilles Heel right now is that it still demands to be tethered to an iTunes desktop client for activation and for software updates. This could be changing soon, with rumors of cloud-based services rumbling, though. When I can buy my grandmother an iPad and have her turn it on and use it right out of the box, without needing a complicated “computer” to plug it into, we’ll be in business.
Caravelle
Bing is competitive ? I try to keep on open mind and not be too “the product I’m using is the Best Ever” especially when I’m using the same product as everybody else, but in this case pretty much every time I made a search with Bing it didn’t remotely give me what I was looking for, and if it did it was still in the middle of stuff I didn’t want. The same search with Google almost always gave me exactly what I was after, and often at the top of the page. The difference would be comical if it wasn’t so depressing.
Bing (or Windows Live Search, whatever) is one of the main reasons I avoid IE. (The other being that I’ve become addicted to firefox’s intelligent URL bar, everytime I go on IE and I have to type “sc…” when I’m looking for Pharyngula I die a little inside. Let alone when I’m looking for a page I don’t remember the exact address of)
Mr Furious
Look, I’m not going to pretend I’m not an unabashed Apple / Mac / Jobs fan. I am.
But at the same time, I can look at the decisions Apple is making or has made, resent them for the personal impact on me, but recognize that in the long game they are making the best decision.
My PowerPC box is officially obsolete now as far as Apple is concerned. I can no longer upgrade it’s OS to current levels, nor can I run the latest suites of software—from Apple OR Adobe. That’s going to present a serious problem for me at some point in the future. Whether the machine dies and I upgrade and then update my software or a client requires CS5 and I am forced to replace my machine to run it, one way or the other I am starting over from scratch.
But I can absolutely understand why at some point Apple has to cut supporting two different chip systems and go all-Intel.
Same with the Flash / HTML5 decision. I think it will put off some consumers or developers, but in the long run they are making the right choice. If it makes their product run better, that’s what matters most.
I honestly believe it won’t be long until an iPad can run out of the box without ever needing to touch a PC. People like your grandmother are a huge part of the device’s target market—people who want some easy-to-use, basic, limited computer functionality: email, internet, reader, without the hassle of using an actual computer.
Comrade Luke
@Robert Sneddon:
One could argue that this is a big reason why they’re going down as well. Trying to innovate while at the same time maintaining compatibility with 20yr old programs is not easy, and in many cases impossible.
The other major mistake was combining the server and client codebases, and taking out the corporate stuff to create a non-corporate (“Home”) version. They’re entirely different markets, and should have been left to innovate in their respective spheres. Unfortunately, the decision was made to make it easier from an internal development perspective as opposed to making it better for the customer.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
The big driver was going to be the file format change, because once the new files got enough traction everyone would have to upgrade in order to share. I don’t say this because I have inside info, just my opinion based on what I know about how things work over there.
Comrade Luke
@stormhit:
Was Courier ever anything more than a tech demo?
Also, what’s the most expensive, least cost-reducible part of any laptop? The display. So let’s make one with two of them.
Genius.
maus
@Comrade Luke:
A stable OS can graft whatever UI they want on top.
That 2008r2 Core and 7 embedded have the effort put into a stable kernel and 7 Client can benefit is a GOOD THING.
2000 client/server, 2003/xp, Vista/2008, none of this is new.
I’m glad for both MSFT and Apple to co-exist, and can’t wait for Android & Linux devices to provide as much competition as possible.
Jon H
@RSA: “And of course the chart showing Jobs’s return to Apple starts just after the bust.”
Jobs returned well before the bust.
And Apple’s stock wasn’t high before he returned.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
They were struggling mightily with what would become Vista. And when you try to align your Office release with your OS release, you’re talking about A LOT of resources waiting for Windows to right the ship.
But let’s be realistic. Even is Vista had shipped two years earlier Microsoft wouldn’t have done anything, because Ballmer wouldn’t have thought that the inroads that Apple was making would affect MS at that time.
To this day, the best (only?) way to get a project approved is to convince Ballmer that (fill in competitor here, PS3 for example) is a threat to Windows. Unfortunately, by the time that has become a reality they’re so far behind they can never catch up.
Comrade Luke
@maus:
Exactly right. And they made the choice to keep the same UI for both, with the exception of turning on themes in XP.
Home users don’t use PCs the same way IT guys do. Designing to try and please both does nothing but piss off both groups.
Comrade Luke
@efgoldman:
The proprietary software is why the organization runs Windows. No matter what Apple does, I don’t see that ever changing in the corporate world.
Apple targets the home user with a little bleed into the corporate world, which they have made a lower priority anyway. Microsoft targets the corporate world and take the home user entirely for granted.
Calouste
Rumors of Microsoft’s demise are a bit overstated.
The only measure by which Apple is ahead of Microsoft is market capitalization:
Annual revenues: Microsoft $58.4bn, Apple $36.5bn
Annual net profits: Microsoft $14.6bn, Apple $5.7bn
Price/earnings ratio: Microsoft 12.8, Apple 24.
Dividend: Microsoft 2%, Apple none.
Why do people put so much emphasis on the stock price as the main measurement after it has become clear over the last few years what a casino Wall Street is?
Also, for a disastrous CEO like Ballmer, isn’t it funny that Microsoft has made a profit for every quarter except one (and that was when the recession really hit and they did write offs) over the last 10 years? You’d think he was leading Chrysler by the way people talk about him.
Lots of talk, not supported by most figures except the most unreliable one.
Jon H
@Robert Sneddon: “Adobe PhotoShop for PPC Mac you bought five years ago won’t run on our new hardware because we swapped processors on you (again).”
You can blame Motorola and IBM for that.
Comrade Luke
This is a nice summary of the two companies (and Facebook, if you care), based interviews they just gave at D8.
r€nato
@ Ben: ‘what will Apple do to follow up iPhone 4G… people can only buy so many iPods’ – yeah, we all heard that 3 years ago. The iPod market had matured and Apple was DOOOOOOOMED! Because of course Apple is a company which rests on its laurels.
Right. This is the company which to this day still rules the MP3 player market with an unassailable 80+% market share. Apple went from no retail stores to being one of the most successful retailers around. Apple went from not being in the cellular handset business to being a leader in the market, crushing incumbents like Motorola and Nokia while making smartphones popular with the masses, where previously they were mainly used by businessmen. And of course they transitioned from PPC chips to Intel flawlessly. They could very easily have stumbled in any of these, and they did not do so. In fact many of their competitors would have (and have, in fact) made a hash of such efforts. That ain’t luck.
Apple’s not a company I would bet against, nor would I foolishly assume they can’t follow up on their latest successes.
Calouste
Bah, in moderation for using an accurate description for Wall Street, lets’ do that again:
Rumors of Microsoft’s demise are a bit overstated.
The only measure by which Apple is ahead of Microsoft is market capitalization:
Annual revenues: Microsoft $58.4bn, Apple $36.5bn
Annual net profits: Microsoft $14.6bn, Apple $5.7bn
Price/earnings ratio: Microsoft 12.8, Apple 24.
Dividend: Microsoft 2%, Apple none.
Why do people put so much emphasis on the stock price as the main measurement after it has become clear over the last few years what a c-a-s-i-n-o Wall Street is?
Also, for a disastrous CEO like Ballmer, isn’t it funny that Microsoft has made a profit for every quarter except one (and that was when the recession really hit and they did write offs) over the last 10 years? You’d think he was leading Chrysler by the way people talk about him.
Lots of talk, not supported by most figures except the most unreliable one.
befuggled
When did Microsoft innovate, anyway? I have a hard time thinking of a product they’ve come out with that wasn’t modeled after somebody else’s.
Brachiator
@Zach:
Saw it in the theaters as well. As I recall, the movie received a number of positive reviews.
Good film.
RalfW
Vista is a s#*tbox. It reminds me of 70’s GM cars that fell apart after 30,000 miles but had leather wrapped steering wheels as a selling point. Hard to know how much the CEO of Microsoft has to do with that, but my sense is that MS has been building crap on top of crap since, ohh, about the moment that the second generation of Windows launched when I was a kid.
r€nato
Zune=expensive failure
XBox=expensive success
Sidekick, Kin, WinMo7= ha. ha. ha.
There’s simply no excuse for a company with the resources and brilliant minds and other advantages it has, to have absolutely no follow-ups to its superannuated Office/Windows franchises, to be perpetually copying Apple and not even succeeding at that.
Microsoft = the GM of high tech.
licensed to kill time
I just want to say that I have never Bing’d a thing.
Martin
@Gromit: Actually, he is tossing the Mac overboard. Not entirely, but the iPad is designed to replace the majority of the Mac marketshare. It’s intended to take more Windows with it, but that’s the plan. It’s a few years off as you note, the tethering prevents that from happening, but the roadmap is pretty clear to me:
Get rid of tethering so it’s a stand alone device. It needs the cloud solutions Apple will be rolling out in the next year for this, so it’s probably 2 years off at least. The processing power of iPad will continue to improve, and the cost for higher density screens will allow for both larger and higher DPI iPads.
What Apple will have, however, is a platform where security is fully within Apple’s hands to control – no malware. The app buying/installation/upgrade experience is absolutely without equal. And Apple will have a massive number of developers writing for their platform that don’t have experience running their own stores, maintaining merchant accounts, and so on. These developers have a big hurdle to overcome to move to traditional platforms.
All of the problems Apple has sought to solve in the Mac are being solved in the iPad right now. The Mac will stay, but it’s not at all in the future of Apple’s consumer strategy.
maus
@Comrade Luke:
While you can enable the client themes on the server line, and you can disable themes on the client OS’, I don’t understand how the UI is being overly complicated.
Do you have an example from another OS that doesn’t have this problem, or a different implementation that you would go with? I’m not following.
Martin
@efgoldman: 40% of iPhones are in enterprise.
I don’t doubt that Microsoft will rule IT for the foreseeable future. But that’s not as big a market as you might think, and it’s not as ironclad as you might think.
Gromit
@efgoldman:
There are a couple of distinct questions in here, I think. One is about the erosion of Microsoft’s dominance in enterprise, and one is about the future of computing generally.
In twenty years we might very well be on the next generation of computing devices. But sometime between now and then I have no doubt that touch interfaces will become ubiquitous, and this will demand a change in form factor to something like the tablet (or a larger tabletop/literal desktop format). The mouse is going away. As haptic feedback technologies improve, the keyboard is going away. It’s a done deal at this point.
So, yeah, I expect to walk into the average office in 20 years and see folks manipulating information directly on their displays, if that’s what you mean.
Whether these folks will be using Windows 12, or Office 2030, on their tablets I don’t know. If I’d been asked to predict Microsoft’s predicament even 10 years ago I wouldn’t have fared well. 20 years is an eon in this industry. Actually, they’ll probably be using Windows 10, since that will have been the last stable version that actually worked with their 3D printers and their holographic projectors, and they’re all gun-shy about updating since the disastrous Soylent Windows update of 2025…
What would never do, however, is to underestimate the influence of a whole generation of IT workers brought up on Apple and Google tech.
@Martin:
Which is precisely what I was trying to say, though apparently not very well.
Jon H
@Calouste: “Rumors of Microsoft’s demise are a bit overstated.”
I don’t think anyone’s predicting their demise as a business. They could run for years on pure momentum at this point.
It’s more about their perceived status as an industry leader, and as a possible threat to proposed startups.
All the movement is coming from Google, Apple, and some smaller companies. If people think about what’s going to be happening, tech-wise, in 5 years, Microsoft doesn’t really factor into it. There’ll be some version of Windows, and they’ll be doing something, but nobody really thinks they’ll do anything that’ll take the world by storm.
The way I see it, in 2004 when Apple was starting work on the iPhone, Microsoft was putting out their SPOT digital watches.
Who the hell in 2004 thinks, “yeah, digital watches, that’s where we want to be in the 21st century.“
Martin
@Calouste: Well, Apple pulled down more profit last quarter than all computer makers and all cell phone handset makers *combined*, and they’re 7th in marketshare in computers and 5th on cell phones. The only reason that MS is turning good profits is that they’re taking such a big chunk of revenues from the OEMs. That’s killing innovation among the OEMs and they know it. HP bought Palm so they could cut MS loose on portable devices. It was such a big coup that MS ran riot through their portable and device groups. MS lost their biggest partner in their key future market.
I’d say that move by HP is the first really big shot across MSs bow that either MS needs to get their shit together or the OEMs are going to go their own way every chance they get.
Martin
@Gromit: Apologies. It looked like you walked up to the line but were afraid to cross it. Nice to see other people get it.
Mr Furious
@efgoldman:
I wouldn’t make predictions about anything computer/techno that far out with any sort of certainty.
Just compare an office today, with one twenty years ago.
I was getting out of college about twenty years ago. With a BFA in Design. The last couple years in school were the first years they brought the Mac into the curriculum. My first job was splitting time sitting at a drafting table, pasting up mechanicals with wax, Xacto knives and Rapidograph pens, and running to the darkroom to use the stat camera.
ALL OF THAT WORKFLOW is completely electronic now from the creative director’s brain to the plate in the printing press.
I haven’t seen a drawing board, or a typewriter for that matter in I don’t know how many years. You’re a photographer who wants to shoot for me? If you say the word “film,” the conversation is over.
You might very well be right that there’s no iPads in the office in 20-30 years, but it won’t be because PCs have been holding them off, it will be because your “computer” is a twenty inch touchscreen that you can roll up and take home with you
Brachiator
@burnspbesq:
The problem is that you can’t run tax and accounting software in this environment without a lot of tweaks and hand holding that puts your data at risk. Nobody has time for this.
@Mr Furious:
You got it. Earlier in the week I stopped by the local Apple Store. They had iPads in the front on tables and people were having big fun using them. Hell, I had big fun using it.
A couple of people specifically asked about getting the device for a parent or grandparent. And here you could see that Apple has partly stumbled a bit, and their situation has been complicated by ATT’s recent changes to their 3G pricing.
It is possible that a parent or grandparent might not already have either a computer or a modem, router, etc. If the iPad were totally untethered from a PC and if the new 3G pricing plan were reasonable, this would not be an issue. Otherwise, you have to have a little tech savvy to get around this.
Some recent comments that Steve Jobs has made indicates that he understands that the rise of mobile devices has created a new product category, one that requires a new way of thinking about what people want and how they need these devices to work.
On the other hand, those companies who are trying to duplicate PCs on tablets are stuck in old ways of thinking and don’t even realize that they have already lost the battle, and probably the entire technology war.
Martin
@Jon H: And the things that MS have done recently that admittedly are very good, like the XBox, aren’t making money.
I don’t know how MS has blown that opportunity. Admittedly I don’t know that much about the game console arena (other than knowing the Wii was the right thing for my kids) but they walked into that with a HUGE advantage and they’ve apparently done a lot of the right things with XBox live and the media center integration, but in spite of all of that they’ve failed to make it profitable. I just don’t see how that’s possible other than mismanagement.
Same with Windows Mobile. They had a great opportunity, and they lost all of it. And now they think they’ll sell 30 million mobile devices off of Windows Phone 7 (which has fuckall to do with Windows 7 and at some point soon will have fuckall to do with phones as well – stupid fucking product naming isn’t helping them) with no shipping product and only HTC still as a partner. And they shipped the Kin – which seems to be tied to and advances nothing at all. It was the ‘oh fuck, we need a product’ product. And they have a partnership with Nokia for Mobile Communicator which does some different stuff yet. Having a company going in 4 different directions for one market segment is just a fucking disaster.
And LOL. I forgot all about the watches.
One of Steve Jobs greatest qualities is saying no to bad ideas. MS needs to hire someone who can do that. Ballmer clearly isn’t that guy.
Jon H
@Brachiator:”A couple of people specifically asked about getting the device for a parent or grandparent.”
My 78 year old father drove up to the Apple Store the day the wifi iPad came out, and bought one. (Alone, which worried me a bit, as he has memory problems.)
Of course, he already had an iBook, so plugging it in wasn’t a problem. He mostly uses the iPad for email and web browsing at home. He also has a kindle DX, which he still uses for reading newspapers.
Comrade Luke
@maus: I’m not really talking about themes when I talk about targeting a home user.
What I’m talking about at the end-to-end scenarios that Apple does so well. Their OS fades into the background, while with Windows you’re constantly struggling to work around some stupid usability problem.
None of this is helped by the fact that every OS since NT 3.51 is basically NT 3.51 with a new coat of UI paint. There are still a myriad of areas in Windows where if you go down more than a couple of levels in the UI you run into something that hasn’t been updated in year. Outlook Express/Windows Live Mail/Whatever it’s called now being a great example.
The other colossal fuckup was not taking all of the competing media products in the company and mashing them up into one coherent iLife-like solution for the home. That’s something that would have taken any exec worth their partner bonus less than a month to figure out even if they came into the job brand new.
Instead, they have thousands of people making products that overlap for no logical reason, but don’t work together at all.
And all of these issues is something a good CEO would address if they were worried about something other than corporate licenses and dividend payments.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
Are you including the iMac in this? Their strategy has always included a hub in the home, and their cloud-based “strategy” has been iffy at best.
Jon H
@Martin: “And LOL. I forgot all about the watches.”
I mean, hell, Douglas Adams was mocking the crap out of digital watches 30 years ago.
Comrade Luke
@Calouste:
I’m not predicting their demise, but I don’t think a future where they become like Bloomberg terminals in the trading world is too far-fetched: at work you use Windows, and literally everywhere else you use something else and Windows is the furthest thing from your mind.
You won’t think negatively about Windows outside the workplace; you won’t think about it at all.
Mr Furious
@Brachiator:
EXACTLY.
This is what Jobs gets, that others don’t. Watch him in any of the videos from D8.
He doesn’t give a shit if the iPad can run every program or website. Different devices have different areas of emphasis and different uses. He’s gambling that people don’t NEED (and therefore don’t want) their iPad to do everything their computer does. He wants his product to do an amazing job and offer a positive experience for the user for a finite set of tasks. Period.
The model of trying to create a jack-of-all-trades device that does nothing well is not as successful.
When he was asked in the forum when they decided to take the iPhone and blow it up into the iPad, he confessed that they had actually started the iPad first. During development, they reached a stage when they looked at what they had, looked at the market ad decided, “Shit, we should make this into a phone.”
They halted tablet work and devoted all resources into the phone.
They beat everybody else out of the gate and defined the market.
A different company would have tried to do both at the same time and been less successful at both.
Mr Furious
@Martin:
One of Steve Jobs greatest qualities is saying “Not yet” to GOOD ideas.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
Xbox 1: build the hardware at a loss initially, and eventually sell it at a profit as you are able to cost reduce the hardware faster than you reduce the price. In addition, make a bunch of money of internally-produced games, where you take 100% of the profits as opposed to a royalty for every game sold by EA (for example).
Issues:
The internally-produced games sold so poorly that the entire initiative (other than Halo) was abandoned altogether.
It took longer to cost reduce the hardware than expected, due to lack of experience in this field. Then, instead of actually getting down to the point where they could sell it at a profit…
Xbox 360: Change the lifecycle of hardware and ship a year or two earlier than Sony to get a head start.
Issues: Far costlier hardware than before, rushed to market with the infamous Red Ring of Death. Waste the head start by having to fix all the hardware issues.
That’s just the top-line.
Jon H
Apple won’t really dump the Mac until it becomes unprofitable. And maybe not even then, because they need machines to develop on. And if they can require iPhone/iPad developers to use Macs, so much the better.
In the meantime, they get to amortize the OS development costs, and the online store costs, and the retail store costs, across more product lines.
Tech they develop for the iPhone can move to OS X, as was the case for Core Animation. Things they develop for OS X can move to the iPhone/iPad when those platforms evolve to the point that they can handle the desktop tech. What they develop for either can move to the Apple TV. The Apple TV provided yet another channel for Music and Video store sale revenue. An iPhoneOS-based Apple TV would provide another channel for App sales.
Adding: While WWDC this year might be almost entirely iPhone/iPad-centric, and I find this disappointing, I can understand it. The competition in that space is intense, so time is very much of the essence, thus it’s better to focus on it now. The 2009 WWDC videos are available for Mac developers, and still relevant, and Snow Leopard is sufficiently new that there’s not that much pressure for a new OS.
Martin
@efgoldman: Well, my employer of over 50,000 has iPhone as the primary platform.
Oh, you’re so close to answering your own question, but fall one step short.
The iPhone took off in enterprise not because of ‘the shiny’ but because it offered a fully functional web browser that rendered pages no differently than the desktop browsers that companies already tested against.
If you want to shove all that important customer and market data around, you’re likely already doing a fair bit of it via the web (we do all of ours on the web) and that browser solves a very big problem very quickly and easily. Any outfit that is web based had virtually full support in the iPhone from day one. Now, other phones have caught up (by using Apple’s browser) but that’s why the iPhone initially got a foothold. Additionally, the iPhone was cheaper to deploy because it didn’t require as many IT resources to get users up and running, to get the software upgraded (which almost no other phones still can do), and so on. From a software distribution standpoint, the iPhone represented a fixed target. Blackberries got a different OS with each model, different Java, different APIs. For Apple we could write one app and deploy it across all models. The apps that worked on the first iPhone work today just fine on the 3GS. Upgrades never broke it, and distribution was easy.
Now, the people that want ‘the shiny’ are most of the ones bitching about lack of Flash.
Comrade Luke
Apple can’t dump the Mac – it’s the primary development environment for the apps that ship on their other devices.
Gromit
@Martin:
Hey, I love my iPad, but it will be a few years before a mobile device/cloud combo can compete with my eight-core Mac Pro in terms of power, storage, or display area.
@efgoldman:
Au contraire, I think that giant server center in NC is actually where they are going to upload Steve’s consciousness into the “cloud”, from which he’ll be able to instantaneously reject every porn app submitted to the App Store in perpetuity.
Artist’s conceptual renderings here.
Jon H
@Gromit: “Au contraire, I think that giant server center in NC is actually where they are going to upload Steve’s consciousness into the “cloud”, from which he’ll be able to instantaneously reject every porn app submitted to the App Store in perpetuity.”
I’d believe that if the building were a perfect cube, or designed by I. M. Pei.
Martin
@Comrade Luke: Yes. Actually, it might be better stated that Apple is throwing Mac OS X overboard. I don’t mean that entirely, I mean as a consumer OS at least as it’s currently implemented.
Either the iMac will get iPhone OS with appropriate changes or Mac OS X will get the same App store treatment with OS X Server standing as the ‘do whatever you want’ OS. There will always be a ‘do whatever you want’ product in Apple’s lineup. Hell, without it nobody would be able to make iPhone/iPad apps, but Mac OS Xs open app model and file structure is overkill for consumers. I think Apple could go either way on this but the iPad is closer to their vision of a future consumer computer than the iMac is in its current form.
Jon H
@Martin: “with OS X Server standing as the ‘do whatever you want’ OS. ”
Unlikely, OS X Server is pretty much just OS X + server apps.
Brachiator
@Jon H:
Very cool. But consider a retiree who lives in an assisted living facility or who does not already have a computer. An iPad might be great for them, but they would have to jump over some additional hurdles to get it working and to keep it updated.
This also brings up the other problem that Apple had with the iPad. They were clearly looking at amazon’s success with the Kindle, which includes built-in wireless/3G connectivity in its price. But Kindle users (like me) just turn the wireless on intermittently to download books and newspapers, and so put little demand on wireless/3G networks. And although I can access my Kindle account with a PC, I don’t need a PC for any Kindle related purposes, not even to get updates.
But getting books is just one of the things that you can do with an iPad. Email, web browsing, getting movies and other video content means that a user is online for longer periods of time. If Apple and their phone partners get this right (and ATT is screwing up big time so far), they will have even more success with the iPad.
@Mr Furious:
I did not know this. Very interesting.
maus
@Comrade Luke:
Martin
I’m still a bit surprised Apple jumped the gun on iPad. It was always supposed to ship with iPhone OS 4, not 3.2. A fair bit of the criticism Apple has gotten over the iPad was never supposed to be limitations of the iPad at all. The update tethering was going to be there for a while, but iPad + OS 4 will look more like what Apple intended. The cloud is key to the whole vision, but I’m not sure we’ll see that until early next year.
I’d still put the odds of Apple jettisoning all the carriers at about 50/50 within 3 years. Steve HATES having Apple’s success in the hands of other companies. It’s clear that the next move will be to use VOIP + a phone number proxy service (like Google Voice) to cut the carriers out of the call side of the mobile experience. The move will be to a data-only flat-fee service. Both Apple and Google are working toward this. The obstacle is what carrier will accept this when their fixed bandwidth service (calls) makes up well over half of their revenues and is ever more profitable as a result? It’s the data side that they’re all struggling with. My estimation is that Apple breaks ranks, throws up a data-only network in the US, leasing bandwidth from other players to fill in as they expand, and offers a no-hassle data plan across all of their products. It’s less of a problem in other countries because, well, few countries are as fucked up on the mobile infrastructure front as the US is.
Comrade Luke
@maus:
No idea what you’re getting at here.
Works would be a competitor to iWork, not iLife. And it was always hampered by the fact that Office was afraid it would sabotage Office sales – as if those were the same customers.
I had a friend whose entire budgeting revolved around Works, and it worked quite well.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
Think Google Voice will ever make it into the App store?
Great service, but without a native app it’s pretty much worthless to me.
ETA: They should just buy Sprint.
Martin
@Comrade Luke: What’s wrong with the current app?
Sprint has the wrong business. Apple wants to lose all the straight calling business, which is all Sprint does. The data side of Sprint is all Clearwire. Clearwire unfortunately only deploys WiMax now and Apple will want LTE because the bandwidth they lease will come from AT&T and Verizon. So Clearwire is the better acquisition from that angle.
Apple only needs to buy talent and right-of-way. They’ve got enough cash to deploy – they just won’t want to deal with the zillions of contracts that need to be written to secure right of way and they need the talent to know how to do this stuff. Once they have that, it’s mostly just writing a large enough check to get it out there.
r€nato
@befuggled:
one could fairly say that Apple didn’t create the 1st GUI, didn’t create the 1st MP3 player, and didn’t create the 1st smartphone.
What Apple *does* do, is they GET the important things like user interface design. They GET that you have to give people what they want even when they don’t know that they want it, NOT what they say they want. Ever see that episode of The Simpsons where Homer’s long-lost brother designs the ideal car according to what Homer says he wants?
There are some things Apple-enviers say and write which just drive me batty. One of them is that people buy Apple products because they are ‘shiny’ and look nice. That Apple products are designed well and look great happens to be true, but that’s a by-product of their emphasis on user interface. BMWs and Porsche’s look great too; they also perform fantastically.
I also get batty when people say shit like, “oh, Apple costs so much!” Uh, no they don’t, that’s more urban legend bullshit. It’s not true if you compare (heh heh) apples and apples. If you compare a $999 MacBook to a $499 HP netbook, you’re comparing apples to lemons. Fact is, Mac computers often cost virtually the same as a PC with similar specs. Plus when you factor in the free software like iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD; the high reliability on both the software and hardware sides; the world-class warranty support; and the value of your time, Mac computers win hands-down. Oh and did I mention the Genius Bar support for your Mac at every Apple Store, which is FREE? Or that you can run both Windows and OS X on your Mac? Or that Apple doesn’t default to treating you like a thief when you try to install a new version of OS X? You just install it. There’s no verification hoops to jump through. They don’t confuse you by marketing eleventy different crippled flavors of OS X at various price points so that you don’t know which one to get. No blue screen of death. No need to purchase anti-virus software. No need to take your Mac to the PC guy every few months (and pay $150 and risk that the PC doofus will just wipe your HD and reinstall the OS because that saves him time) because it’s slowed down to a crawl for some reason.
And if your budget still doesn’t allow you to buy the value you get with every Mac, the Apple Store (as well as select retailers like Small Dog) has refurb’d Macs at a significant discount.
My stepfather – who is not at all a computer geek – switched to Mac two years ago and he would not go back to PC for anything, even if you offered him a PC for free.
r€nato
@maus: from what I understand, there are internal barriers to this kind of thing within MS. MS apparently works like a series of competing fiefdoms, which is just nuts.
r€nato
@efgoldman: goddamn, you seem to have bought into every urban legend there ever was about Apple.
Apple will survive without Steve Jobs. He’s anything but an idiot; I’m sure he’s considered the fact that he’s not immortal. He’s succeeded in inculcating a culture at Apple that will outlive him. The only question is if the successor CEO will be as focused as Jobs, if he’ll be as good at saying ‘no’ to bad ideas (and ‘not yet’ to good-but-not-great ideas) as Jobs is.
r€nato
@Comrade Luke:
I can’t tell you how often I have seen the following: some corporate type uses a Blackberry for work, but they also carry an iPhone for personal use.
And maybe that is a good idea, to have a completely separate work smartphone and personal smartphone. But that’s a great analogy for where all this is headed: people use Windows because they have to; they use Apple products because they want to.
Amanda in the South Bay
@r€nato:
Maybe I’m the only one in this thread who remembers that a recession is going on (just finished?) and that many people are under/un-employed, blah blah blah.
I have a job interview on Thursday that I feel pretty confident about (and if I get it will most assuredly brag about it on every open thread that day!) but I’ve been pretty poor and underemployed for a while (even in the “liberal” Bay Area you wouldn’t believe how much discrimination against trans people there is in hiring) and as much as I need a new computer, that’s still 450 or so extra dollars that I can’t really see myself spending for a Macbook, as much as I do love Macs (I have a hand me down Powerbook G4).
I guess its all relative-i.e. how much we make, what our incomes are, what each of us defines as “upper middle class” and so on. And, being on the low end of the income scale in such a fucking overpriced and affluent area (Silicon Valley) I tend to take such things personally.
Oh, and I think Windows 7 aint that bad (certainly not as bad as XP or Vista) and I’m somewhat of a Linux fangirl, so I don’t quite feel as constrained with the choices of Win v Mac.
Ironically, I’m even thinking of changing in my two year old Asus Debian netbook for an iPod Touch, so I do love me them Apples, but I’d get so sick I’d have to go to the ER if I put all that money down on even a low end Macbook.
r€nato
@Martin: I’m going to take a stab at what’s wrong with Microsoft: they’re like a 10 year old kid, chasing the bouncing ball, always running to where the ball was, never anticipating where the ball will be.
Look at Zune. A total fuckup of a product, and even if it had been somewhat of a success and, let’s say it took 10% of the MP3 player market which would have qualified as a huge success… so freaking what? The MP3 player market has matured and Apple – while still happy to sell as many iPods as people want to buy – has moved on. I hardly use my 5th gen iPod any longer – why should I when I have an iPhone which carries my music and videos AND works as a phone too, plus all the apps? Hell, why is Microsoft even bothering with Zune any longer, other than a stubborn refusal to admit it’s a failure? Not to mention how MS fucked all their ‘PlaysForSure’ partners right in the ass with Zune, after they promised them over and over they weren’t going to compete with them in the MP3 player market.
(anyone remember the smashing success of their crippled song sharing feature on Zune, ‘welcome to the social?’ Yeah me neither.)
Man, I could go on and on, like the ridiculously retarded Microsoft Marketplace where you spend $5 to buy 400 points and a song costs 79 points which translates to… ah fuck it, I’m going to iTunes Music Store. Or if you want to talk about cellphones, let’s talk Sidekick… and Pink… and Kin… and WinMo7.
This company has a REALLY bad case of ADD and they might have gotten away with it, if they were actually competent at producing and marketing whatever flavor of the month they thought was going to be the next iPod/iPhone/iPad killer.
Finally, Ballmer is exactly like a Bush regime flunkie… he regularly spouts the most patently ridiculous up-is-down, everything-is-good-news-for-MS BS and he seems to believe it as well. You could fill a small book with LOLworthy Ballmer quotes, like when he said in advance of iPhone’s launch that it doesn’t matter how many handsets you sell; what really matters is how much penetration your mobile OS has. Well, even if that wasn’t bullshit, iPhone’s OS is beating the crap out of MS there too.
Oh and by the way… have any of you visited one of the two Microsoft Stores open in the US? They are virtual clones of Apple Store; the only difference is the logo.
I don’t hate on MS and Ballmer out of Apple tribalism; I hate on them because they are just so damned incompetent. They just don’t get it. There is no excuse for a company with the advantages and brainpower MS has, to not have relegated Apple to a niche player. Military history proves time and time again that it’s not the biggest army that necessarily wins; it’s what the general does with it that counts.
Mr Furious
@r€nato:
Yup. My parents had a Gateway in the den for years that was so frustrating to use they barely ever turned it on. Could never get the printer to work…or the scanner…wouldn’t work with their digital camera, etc. I lived out of state and couldn’t help them, and I’d lose my patience and want to start smashing things after spending ten minutes diagnosing a PC anyway.
A couple years ago they bought an iMac. They actually enjoy their computer now. My mom is on Facebook. She enjoys and actually uses her camera. She can keep up with her grandkids around the country, etc. They can buy a printer and just plug it in and it works. So all the pictures that my mom has taken that previously existed only in the ether can be printed…
Without that Mac, they’d still be in the dark ages, so to speak.
The iPad will only expand that market once they get it operating independently.
r€nato
@Amanda in the South Bay: Amanda, you gotta do what you gotta do. I’m not going to put you down for buying a PC netbook if that’s what you can afford. If it does the job, fine. But, you’re getting what you pay for. There is a very high amount of dissatisfaction with the low-end netbook market, both from consumers who expected better performance and manufacturers who have realized where the race to the bottom ends up. That’s why Apple never bothered with netbooks; that’s why Tim Cook openly scorned them, and correctly predicted 18 months ago where it would all end up, when everyone including all the genius analysts on Wall Street were wailing about why Apple wasn’t going to do netbooks too.
No matter how many times you tell people, ‘hey it’s a netbook; it’s not going to be any good for gaming; you’re not going to be able to run six applications all at once,’ they will end up disappointed with the experience and they will associate that disappointment with Asus or HP or whomever sold them that computer.
I drive a Corolla, not a BMW. A Corolla is what I can afford. It works for me. It does what I need it to do; basic transportation, it’s reliable, it gets me where I need to go in an economical manner. But I also don’t expect it to help me pick up chicks, or to be a car I’d enjoy driving on a long road trip on windy mountain roads in Colorado. I think too many people pay for PCs and expect something approaching a BMW experience, and they don’t even get a Corolla experience in the end.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
There is no Google Voice app – it’s been blocked from the App store (so far).
I didn’t realize Sprint used ClearWire. That’s the part I was referring to, so yea, that would be the better purchase.
Martin
@r€nato: Tim Cook and Jony Ive are as good as Steve as doing this. Apple will execute just fine without Steve. As you note – it’s now in the culture.
Comrade Luke
@r€nato:
Another great example of making a decision because it helps them internally, by obfuscating foreign currency issues, at the expense of the user experience.
Q. Why are we inventing another currency?
A. Because it’s easier for us to manage!
Q. But what about making it easier for the user?
A. But it’s easier for us to manage!
Martin
@Comrade Luke:
Google Voice for iPhone
The app store isn’t the only way to deploy apps on the iPhone, contrary to the rantings of, well, everybody. For a whole year people developed and shipped apps for the iPhone before the app store showed up. That means of creating apps not only still exists, but is actively being expanded and promoted by Apple – Google was smart enough to use it.
Comrade Luke
@Martin:
That’s no good. It doesn’t integrate with the contacts on your phone, and since it’s not a native app you don’t get notifications when you get a voicemail.
Also, it doesn’t dial from your Google Voice number, but via a “Google access number”, so my recently dialed list is always the access number, not the number I called.
Brian J
@PeakVT:
I wonder how any growth Apple will see in the coming years will affect its cash on hand. You can make the argument that computers, as opposed to tablets or phones, aren’t where the growth will or should be, but I’m not sure it’s going away as fast as some think. If it doesn’t, Apple will probably benefit enormously, as it pretty much has only one place to go as far as percentage of the market: up. If it’s making money hand over fist right now, I can only imagine how much it would be making if it manages to double its sales of Macbooks.
Martin
@Comrade Luke: I don’t think any 3rd party app would be able to dial – that should be a protected API. For some good reasons. Reasonable points on the others. Apple is unfortunately still trapped to some degree by AT&T.
Mr Furious
@Brian J: I think they will increase their share as more and more people get a taste of the Apple experience through the tablets and phones… The margins are totally different (I’m guessing) and the app money isn’t there with the computers, but it can only bolster the bottom line.
demimondian
@Martin: You don’t know what you’re talking about dude.
Look, I worked at MEFT for eleven years. What most of the free software world doesn’t know is that to a business..we don’t matter. The only organizations which actually save money using Linux are Google and Amazon. And Teh Googley only saves money because they have hundreds of thousands of servers in data centers for which they don’t pay license fees. Similarly, the only company on earth which actually net saves money on running FreeBSD (or any form of BSD, for that matter) is Yahoo!…see Google, data centers, license fees, above.
Meanwhile, Microsoft wells 80% of its license through bulk license programs. And those licenses? Yeah, they’re pure gold.
demimondian
@Comrade Luke: Never mind that the strategic goal for the 360 was to…kill the PS3. A goal which it met.
Oh, and it’s been profitable for years, now, and its sales are increasing. The former, of course, unlike the PS3, and the latter, unlike the Wii.
Comrade Luke
@demimondian:
It is? This generation is over? PS3 will catch Xbox, book it.
Wii made money from the first unit sold. Xbox? Not so much, and way to conveniently forget the warranty payments for the faulty hardware.
Keep dreaming though; I’m sure you’ll make partner soon enough with that level of delusion.
demimondian
@Comrade Luke: The warranty payments were a drop in the bucket. As to the PS3 making money — five years into a generation, the generation is *over*, baby. PS3 is history.
Martin
@demimondian: But they aren’t a growth market. Yes, it’s a lot of licenses, and they keep the engine going, but there’s minimal growth there and the consumer market doesn’t see those economies of scale. What do I care if GM gets Windows licenses for $28 per FTE if I have to pay $399 for a copy of Office or if a Windows license drives the cost of a netbook up by 15%? It’s a great strategy for keeping the IT division going, but its not helping the OEMs – as HPs purchase of Palm should make clear and it’s not bringing consumers on board.
And profitable for years? No. They’re profitable through the holidays and lose money mid-year. It’s great that they’re killing off the PS3, but killing competitors isn’t their mission – making money is. And do they not think that Sony will come back with something new? Or Nintendo, or hell, Apple? I don’t mean to be overly critical here, Apple had the better part of a whole decade wishing they were as profitable as XBox has been, and they have segments that they’re perfectly content being break-even (like music), but MS isn’t treating XBox as a hobby or even as a loss-leader and it’s not clear what they’re building toward, other than a PS3 killing division.
demimondian
@Martin: Um, you are wrong on several points. First, the cost of a Windows license is actually wiped out on your average netbook — the shovelware payments to the OEM more than make up for the Windows license. There’s a reason that the Dells bundled with Linux are often more expensive than their Windows counterparts, and it *isn’t* because Dell is under MSFT’s thumb. The OEMs charge good money for renting out install disk space to third parties.
As to the 360 — it funds a large chunk of other things, like the Zune. The business unit is much larger than the 360. And, no, they do *not* think that Sony will come back; the company as a whole was completely dependent on the PS3 transition to have any hope of remaining profitable, and it flopped. Why do you think that Sony has had so much management turmoil?
Brian J
@Mr Furious:
I wonder to what extent one helps the other. Buying the phone convinced me I’d like to buy a Macbook, although I bought one used. Then again, when I get a new computer in the next year or so, it will be an Apple product of some type.
No matter which way you look at it, though, it seems like Apple only has room to grow.
El Cruzado
@demimondian: 3 billion dollars wasn’t a drop in the bucket. It pretty much erased any chance of decent profits for the 360 as a whole.
And no, the generation isn’t over and won’t be for a while. The console generational change is slowing down as the business model becomes unsustainable coupled with the prices of bleeding edge technology and the escalating costs of producing games that are just slightly shinier than the previous generation’s.
Martin
@demimondian:
Reasonable point. I’m not sure that’s having an overall beneficial effect on the desirability of these devices, however. Further, we don’t know what Google will pay OEMs to put Android on there. They pay Apple for premium search placement on the iPhone and Safari. Being part of the shovelware effort themselves, and being in the ad business, surely they’ll put something into this game.
demimondian
@El Cruzado: Sorry, no. The generation is over. Yes, the devices will continue to sell for a while, but the investments in the games have already shifted — most games are not exclusive to the Playstation, and there is no way that Sony will be able to leverage their position in the game console market to control content like they did with the PS2.
The next generation will be fought over input devices — currently, that means MSFT’s Project Natal, and Sony’s attempt at the same thing. *If* Natal is a success, it will wipe the other two off the map, as it has no discrete input device. Personally, I’m skeptical, but MSFT’s design is clever, and might work.
As to the fatuous “three billion dollar” trope — you don’t actually think it cost that much, do you? Stop and think about it. At the point the warranty upgrade was announced, a new 360 cost about 250 dollars to produce. Let’s assume that Microsoft replaced each device that was sent in. That would require the replacement of 12.5 Million units at the original cost — or more like 25 million units at current estimated cost. Microsoft has only sold about 40 million of the blasted things!
Yes, the replacements were expensive. No, they haven’t cost that much. And, oh by the way — their cost is factored in to the various charts you can find of Microsoft’s revenue.
demimondian
@Martin: If Google were paying netbook manufacturers to put Android on their devices, I would expect Microsoft would respond to the challenge by reducing their prices. Android, however, poses no threat whatsoever to Windows outside of that small (and possibly shrinking) market; the unified Windows API is just too useful to most developers — and particulalry to game developers. From Microsoft’s point of view, the competitive value of forcing Google to pay more to make inroads in a narrow sliver of the market is likely to be money well spent.
Karl
Something of a nitpick, but Google’s android and Chrome OS platforms are just application layers running on top of a linux operating system. You can’t see the linux as a user, but it’s there. So anyone selling an android/Chrome/Chromium device is most definitely “saving money by using linux.”
That’s what Google means when they say they want the OS to disappear.