Dude- That's totally you own opinion . 2 out of those 3 are totally biased fanboyz. Speak for yourself.
Actually I forgot to add your name to the list but whatever. In my dealings with all 3 they have been reasonable. Granted you got this thing going with solipsism but that is y'all. Still iStink does not have to justify himself to anyone.
Microsoft once again denied they're making a branded mobile phone, as a confusing Wall Street Journal article seemed to say Microsoft and Verizon Wireless were working on some sort of device.
It will not completely suck because, with all the experience - own and borrowed from the others - it is hard nowadays to make completely useless smart phone; on the other hand, it is more likely to be just another "me, too" product than real killer; most of the phones are, statistically speaking.
And why killing iPhone's design team? It is much more useful to buy them over. Like Palm did with that Pre guy. Each team has many talented people who feel they'd be better project leaders than current one (and some actually might be) and will jump boats if right position - and right money - are on the table.
But all together, there is no real news there... nothing to justify such "enthusiasm".
I think we are agreeing more than you think. I also concur that whatever this new phone may be, it won't _completely_ suck. It will, I reiterate, suck just enough to make it insipid.
I would be terribly surprised if any of Apple's core team (who work on projects such as the iPhone) would ever work for an outfit like M$. I'd go into my reasons but really, if one has read the terribly interesting book "Hackers" by Steven Levy, then you would know from where I'm coming with such a claim. In short, M$ represents heat death/stagnation. Apple computer, though also a mighty corporation (and conservative) has taken a different approach - dare I say, better & more expansive?
It will not completely suck because, with all the experience - own and borrowed from the others - it is hard nowadays to make completely useless smart phone; on the other hand, it is more likely to be just another "me, too" product than real killer; most of the phones are, statistically speaking.
here's a good example:
dell, they are trying to sell their phone to carriers with no success--i guess its hard to make a completely sucky phone and dell succeded
I wonder if M$ has ever had an original idea in its entire existence?
Just one (that they're still riding on, tho' the boat's starting to take on serious water), and one which which they "executed" with amazing alacrity:
That they could pretty much take down (or at least badly wound) all of their 1980's competitors at once through a combo of guile, misdealing, API tricks, and liberal borrowing:
IBM (pretending to help IBM develop OS/2 while readying an IBM-free Windows), Apple (borrowing the Mac OS metaphor for Windows, after having complete access to the API's to develop the Mac's 1st productivity suite), Lotus (1-2-3 spreadsheet), Ashton-Tate (dBase III and IV), Harvard Graphics Presentations, WordPerfect (promising a "trusted ISP" an upgrade path, while practicing the mantra "The coding's not done until WordPefect won't run), Novell, Borland and later, Netscape.
You whipper-snappers here may not remember this period, but they put more blood on the floor during a few furious years than Wolverine's going to let on screens across the nation with his Admantium claws this week. It really was quite something - like Tony Soprano taking out all the other standing families around with hit after hit.
And where, 25 years later, does virtually all of MS's profit come from, despite the launch and acquisition of hundreds of other products? Windows, Office, Win Server and Exchange.
[Long list of me-too and no way MS products redacted here]
And the trick can't be replicated since all the possible prey are too wary, so where do they go now??
Not into oblivion, as there's still big shelf-life left in the cash cows, and their hooks are in the enterprise as well as the home, but the company seems destined to become just another RBC (really big company) that provides part of the plumbing of computing, not a leader of where digital life is going.
I would be terribly surprised if any of Apple's core team (who work on projects such as the iPhone) would ever work for an outfit like M$. I'd go into my reasons but really, if one has read the terribly interesting book "Hackers" by Steven Levy, then you would know from where I'm coming with such a claim. In short, M$ represents heat death/stagnation. Apple computer, though also a mighty corporation (and conservative) has taken a different approach - dare I say, better & more expansive?
anyway, whatevs.
Everything bellow is related to Formula 1 Racing, but works well in different scenarios.
F1 driver, Rubens Barrichello, left Ferrari F1 team when they were at the top of their performance, and moved to underdog BAR Honda.
We know that in F1 racing, Ferrari is all there is - history, passion, unique team culture, most influential name in racing... beautiful Italian girls ... and I'm not even their supporter. In short, they are as cool as F1 goes, and as rich as anyone else - if not much more. And they are in Italy!
Yet, Rubens decided he'd rather be No.1 driver (or equal at least) in piss-poor performing Honda than No.2 in Ferrari.
Ross Brawn - brilliant technical director, part of Schumacher winning team - left Ferrari as well and, after a sabbatical year, moved to Honda - though he had open invitation to return to Ferrari, and blank put-your-own-number check on the desk.
Two men, two different reasons. Rubens got bored to look at the guy in front of him, arguably (but not necessarily) more capable. He wanted his chance to do his best instead of just doing best for the team. Ross wanted new challenges; he got bored with being on the top - he wanted to get to the top again; because sometimes, fun is in getting there. Not unlike Adrian Newey, brilliant F1 car designer, who left McLaren and went to design cars for Red Bull Racing. McLaren Mercedes is likely 2nd most influential team in the sport, one with names like Senna and Prost associated with. Red Bull is, well... energy drink.
My point? Give people best team, best money, best corporate culture... some will desire change, for one reason or another. Second in command in iPhone design team might crave to be first in command, even if it is somewhere else. A guy who developed iPhone GUI might get bored with adding little improvements to existing platform (which is arguably so good you can't do much more without changing it completely) and wants a challenge of designing something new from the scratch... even if that means working for someone else.
Coincidently, Rubens, Ross and Adrian are doing extremely well. After Honda dramatically decided to pull out from sport just a few weeks before the beginning of 2009 season, Ross pretty much inherited Honda's F1 team - now called BrawnGP - and his team is leading championship after 4 races. Rubens is 2nd driver in standings - behind BrawnGP's other driver, Jason Button. And new Red Bull Racing car is considered best design on the grid. They are 2nd in team standings, and their driver is 3rd in drivers' standings.
Both Ferrari and McLaren are piss-poor so far, just hoping to do catch-up in the second part of championship.
Just one (that they're still riding on, tho' the boat's starting to take on serious water), and one which which they "executed" with amazing alacrity:
That they could pretty much take down (or at least badly wound) all of their 1980's competitors at once through a combo of guile, misdealing, API tricks, and liberal borrowing:
IBM (pretending to help IBM develop OS/2 while readying an IBM-free Windows), Apple (borrowing the Mac OS metaphor for Windows, after having complete access to the API's to develop the Mac's 1st productivity suite), Lotus (1-2-3 spreadsheet), Ashton-Tate (dBase III and IV), Harvard Graphics Presentations, WordPerfect (promising a "trusted ISP" an upgrade path, while practicing the mantra "The coding's not done until WordPefect won't run), Novell, Borland and later, Netscape.
You whipper-snappers here may not remember this period, but they put more blood on the floor during a few furious years than Wolverine's going to let on screens across the nation with his Admantium claws this week. It really was quite something - like Tony Soprano taking out all the other standing families around with hit after hit.
And where, 25 years later, does virtually all of MS's profit come from, despite the launch and acquisition of hundreds of other products? Windows, Office, Win Server and Exchange.
[Long list of me-too and no way MS products redacted here]
And the trick can't be replicated since all the possible prey are too wary, so where do they go now??
Not into oblivion, as there's still big shelf-life left in the cash cows, and their hooks are in the enterprise as well as the home, but the company seems destined to become just another RBC (really big company) that provides part of the plumbing of computing, not a leader of where digital life is going.
Even if they did deal with competition with some prohibition-approved methods, question remain - why did no one else managed to come out with competing platform - specially in the old DOS days when MS wasn't even remotely this strong.
Why didn't Apple make a deal with WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape creators... and offered a platform with great networking and Internet accessibility, business office suit... and reasonable pricing?
Opportunity lost?
MS is where they are right now - because they did the best job overall in new, emerging IT market.
Speaking of Pink, didn't Microsoft have a project at one point named Pink that never came to fruition, it ended up being all made up or something to try & hype up their position & discourage competition from even trying.
Anyone else remember that or am I cracked?
I don't know you well enough to say whether you're "cracked" or not, but "Pink" Was an OS project that Apple had going for a while.
Even if they did deal with competition with some prohibition-approved methods, question remain - why did no one else managed to come out with competing platform - specially in the old DOS days when MS wasn't even remotely this strong.
Why didn't Apple make a deal with WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape creators... and offered a platform with great networking and Internet accessibility, business office suit... and reasonable pricing?
Opportunity lost?
MS is where they are right now - because they did the best job overall in new, emerging IT market.
A number of books have attempted to analyze how this happened. Part is that IBM actually used MS to take out the Apple II and all the other nascent alternatives - and IBM already owned the enterprise market and the business support infrastructure, so they opened that all to MS (and Intel, significantly).
Before the IBM PC (and its brilliant Charlie Chaplin introductory ad campaign) ever happened, it was axiomatic in the business computing world (95% of the computing world at the height of the Apple II market) that "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM."
So when these odd new machines - which the "data processing" (not yet called IT) departments instinctively distrusted in the first place since they valued complete control of computing in their "glass houses" (where the air-conditioned, air-filtered mainframes lived) - began to make their way into companies, brought in by individual pioneers, they were never embraced until a product with the IBM label made the whole thing a little more kosher.
So in the beginning it wasn't so much that MS "did the best job overall in new, emerging IT market," rather that it was handed to them by IBM, and they were working from the inside from the start.
Apple, while successful and growing rapidly, had no nation-wide business sales and service force, and actually little inclination - then, and mostly now - to try and build one. Apple, also, has been repeatedly dinged for having poor relations with ISV's for decades. (MS might help you out so they could reverse engineer your intellectual property and crush you later, but were more helpful until they were ready to take you out).
It's not exactly an innovation, but also, if the Mac could have reversed the tide, MS was also ahead in tools, languages and developer environments, things they have long been regarded as fairly competent at. Though it may be relvant for the future that Apple has finally in the last few years made great strides in these areas.
Another inhibiting factor that doomed Apple in the first great PC corporate revolution (I'm hoping for a second) was their choice - twice in the Mac era - of the wrong CPU horse to ride, first, the Moto chips, and then the IBM/Moto development of the PowerPC architecture.
Which were not only proven to be the wrong choices, but cost billions of development bucks and years of catch-up to migrate their entire base FOUR times - from Apple II to Mac (processor and OS), from Moto to Power, from OS 9 to OS X (and integrating all the NeXT pieces, in the tangle of Blue Box, Yellow Box, Rhapsody, Carbon and Cocoa - and finally from Power to Intel - all tasks MS never faced (since the first Windows was simply a layer on top of DOS, and there's likely bits of legacy code in Vista that was written before many of you were born.
And in another dead end, going down and then shutting down the clone road - something MS again, as a software only company never faced. Not to mention all the time and money spent on the Apple III and Lisa. Not to mention that businesses are bottom-line buyers with short-term depreciation schedules and Apples have never been bargain-priced products despite demonstrably lower TCO's over their longer useful life-times.
The real wonder is not that Apple was beaten by MS during all of this, it's that they were able to survive so many serious setbacks - and errors in judgement, and finally re-emerge Phoenix-like in one of the great corporate comebacks of all time.
Which is either a testament to how good Apple's overriding vision has always been, or just how poor a default MS has always been. Or some of both.
So to corporate buyers, as PC's became real parts of, and then the key to corporate computing, Apple was two hippies barely out of their family's garage, while MS rode in on the shoulders of the titan of the whole industry. And Apple still looked that way to IT when the Mac arrived with, yes, "Goodies" as the standard menu bar name for what MS has always (and Apple now again) calls "Tools." Oh, I remember cringing when I saw that.
All the ISV's I mentioned in my post, i.e., those developing serious productivity apps chose to develop for the DOS/Intel 8086 platform over the Apple II. And Apple shunned Intel when they tried to fight back with the Mac. Still, Lotus brought out "Jazz" for the Mac, and WordPerfect bought a Mac word processor (from the Beagle Boys I believe), but neither were great programs and neither had much to do with their PC versions and both faded away.
WordPerfect, in fact, tried to be the all systems company, e.g., also offering a Unix version, and I think, others.
WP, already hamstrung by coding hanky-panky from MS (it went to court, and while it was never "proven," it seems almost certain MS Office programs were being given better access to Win API's), also missed out on MS's innovation in bundling: creating a suite of productivity programs, i.e., MS Office.
Novell made the biggest, most concerted effort to displace MS, but they were at least a year or two too late, if they ever had a chance. They obtained DR DOS from Digital Research, bought WordPerfect (which also had a presentations program and a groupware client), the Quattro Pro Spreadsheet, "rights" to the Paradox database and had a vision of using Netware and these acquisitions to challenge Gates and Co. from top to bottom under the leadership of an aging Ray Noorda who had built the best network operating system on the planet at one point, and wasn't content to see MS's inferior server system displace "Big Red."
However, stuffing programs from 3 different companies into a box does not an instant integrated Office Suite make - with virtually no connections between WP, SS and DB in the initial release. And welding the Digital Research tech to Netware never made any real headway either.
Novell sold all the productivity pieces (except for the groupware client now known as GroupWise) to Corel at a huge loss, effectively ending Utah's attempt (where both Novell and WP started) to compete with Silicon Valley and Redmond.
Corel at the time, after early success with Corel Draw was being soundly thrashed by Adobe (the sole early era ISV to not be crushed by an MS alternative, unless you count Quicken, which MS nearly bought, and then tried to crush with MS Money, but didn't, and Citrix which was partly eaten but re-framed itself in new niches). (Oracle was never really a PC company so they're part of a different narrative, even though they're gearing up to take on MS in new arenas even now.)
Corel tried a number of approaches to compete against MS (and Adobe), including an early Java machine OS, when Java had real buzz and was seen as an alternative to Windows and for running full-scale apps, and expended many resources recoding WordPerfect Suite as a Java alternative to Office. They also tried Corel Linux and other approaches, including an alternative to Acrobat Reader.
But as things have settled out, Corel survives as the second tier bargain priced alternative to both MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite - with good programs (WP is still 10 times better than Word, and there's much to like about their graphics programs), with little prospect of ever becoming a leading force again.
Meanwhile, while those projects gained few adherents, Corel's cash cows were starving by being displaced by Adobe's Photoshop, and its successful stream of acquisitions, Aldus, others and later, Macromedia (DreamWeaver and Flash) - resulting in Creative Suite, Flash, Acrobat, etc., which have never been really challenged by MS.
(Another difference between Adobe and all of these other fallen or diminshed companies is that because of Apple's one bastion in the professional market, i.e., among creatives, Photoshop has long been both a Mac and Win program, and the Mac versions used to come out FIRST. And once Adobe masters X-code, may again someday, who knows? Despite friction between the two companies and some direct competition between them.)
Apple's other core non-end user base was in the K-12 education market, which they were in danger of losing, but stabilized in after Jobs' return to Apple. The MS "light touch" is also involved in this area, e.g., when MS "generously" began making charitable donations of fully equipped computers to schools, and you can imagine the percentage of those that were Apples.
But underlying all this history is that what IBM and Apple failed to appreciate was just how ambitious and ruthless a force IBM had unleashed in MS, and I personally have always felt that that's the real key to the story. And not truly an innovation, as, e.g., the British pioneered the approach with their colonies in entities like the Hudson Bay and East India trading companies, ruthless monopolies unhindered by any sense of business ethics, even addicting millions of Chinese to opium to garner control of the world tea market. Further, IBM had plenty of case studies of monopolistic bundling computer industry practices for Gates to emulate.
In fact, while reeling from Microsoft's defection, an old anti-trust suit went against IBM and made it that much harder for them to cope for many years, when they were on the verge of breaking up to survive the damage inflicted by MS, and then the decline of their own PC's against the "IBM-PC-Compatible" industry they also created and lost out to by trying to keep proprietary standards like Microchannel which they hoped to license to the Compaqs of the world to get a piece of each PC sale, but ended up ghettoizing their own PC's as less compatible than the "compatibles"!
It's also a fact that Apple is not immune to putting ISV's out of business by incorporating their products and features into Apple products, e.g., Dashboard and its widgets pretty much destroyed Konquistador.
And THAT was Mr. soft-talking, nerdy-acting, now charitable foundation running Gates' true skill: doing whatever it took to derail, mislead, crush, copy, buy, buy and close, outmarket and overwhelm all comers by virtue of controlling the OS and the entire WinTel market, and which earned his company its Borg-like reputation. On merit.
A number of books have attempted to analyze how this happened. Part is that IBM actually used MS to take out the Apple II and all the other nascent alternatives - and IBM already owned the enterprise market and the business support infrastructure, so they opened that all to MS (and Intel, significantly).
...
Anyway, one long-time amateur observer's take.
Very good. I would fill in some of the details, but it's enough.
Very good. I would fill in some of the details, but it's enough.
Thanks! It was fun trying to pull (what I remember of) all these threads together from this distance in time.
And considering how that history went down, it makes me hopeful about the present and the future.
We've reached a new, critical "inflexion point" in computing and how it effects and interacts with the lives of all of us - a change as significant as the change first, from "glass house" to personal computing, and second, the change from stand alone/corp network computing to internet computing.
And as we reach this point, Apple is leading a genuine "paradigm shift" with its iDevices and their new OS as the "smart portal" to the global, mobille OS of the internet, backed up by its sleek, mature Mac OS and computers, its retailing models for hard and software and its long-term focus.
I genuinely think things are really going to be different this time. I don't think any one company is going to wield the clout and dominance that MS has had for decades, but Apple will absolutely be in the thick of it.
apple could have been the "ms" of early years got fat and happy, but MS never looked at itself as a hardware company Gates knew that hardware would end up a commodity product and software was the driving force, also IBM was both and locked
apple always i think thought of itself as both software and hardware, and showed that IBM model of integration with hardware/ software AT THE CONSUMER level (not hot ugly mainframes ) empowered the INDIVIDUAL
apple fell away from innovation and stagnated it failed, but phoenix of SJ rose to re-focus the energy to the new apple
ipod/ itunes proved a new paradigm, integration with innovation rocks
apple did an end run around the stagnant enterprise, who cares what you have its what all the workers are bringing in that counts
that is how apple will get into enterprise, all the workers and employees bring in a device forcing enterprise to raise its dinosaur heads and move.
apple wouldn't be the company today without the failure of the early years, many companies lose focus and go back to basics, fundamentals but it takes vision
Very good. I would fill in some of the details, but it's enough.
Indeed, impressive.
Liking his methods or not, Gates did the best for him, his company and his shareholders. Which, at the end of a day, is something every company out there is trying to achieve.
Comments
10 CLS
20 PRINT"Create Microsoft Product"
30 INPUT"What is name of equivalent Apple product? ", A$
40 IF (LEN)A$ = 0 THEN GOTO 30
50 PRINT"Your new product is: Microsoft ", A$
60 END
wow that brings back some memories of sitting by the warming glow of a commodore pet. |-D
Dude- That's totally you own opinion . 2 out of those 3 are totally biased fanboyz. Speak for yourself.
Actually I forgot to add your name to the list but whatever. In my dealings with all 3 they have been reasonable. Granted you got this thing going with solipsism but that is y'all. Still iStink does not have to justify himself to anyone.
Microsoft once again denied they're making a branded mobile phone, as a confusing Wall Street Journal article seemed to say Microsoft and Verizon Wireless were working on some sort of device.
source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346182,00.asp
/end of thread
Don't agree.
It will not completely suck because, with all the experience - own and borrowed from the others - it is hard nowadays to make completely useless smart phone; on the other hand, it is more likely to be just another "me, too" product than real killer; most of the phones are, statistically speaking.
And why killing iPhone's design team? It is much more useful to buy them over. Like Palm did with that Pre guy. Each team has many talented people who feel they'd be better project leaders than current one (and some actually might be) and will jump boats if right position - and right money - are on the table.
But all together, there is no real news there... nothing to justify such "enthusiasm".
I think we are agreeing more than you think. I also concur that whatever this new phone may be, it won't _completely_ suck. It will, I reiterate, suck just enough to make it insipid.
I would be terribly surprised if any of Apple's core team (who work on projects such as the iPhone) would ever work for an outfit like M$. I'd go into my reasons but really, if one has read the terribly interesting book "Hackers" by Steven Levy, then you would know from where I'm coming with such a claim. In short, M$ represents heat death/stagnation. Apple computer, though also a mighty corporation (and conservative) has taken a different approach - dare I say, better & more expansive?
anyway, whatevs.
Don't agree.
It will not completely suck because, with all the experience - own and borrowed from the others - it is hard nowadays to make completely useless smart phone; on the other hand, it is more likely to be just another "me, too" product than real killer; most of the phones are, statistically speaking.
here's a good example:
dell, they are trying to sell their phone to carriers with no success--i guess its hard to make a completely sucky phone and dell succeded
Zunefune LOL
How about calling it a Microphone
I wonder if M$ has ever had an original idea in its entire existence?
Just one (that they're still riding on, tho' the boat's starting to take on serious water), and one which which they "executed" with amazing alacrity:
That they could pretty much take down (or at least badly wound) all of their 1980's competitors at once through a combo of guile, misdealing, API tricks, and liberal borrowing:
IBM (pretending to help IBM develop OS/2 while readying an IBM-free Windows), Apple (borrowing the Mac OS metaphor for Windows, after having complete access to the API's to develop the Mac's 1st productivity suite), Lotus (1-2-3 spreadsheet), Ashton-Tate (dBase III and IV), Harvard Graphics Presentations, WordPerfect (promising a "trusted ISP" an upgrade path, while practicing the mantra "The coding's not done until WordPefect won't run), Novell, Borland and later, Netscape.
You whipper-snappers here may not remember this period, but they put more blood on the floor during a few furious years than Wolverine's going to let on screens across the nation with his Admantium claws this week. It really was quite something - like Tony Soprano taking out all the other standing families around with hit after hit.
And where, 25 years later, does virtually all of MS's profit come from, despite the launch and acquisition of hundreds of other products? Windows, Office, Win Server and Exchange.
[Long list of me-too and no way MS products redacted here]
And the trick can't be replicated since all the possible prey are too wary, so where do they go now??
Not into oblivion, as there's still big shelf-life left in the cash cows, and their hooks are in the enterprise as well as the home, but the company seems destined to become just another RBC (really big company) that provides part of the plumbing of computing, not a leader of where digital life is going.
I would be terribly surprised if any of Apple's core team (who work on projects such as the iPhone) would ever work for an outfit like M$. I'd go into my reasons but really, if one has read the terribly interesting book "Hackers" by Steven Levy, then you would know from where I'm coming with such a claim. In short, M$ represents heat death/stagnation. Apple computer, though also a mighty corporation (and conservative) has taken a different approach - dare I say, better & more expansive?
anyway, whatevs.
Everything bellow is related to Formula 1 Racing, but works well in different scenarios.
F1 driver, Rubens Barrichello, left Ferrari F1 team when they were at the top of their performance, and moved to underdog BAR Honda.
We know that in F1 racing, Ferrari is all there is - history, passion, unique team culture, most influential name in racing... beautiful Italian girls
Yet, Rubens decided he'd rather be No.1 driver (or equal at least) in piss-poor performing Honda than No.2 in Ferrari.
Ross Brawn - brilliant technical director, part of Schumacher winning team - left Ferrari as well and, after a sabbatical year, moved to Honda - though he had open invitation to return to Ferrari, and blank put-your-own-number check on the desk.
Two men, two different reasons. Rubens got bored to look at the guy in front of him, arguably (but not necessarily) more capable. He wanted his chance to do his best instead of just doing best for the team. Ross wanted new challenges; he got bored with being on the top - he wanted to get to the top again; because sometimes, fun is in getting there. Not unlike Adrian Newey, brilliant F1 car designer, who left McLaren and went to design cars for Red Bull Racing. McLaren Mercedes is likely 2nd most influential team in the sport, one with names like Senna and Prost associated with. Red Bull is, well... energy drink.
My point? Give people best team, best money, best corporate culture... some will desire change, for one reason or another. Second in command in iPhone design team might crave to be first in command, even if it is somewhere else. A guy who developed iPhone GUI might get bored with adding little improvements to existing platform (which is arguably so good you can't do much more without changing it completely) and wants a challenge of designing something new from the scratch... even if that means working for someone else.
Coincidently, Rubens, Ross and Adrian are doing extremely well. After Honda dramatically decided to pull out from sport just a few weeks before the beginning of 2009 season, Ross pretty much inherited Honda's F1 team - now called BrawnGP - and his team is leading championship after 4 races. Rubens is 2nd driver in standings - behind BrawnGP's other driver, Jason Button. And new Red Bull Racing car is considered best design on the grid. They are 2nd in team standings, and their driver is 3rd in drivers' standings.
Both Ferrari and McLaren are piss-poor so far, just hoping to do catch-up in the second part of championship.
Change is good, sometimes.
here's a good example:
dell, they are trying to sell their phone to carriers with no success--i guess its hard to make a completely sucky phone and dell succeded
And what makes you think it was "completely sucky" phone..?
Carrier(s) could have turned it down for many reasons:
- too expensive
- not what they were looking for
- Dell is asking for too much (exclusive contracts etc) and phone is not that good (another me-too)
... just to name a few. I don't know complete story, though.
Just one (that they're still riding on, tho' the boat's starting to take on serious water), and one which which they "executed" with amazing alacrity:
That they could pretty much take down (or at least badly wound) all of their 1980's competitors at once through a combo of guile, misdealing, API tricks, and liberal borrowing:
IBM (pretending to help IBM develop OS/2 while readying an IBM-free Windows), Apple (borrowing the Mac OS metaphor for Windows, after having complete access to the API's to develop the Mac's 1st productivity suite), Lotus (1-2-3 spreadsheet), Ashton-Tate (dBase III and IV), Harvard Graphics Presentations, WordPerfect (promising a "trusted ISP" an upgrade path, while practicing the mantra "The coding's not done until WordPefect won't run), Novell, Borland and later, Netscape.
You whipper-snappers here may not remember this period, but they put more blood on the floor during a few furious years than Wolverine's going to let on screens across the nation with his Admantium claws this week. It really was quite something - like Tony Soprano taking out all the other standing families around with hit after hit.
And where, 25 years later, does virtually all of MS's profit come from, despite the launch and acquisition of hundreds of other products? Windows, Office, Win Server and Exchange.
[Long list of me-too and no way MS products redacted here]
And the trick can't be replicated since all the possible prey are too wary, so where do they go now??
Not into oblivion, as there's still big shelf-life left in the cash cows, and their hooks are in the enterprise as well as the home, but the company seems destined to become just another RBC (really big company) that provides part of the plumbing of computing, not a leader of where digital life is going.
Even if they did deal with competition with some prohibition-approved methods, question remain - why did no one else managed to come out with competing platform - specially in the old DOS days when MS wasn't even remotely this strong.
Why didn't Apple make a deal with WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape creators... and offered a platform with great networking and Internet accessibility, business office suit... and reasonable pricing?
Opportunity lost?
MS is where they are right now - because they did the best job overall in new, emerging IT market.
It pays no attention to criticsm!
Great video!
Speaking of Pink, didn't Microsoft have a project at one point named Pink that never came to fruition, it ended up being all made up or something to try & hype up their position & discourage competition from even trying.
Anyone else remember that or am I cracked?
I don't know you well enough to say whether you're "cracked" or not, but "Pink" Was an OS project that Apple had going for a while.
Even if they did deal with competition with some prohibition-approved methods, question remain - why did no one else managed to come out with competing platform - specially in the old DOS days when MS wasn't even remotely this strong.
Why didn't Apple make a deal with WordPerfect, Lotus, Netscape creators... and offered a platform with great networking and Internet accessibility, business office suit... and reasonable pricing?
Opportunity lost?
MS is where they are right now - because they did the best job overall in new, emerging IT market.
A number of books have attempted to analyze how this happened. Part is that IBM actually used MS to take out the Apple II and all the other nascent alternatives - and IBM already owned the enterprise market and the business support infrastructure, so they opened that all to MS (and Intel, significantly).
Before the IBM PC (and its brilliant Charlie Chaplin introductory ad campaign) ever happened, it was axiomatic in the business computing world (95% of the computing world at the height of the Apple II market) that "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM."
So when these odd new machines - which the "data processing" (not yet called IT) departments instinctively distrusted in the first place since they valued complete control of computing in their "glass houses" (where the air-conditioned, air-filtered mainframes lived) - began to make their way into companies, brought in by individual pioneers, they were never embraced until a product with the IBM label made the whole thing a little more kosher.
So in the beginning it wasn't so much that MS "did the best job overall in new, emerging IT market," rather that it was handed to them by IBM, and they were working from the inside from the start.
Apple, while successful and growing rapidly, had no nation-wide business sales and service force, and actually little inclination - then, and mostly now - to try and build one. Apple, also, has been repeatedly dinged for having poor relations with ISV's for decades. (MS might help you out so they could reverse engineer your intellectual property and crush you later, but were more helpful until they were ready to take you out). So to corporate buyers, as PC's became real parts of, and then the key to corporate computing, Apple was two hippies barely out of their family's garage, while MS rode in on the shoulders of the titan of the whole industry. And Apple still looked that way to IT when the Mac arrived with, yes, "Goodies" as the standard menu bar name for what MS has always (and Apple now again) calls "Tools." Oh, I remember cringing when I saw that.
All the ISV's I mentioned in my post, i.e., those developing serious productivity apps chose to develop for the DOS/Intel 8086 platform over the Apple II. And Apple shunned Intel when they tried to fight back with the Mac. Still, Lotus brought out "Jazz" for the Mac, and WordPerfect bought a Mac word processor (from the Beagle Boys I believe), but neither were great programs and neither had much to do with their PC versions and both faded away.
WordPerfect, in fact, tried to be the all systems company, e.g., also offering a Unix version, and I think, others.
WP, already hamstrung by coding hanky-panky from MS (it went to court, and while it was never "proven," it seems almost certain MS Office programs were being given better access to Win API's), also missed out on MS's innovation in bundling: creating a suite of productivity programs, i.e., MS Office.
Novell made the biggest, most concerted effort to displace MS, but they were at least a year or two too late, if they ever had a chance. They obtained DR DOS from Digital Research, bought WordPerfect (which also had a presentations program and a groupware client), the Quattro Pro Spreadsheet, "rights" to the Paradox database and had a vision of using Netware and these acquisitions to challenge Gates and Co. from top to bottom under the leadership of an aging Ray Noorda who had built the best network operating system on the planet at one point, and wasn't content to see MS's inferior server system displace "Big Red."
However, stuffing programs from 3 different companies into a box does not an instant integrated Office Suite make - with virtually no connections between WP, SS and DB in the initial release. And welding the Digital Research tech to Netware never made any real headway either.
Novell sold all the productivity pieces (except for the groupware client now known as GroupWise) to Corel at a huge loss, effectively ending Utah's attempt (where both Novell and WP started) to compete with Silicon Valley and Redmond.
Corel at the time, after early success with Corel Draw was being soundly thrashed by Adobe (the sole early era ISV to not be crushed by an MS alternative, unless you count Quicken, which MS nearly bought, and then tried to crush with MS Money, but didn't, and Citrix which was partly eaten but re-framed itself in new niches). (Oracle was never really a PC company so they're part of a different narrative, even though they're gearing up to take on MS in new arenas even now.)
Corel tried a number of approaches to compete against MS (and Adobe), including an early Java machine OS, when Java had real buzz and was seen as an alternative to Windows and for running full-scale apps, and expended many resources recoding WordPerfect Suite as a Java alternative to Office. They also tried Corel Linux and other approaches, including an alternative to Acrobat Reader.
But as things have settled out, Corel survives as the second tier bargain priced alternative to both MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite - with good programs (WP is still 10 times better than Word, and there's much to like about their graphics programs), with little prospect of ever becoming a leading force again.
Meanwhile, while those projects gained few adherents, Corel's cash cows were starving by being displaced by Adobe's Photoshop, and its successful stream of acquisitions, Aldus, others and later, Macromedia (DreamWeaver and Flash) - resulting in Creative Suite, Flash, Acrobat, etc., which have never been really challenged by MS.
(Another difference between Adobe and all of these other fallen or diminshed companies is that because of Apple's one bastion in the professional market, i.e., among creatives, Photoshop has long been both a Mac and Win program, and the Mac versions used to come out FIRST. And once Adobe masters X-code, may again someday, who knows? Despite friction between the two companies and some direct competition between them.)
Apple's other core non-end user base was in the K-12 education market, which they were in danger of losing, but stabilized in after Jobs' return to Apple. The MS "light touch" is also involved in this area, e.g., when MS "generously" began making charitable donations of fully equipped computers to schools, and you can imagine the percentage of those that were Apples.
But underlying all this history is that what IBM and Apple failed to appreciate was just how ambitious and ruthless a force IBM had unleashed in MS, and I personally have always felt that that's the real key to the story. And not truly an innovation, as, e.g., the British pioneered the approach with their colonies in entities like the Hudson Bay and East India trading companies, ruthless monopolies unhindered by any sense of business ethics, even addicting millions of Chinese to opium to garner control of the world tea market. Further, IBM had plenty of case studies of monopolistic bundling computer industry practices for Gates to emulate. And THAT was Mr. soft-talking, nerdy-acting, now charitable foundation running Gates' true skill: doing whatever it took to derail, mislead, crush, copy, buy, buy and close, outmarket and overwhelm all comers by virtue of controlling the OS and the entire WinTel market, and which earned his company its Borg-like reputation. On merit.
Anyway, one long-time amateur observer's take.
A number of books have attempted to analyze how this happened. Part is that IBM actually used MS to take out the Apple II and all the other nascent alternatives - and IBM already owned the enterprise market and the business support infrastructure, so they opened that all to MS (and Intel, significantly).
...
Anyway, one long-time amateur observer's take.
Very good. I would fill in some of the details, but it's enough.
Very good. I would fill in some of the details, but it's enough.
Thanks! It was fun trying to pull (what I remember of) all these threads together from this distance in time.
And considering how that history went down, it makes me hopeful about the present and the future.
We've reached a new, critical "inflexion point" in computing and how it effects and interacts with the lives of all of us - a change as significant as the change first, from "glass house" to personal computing, and second, the change from stand alone/corp network computing to internet computing.
And as we reach this point, Apple is leading a genuine "paradigm shift" with its iDevices and their new OS as the "smart portal" to the global, mobille OS of the internet, backed up by its sleek, mature Mac OS and computers, its retailing models for hard and software and its long-term focus.
I genuinely think things are really going to be different this time. I don't think any one company is going to wield the clout and dominance that MS has had for decades, but Apple will absolutely be in the thick of it.
apple could have been the "ms" of early years got fat and happy, but MS never looked at itself as a hardware company Gates knew that hardware would end up a commodity product and software was the driving force, also IBM was both and locked
apple always i think thought of itself as both software and hardware, and showed that IBM model of integration with hardware/ software AT THE CONSUMER level (not hot ugly mainframes ) empowered the INDIVIDUAL
apple fell away from innovation and stagnated it failed, but phoenix of SJ rose to re-focus the energy to the new apple
ipod/ itunes proved a new paradigm, integration with innovation rocks
apple did an end run around the stagnant enterprise, who cares what you have its what all the workers are bringing in that counts
that is how apple will get into enterprise, all the workers and employees bring in a device forcing enterprise to raise its dinosaur heads and move.
apple wouldn't be the company today without the failure of the early years, many companies lose focus and go back to basics, fundamentals but it takes vision
also from failure people started to listen to SJ
Very good. I would fill in some of the details, but it's enough.
Indeed, impressive.
Liking his methods or not, Gates did the best for him, his company and his shareholders. Which, at the end of a day, is something every company out there is trying to achieve.