Mainly Macintosh

Microsoft profis contract while Apple expansion continues

Apple growth continued unabated last quarter but the same cannot be said for aging giant Microsoft.

All kinds of reasons can be given for this but the simplest ones are probably correct;

A monopolist seeks to dominate everything it wants to do so it no longer has to do what it does not want to do. That is not some complex economic principle - that is common sense.

For companies like Apple, innovation was always a core activity. Apple invented things. It led. It lunged at doing them better than anyone else. Apple engineers repeatedly created better ways of doing things because they over-estimated what the state of the art was and accidentally improved upon it.

Microsoft for the most part created its product line by buying or licensing other company's products. Sybase's commcercial SQL database became Microsoft SQL Server. UIUC's free cross platform Mosaic web browser became the Windows-only Internet Explorer. And so forth.

It is hard to leap ahead when you are trying to remould last year's produt you got from some other company. Apple found that out in the 1990s.

Much of what is termed development at Microsoft is really just maintenance programming on products that were created at other companies or at USA universities.

That sounds bad but in the short term, at first - the reasons for this do not become manifest. Over time, they do manifest themselves. The germ of creation was not there to begin with so when the time comes for old trees to fall and new ones to take their place, there is not a means to do that.

Like a monarchy in a kingdom without heirs or the means to create them, politics not nature will determine what follows.

For the first 8 years of the 1990s, Apple coasted. There was an initial twist of change, some maintenance of software products acquired from other companies (e.g. the spreadsheet they got from Informix) - and then software product lines from the previous decade died off one by one.

Microsoft itself is in a decade of sequals. "Our most tested operating system ever" and "our safest operating system ever" begets "our most tested operating system ever" and "our safest operating system ever". Sounds like a broken record, right?

Big surprise. And ironic, considering. The metrics hardly show an improvement - quite the opposite. Whereas things should have been improving - they instead got steadily worse.

Microsoft had a number of multimedia reference products in the mid and late 1990s but these all died off in the early 2000s.

Apple rekindled its youth by retiring one of its two youthful cofounders to the fold. He brought a lot of his original talent - combined with a more stable, powerful software platform, and over a decade of experience creating another computer company and making a 3D animation company to its ultimate fruition - the future of Disney animation.

Billionaire Paul Allen seems to show no interest in returning to Microsoft. Like Steve Jobs, he had cancer and got over it. Unlike Steve Jobs, he left Microsoft to get over it. And also unlike Steve Jobs, he did not while away the next decade creating a next generation computing system.

For years, Microsoft attacked competitors and tried to carve out a safety zone with no compeition in it. It succeeded and how.

MS-Windows has grown increasingly more expensive every couple of years for the past decade, while the prices of Macs has continuously come down. That is the nice thing about Macs - the prices go down, the systems don't.

This weeks news stories paint a clear picture of what happened last quarter in the computer industry.

1. Apple reports best quarter ever with $1.21 billion profit
2. Microsoft profits sink for the first time in 23 years

Apple came out with iPod, the easiest to use, powerful MP3 player and has continually improved it - pushing the technology hard to come out with a better product every year.

Apple came out with OS X which was radically better and much more soundly designed than the 1980 era Mac OS which MS-Windows was created to immitate. Apple threw their core away, making a fresh start. MS-Windows, for the most part - is not fresh.

Apple came out with a slew of user friendly multimedia applications - iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and iTunes.

The iMovie application introduced inexpensive DV camcorders and editing to home users and corporations. The iDVD program allowed digital videographers the means to burn their works to DVD so that anyone with a DVD player or a DVD drive in their computer could watch them.

These were ground breaking applications. Microsoft came out with the expected "me too" products a couple of years later but they did not really stack up against the established favorties on the Mac - or the iPod & iPhone.

The ground that has been breaking for Redmond since 2001 seems to be the bedrock.

Malware of increasingly indisidious nature has been breaching computers more and more frequently. You do not have to look far to find someone who says their data has been stolen, their computer is running slow, their server has been taken over, and their desktop system has begun sending out spam.

To find a Mac user who says that you are going to have to look a while. Macs take a more conservative approach to internals and safety than black box MS-Windows.

Macs build on lessons learned at the phone company and computer science departments at US universities that made Unix one of the strongest operating systems ever.

Macs approached the end of the 1990s with a slow, fairly unrobust operating system when Steve Jobs arrived - and entered the 2000s with a user friendly and far more trustworth one than consumers had seen before.

Apple also slashed the prices of the Mac and iPod product lines, and introduced an iPhone which it wasted no time cutting prices of as well - even making the price cuts retroactive.

Microsoft's changes to the OS in the 2000s by all accounts including their own were superficial. They planned to do more when they talked about Longhorn but in the end, 4 years later they sacked the top management on the project, cut out the goodies promised, and shipped Vista instead.

Vista's notable qualities were: bloat, high resource demands reqiuring more RAM and more powerful CPUs, and a sudden dearth of compatible/stable device drivers. So, it became hard to run all those previous generation of Windows-only devices on, well - Windows.

The "me too" Zune product not only has not caught on with consumers - it has not caught on to the best known fact about Gregorian calendar. Which is, virtually ever 4 years for the past few centuries our western world calendar has one extra day. All the Microsoft Zunes in the world on December 31 celebrated the not so unusual occaision by crashing.

That is not the sort of thing that Apple products do. However, calendar and time have been source of hard crashes on Windows computers dating back to Windows 98. Which at the time, Microsoft heralded as their "most tested operating system ever". Only it crashed every 47.9 days, no matter what unless it was rebooted.

Windows 7 sounds like just another sequal in the Windows series. Sort of like buying this year's Pontiac to replace the one you got two years ago because it is "new". Though truth be told, aside from some minor enhancements - it's the same old car with some different styling to the externals.

Though in this case, the analogy is a bit of an anachronism because it is sounding like there will not be Pontiacs in the future for long.

Is this year going to be a good year for the computer industry? Depends on which company you use as your benchmark - Microsoft, or Apple.

Microsoft needs to take a fresh start. Apple did it. IBM did it. Now it is Microsoft's turn.

No one can do it for them, but if everyone else does and they do not - then they will be left out. The future for Microsoft will be former users fondly looking back at some version of it before the last one, even as some car enthusiasts fondly remember that Pontiac Trans Am their neighbor had or that they used to see on Knight Rider TV show.

This month I read of two different uses of computers.

Apple users wrote of using their Macs to develop stuff. And 3 different Microsoft users wrote of connecting MS-Windows PCs up to the Internet so they could capture and observe malware infecting a computer.

Think next month will be any different - or any other month this year?

If Microsoft is going thru the same phase in its life cycle that Apple and IBM did a decade earlier, and it sure looks like that - then they will come out with something completely new in a few years.

But who wants to keep buying the last couple versions of a dying generation of software? And unlike the transition period of Apple and IBM, who wants to sit out the twilight of a soon to be defunct generation of an OS while vainly trying to fight off unrelenting hordes of viruses and worms that seem to effortlessly breach the walls of the kingdom?

Time to buy a new castle?

Labels: apple, microsoft

posted by John Collins @ 9:54 PM