Goodbye Sweet Windows - The Sequel

Just about two years ago, I bought my first Mac, a first generation core duo Macbook. After a few months of use, I was so impressed by this little marvel that I wrote a piece about my switching experience that made it to the front page of digg.com (much to my surprise). Now, two years later, I've jut bought my second Mac (a Macbook pro this time) and am all-in-all still a very happy Mac user.


Many things have changed in two years. Both vista and Leopard have come out. Adobe has finally released a universal version of CS and Microsoft has released a universal version of office. Having watched the moves of most of the major industry players over the last two years, here are my thoughts on the current state of things.


First of all, I’m convinced that Apple is the only consumer technology company in existence at the moment that is actually interested in developing the state of the art and delivering on the social and creative benefits of computing in general. Almost everyone else in the field is a huge drifting deadwood zombie or well on its way to becoming one. Adobe and Microsoft have basically done nothing exciting and truly cutting edge with their business or products for nearly 10 years. In fact they're perfectly happy to sit on their asses and milk their customers indefinitely which they can do since its been about 10 years since either of these companies have had any serious competition. All of the competition has either been bought up, forced out of business or collapsed under the weight of their own incompetence, which in my opinion is the current leading cause of corporate moribundity in the west, that is, total and absolute incompetence on the managerial and executive level.


Based on what I’ve seen over the past several years, it appears that corporate America has lost the understanding of the value of balancing the desire to make money, the desire to push the envelope technically, intellectually and artistically and the desire to improve the human condition. It may be a fine point to make but any endeavor that doesn't balance these things is in the end going to yield results that are vastly inferior to the results of someone who does and no where is this more evident than in the technology industry. Apple has its heart and its mind mostly in the right place -this is evident to anyone with eyes to see, and its coffers are being filled as a consequence. This divide is so big in fact that I think the average computer user is beginning to pick up on it existence and is beginning to understand that this divide is largely fueled by a difference in motivation.


The animus of a company like Microsoft has never been to produce the best software for the best computers out there, but rather to dominate every market segment they move in to by whatever means necessary. This is evidenced by their all-out wars against word perfect and Netscape back in the day, and more recently by their ongoing hostile take-over attempts of yahoo in the face of their inability to compete with Google in the web search market, (unfortunately to the detriment of some of their core products: office and windows). On the other hand, its pretty obvious to me that the modus operandi of a company like apple is fueled by something very different. That motivation doesn't seem to be, how can we dominate whatever market we enter, but rather something more like: what conceivable use could someone possibly have for a certain kind of technology. From this short list of things, how can we make what technology has to offer as accessible and useful as possible.


The effect of these guiding principals and the strategies that stem from following through with their logic make a world of difference to the end result. Microsoft for example, only really cares that 90% + of the world's PCs use the windows platform and that that platform's dominance goes unchallenged. They don't really care what people do on a windows PC or how they do it unless that activity has some bearing on the dominance of the platform. This is why we see Microsoft constantly hyper focused on some very specific and sometimes peculiar things, such as word processors, media players, browsers and more recently web searching and web applications. More importantly, Microsoft has only been interested in these things reactively, and never out of anything other than their mandate to dominate.


Apple's perspective however, has yielded very different kinds of products. Because they do care what you do and how you do it, Apple's focus has been on producing 'whole computers' that are immediately accessible and useful -often elegantly so. Although I wouldn’t have appreciated this a number of years ago, Apple develops devices with the same purposeful focus that console developers do. Consoles make it exceedingly easy to play games, and all of their use cases are focused on making playing a game on your couch as painless, nay as joyful as possible. Apple brings the same kinds of focus to the tasks that ultimately make computing platforms worth having for consumers, specifically, managing and editing pictures, movies, music and other documents. This is reflective of my subjective experience on the Mac platform so far. In fact, one of the biggest differences I can articulate between using a Mac and a PC is that the Mac as basically eliminated he need to tweak and maintain which I would constantly be doing on my PC. In fact, 90% of the time I’m on my Mac, I’m actually doing productive work. The other 10%, I feel like I aught to be tweaking something or wresting with something, but really there isn’t anything to wrestle with. Its almost too easy.


On an unrelated note, it occurred to me recently that the big PC manufacturers may be in big trouble, but I don’t think they realize it yet. What I mean by this is that the only reason that PC manufactures can actually sell their products is because they can load them up with an OS that enables the user to do things they actually want. Historically speaking this has been a one horse race and as long as that one horse is doing well, everybody’s happy. The problem begins if and when people start loosing interest or faith in that horse, which is exactly what’s happening. The writing is on the wall. If the major PC manufacturers do not invest heavily in an acceptable OS alternative for their hardware (consumer Linux anyone?), and the general public looses interest in Microsoft Windows (and say flock to the Mac platform), these companies will cease to have a viable business in a very short amount of time. We’re already heading down this road, and the journey could be accelerated rapidly should Apple alter its strategy and decide to service the low end of the market, the only place where the traditional PC still has any remaining advantage –rock bottom prices. If Apple were to introduce a 500$ all-in-one to compete in this segment, I’m convinced the floodgates would open. Sure, the Mac Mini is a great little computer, but for 500$ in PC land you can buy a machine with a keyboard, mouse and a 22-inch monitor. Sure it’ll be under-powered and crappy, but the average consumer doesn’t know the difference. They only know the cool looking Mac costs the same but doesn’t come with anything.


In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that my Mac experience hasn’t been all sunshine and lollly pops. In particular, my first generation Macbook was having issues with its super drive which had to be replaced twice. But to Apple’s credit, both times, the authorized repair people were friendly and the service was speedy (a couple of days each time) and covered under warranty. Still, this experience and that of others I’ve read online seems to indicate that Apple is experiencing some growing pains when it comes to QA in its products. Its saving grace is that it tends to deal with problems fairly quickly though honestly the fact that some of them have gotten out the door, to me indicates that there are systemic QA problems at play here. Apple has enough going for it right now that these foibles are mostly forgivable, but this may not always be the case, and I think Apple needs to figure out what’s going on before permanent damage is done to its reputation. Still, the stars are aligned and in my opinion, the game is Apple’s to loose at this point.