Is The Past Repeating?

Most historians will point at the release of windows 95 as the date that Microsoft finally reached 'good enough' feature parity with the original Mac OS. Historians will also point out that this is the same period in which the Mac as a platform began its rapid decline in terms of market-share and more generally mind-share.

With the release of windows 7 I began to wonder, is history was about to repeat itself? Just as in the previous case, it took Microsoft almost a decade to reach feature parity with OSX by ripping off most of the marquee features that have until very recently distinguished the Mac as the superior platform in terms of usability and core technology. Lets look at some features that windows is about to begin enjoying, that the Mac has had for many, many years now:

Feature	Mac Release	Windows Release
compositing desktop that allows for window shadows and desktop 3d effects and animations	OSX 10.0 2000	Vista 2007
small cute apps for focused info like stock quotes, weather etc. (Widgets vs Gadgets)	OSX 10.4 2005	Vista 2007
dock that merges app switching and app launching.	OSX 10.0 2000	Windows 7 2009
advanced task switching (expose vs flip 3d, aero peek etc)	OSX 10.3 2003	Vista 2007, Windows 7 2009
integrated easy to use file previews for most major file types	OSX 10.5 2007	Vista 2007
Integrated OS level file search (spotlight vs windows search)	OSX 10.4 2005	Vista 2007
Folders whose contents are based on file system queries (Smart Folders vs Libraries)	OSX 10.4 2005	Windows 7 2009

There are still many things that OSX does that windows does not (and probably vice versa) but of the new windows features that are obviously highly OSX inspired its clear that the motivation (as it historically has been for MS) has been to produce half-baked 'me too' implementations that are really only good enough to confuse Joe consumer long enough to get him to buy the seemingly less expensive windows rig in the face of the surprisingly appealing Apple offering.

Sadly the difference is in the details, and it can take a couple of weeks on a Mac to realize that the two platforms are literally nigh and day in terms of quality and user experience. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s chicanery keeps millions of people each year from being exposed to the superior execution of these features on the Mac platform. Because of this, for the uninitiated, making the big switch can require a bit of a leap of faith. It did for me.

Of course the big question is what happens now? Thanks to Vista, Apple has had several years to press its advantage, and consequently the Mac has made some decent market share gains (currently at nearly 10% -up from about 2% earlier in the decade). But now that the feature divide has been somewhat lessened, will history repeat itself? Will the general public quickly lose interest in the Mac and flock back to the PC?

In my opinion, this is a definite possibility. However, a few things are different enough this time around that there is good reason to be hopeful:

1) Apple is not playing from a position of weakness, which it was in 1995. OSX is technically very strong and well positioned for radical innovation, assuming the will and the ideas are there. This is true in both the desktop space AND in the mobile space. Perhaps just as importantly, Apple's leadership is strong, and they're playing for keeps -not unlike the re-invigoration and drive of someone coming back from a near-death experience, which is actually true on many levels with Apple. In a short number of years, the 'new' apple has nearly dominated the legal online media download market and the media player space, and has radically changed the mobile phone industry. The consumer PC space is the one area where despite doing increasingly well, Apple has been slowest to grow relative to its other endeavors. Which brings us to the next point.

2) Apple's Achilles heel has always been its price point in comparison with the rest of the PC industry. That gap for equivalently spec'ed computers has shrunk to within a couple of hundred dollars nowadays, but lets face it: most computer users really just want a cheap POS computer that is 'good enough' for a 'full' web experience and one that is capable of reading/editing MS Office documents they might get suckered into bringing home from work. Frustratingly this is an arena apple doesn’t even play in, but for good reason: those netbooks and 400$ laptops are practically disposable in terms of quality and net their makers razor thin margins, neither of which apple is interested in being associated with. So where does this leave apple in terms of opportunity for growth?

I have a theory that in the next 6-12 months apple will make a radical play for the budget consumer market that will involve redefining the low end of the consumer PC space that is dominated by these cheap sub 600$ devices. I believe they will do this with their rumored but not as yet announced tablet device. Think about it. If you were a budget conscious consumer and for 3-600$ you had a choice between one of a slow netbook/laptop with a tiny/crappy screen, a slow bulky desktop, OR a very sexy portable touch screen internet tablet with excellent usability and many games and applications, which choice would you make? Assuming this device:

• does full web browsing and email,
• can be used to play some games (including some high profile ones)
• can do basic personal media management (a-la a stripped down iLife)
• can do basic personal productivity (a-la a stripped down iWork)
• can be used to sync your ipod/iphone (ie its designed to BE a desktop replacement -not accessory)

Then this would be a no brainer choice, and Apple will have successfully eaten the lunch of the entire consumer focused budget PC market segment who would likely be eager to trade up to something that clearly has better value at a similar price point.

Another reason why I believe this to be a probable next move is that points 1-4 are already mostly implemented in the iphone/itouch product line-up which inhabits the 200-400$ price space. If 200$ more would get us a 10-12-inch screen and a little more horse-power and a little more disk space,

this would fill out the 400$ to 900$ gap in apple's product line-up quite nicely.

Here's another thing we need to face: computers are STILL too complicated for the average person. Hell even people I know in their early 30's who have grown up with computers still don't really get how to

use them, but you know what? My mom effortlessly figured out how to use many features of my iPhone within seconds. If this is the type of usability and general experience we can expect from an apple 'tablet', we're looking at a home-run, and the budget PC segment will implode in short order.

Unfortunately, I see a few things that may be roadblocks to this happening. And the case as its often been in the past, is that the game is Apple's to lose.

1) flash: everybody hates it, but flash is still the conduit through which most of the web gets its video content. In order to succeed as a budget PC replacement, this tablet NEEDs to be able to play the flash video on the web sites that joe user is used to going to. Apple has tried to move the industry away from flash by keeping it off the iPhone with limited success. It may be time to give up on this.

2) productivity: this device needs to be seen as being capable of handling basic productivity tasks in accepted business formats. This means Word documents and PowerPoint documents. Sure, just like flash, everybody hates these and almost nobody at home who is a casual user uses office for anything significant, but they become VERY uneasy if its not at least possible to do business at home. This is one of the basic value propositions that made the generic PC successful early in its history, and if apple wants to supplant the low-end PC, it needs to be able to offer something in this regard.

3) greed / arrogance: apple does great work and it deserves to be proud of what its done in the past decade. However, when greed and arrogance rear their ugly head, apple stumbles. Here are some examples: until very recently apple still sold combo drives on most of its machines in an age where every PC has shipped with a dvd-rw for a VERY LONG TIME. Another example is memory and HD specs. White its true that OSX is not the bloated resource hog that Vista was, ram and HD space is cheap and it would have been an easy PR win for Apple if they had kept the mac equivalently specked with PCs in this regard over the past several years. Unfortunately, the desire for high margins has kept apple from doing so and they’ve undoubtedly lost many sales on this easily comparable ground alone. My last example and perhaps the most relevant is the Macbook Air. The Macbook air is a pretty cool machine aesthetically and technically. This is the type of machine that apple has a gift for producing, and they should be proud of their work, but the immediate consensus on release was that apple’s pride had lead it to over-valuate the air in the market place. It was over-priced at an initial 1799$. Today it is much more reasonable starting at 1499$ but still. This is the kind of mis-step that can make or break the popular acceptance of a product, and something that Apple needs to keep in check.

If it can manage to hit these targets, I believe the personal computer space in five years will land solidly in Apple’s lap. The one wild card in all this prognostication is Google and its Android OS which could well rise up to power a generation of also-ran devices to compete with Apple in this space. Google itself has shown very little talent at producing interesting or compelling consumer electronic devices. Some of its partners however have shown surprising skill in taking Android and hammering it into some remarkable products. Given this dynamic, Android may be worth keeping a close eye on over the next few years and may well usurp windows in terms of competitive importance in many segments of the computer/consumer electronics market.

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.

Goodbye Sweet Windows

I wrote this about two years ago:

As much as I love the diversity in the PC hardware market today, I’ll probably never buy a windows based PC again. Let me explain:


The warning lights began going off for me some time around the release of windows XP. The first thing that made me uneasy was hearing that the home edition of XP would have to be activated by phone and that the license would have a limited number of re-activations over changing hardware configurations. The second thing that made me uneasy was XP’s new theme, which quite frankly left me dumbfounded in its patronizing fisher-priceyness. The overwhelming sense I was getting was that something wasn’t well at Redmond. Whoever was calling the shots seemed to be making some very strange decisions.


Still, I stuck it out. A couple of years later, I had to buy a second PC for a project I was working on and of course it came with XP. My main machine was still a win2k box and was doing fine for the home recording, graphic design and web development I did for fun. In fact, the first PC usage roadblock I ever hit was in trying to do video editing and in that case methinks the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of the software vendors whose video editing software I wrestled with to no avail. All in all the software was unusable and I pretty much resigned myself to not being able to do video editing at home without blowing a small fortune on professional software.


Fast-forward a couple of years to today. This past summer, I started looking into getting a laptop that I could use in my home recording studio (rather than a dedicated desktop) so that I could easily pack up and move around if need be. I took a moment to consider the current state of the industry and it didn’t take me long to realize that nothing much had changed. MS was still pushing draconian activation schemes, was still struggling with security issues, and consumer grade software for multi-media projects was still by and large crappy. Given what’s been going on with IE and XP’s general stagnation, it was pretty clear to me that MS and its PC platform was suffering as a side effect of this corporation becoming just another soulless money-driven, innovation stifling behemoth.


To be honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that most of my computer usage amounts to graphic design and home recording, I probably just would have switched to Linux, in particular Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 which Novell has done a fantastic job on. If all I was doing was web development, document editing and surfing, that platform is solid, and might I add beautiful. Unfortunately, in terms of graphic design and audio sequencing software, Linux still has a way to go. In particular, the Gimp team despite enormous strides, needs to swallow their pride and admit they don’t have a clue about usability.


Which brings me to my eventual choice, Apple. Growing up, most of the public schools I went to had Mac labs, and a good friend of mine growing up always had a Mac in his home. I’ve always admired the Mac’s usability and single minded devotion to making complex things easy to do, but of course as a burgeoning geek, I always kind of resented the fact that they kept so many details hidden away beneath the hood. Then there was the price factor. Had Apple’s hardware not been priced so solidly out of our range, we may well have owned a Mac or two instead of the mish-mash of Tandy and PC Clones we eventually did buy.


Today the landscape is quite different. Other people have pointed it out and I think its true: a perfect storm of conditions seems to be coming together for Apple that could well bring it the fanfare and market share it deserves. First, prices are much more competitive these days, although hardware wise, they sometimes walk a perplexing tight-rope between extreme generosity (wi-fi, Bluetooth and iSight standard in everything) and senseless stinginess (512mb of ram, 60gb laptop HDs, cd-rw drives instead of dvd-rw drives standard). That aside, the 200-300$ difference is more than made up for by the fact that the software that ships with a Mac is excellent and I’m not talking about OSX.


As someone who has wrestled with consumer grade audio and video software on windows for years, I was literally dumbfounded to find that ‘awesome out of the box’ was definitely more than just a clever catch phrase. Garage Band *IS* an excellent entry to mid-level audio sequencer and recorder. IMovie and iDVD *ARE* excellent home video editing and DVD authoring tools. I know I’d certainly heard people say this before, but it’s a whole other story when you realize first hand that its true, and that was the tipping point for me.


Right now I can’t see myself buying a windows based PC ever again. I’m sick of the politics and I’m sick of the stagnation and corporate bullying. I’m also sick of all the hoops you have to jump through to do things that aught to be simple. On a Macbook I sat down one evening and finally put together a DVD of our honeymoon vacation after two years of spinning my wheels on the project on a PC. From the video capture to arranging scenes, to picking and customizing DVD menus to picking a soundtrack for the slideshow extras, it was intuitive, a no-brainer, and the attention to detail and follow-though of ideas on the software level was exceptional. Needless to say, the results were amazing. When I tried to do this on my windows based PC, I had to go out and buy a fire-wire card, a bigger hard-drive, more RAM and try 3 or 4 different software packages, all of which were duds.


Linux has reached this same high-water mark in terms of office use and aesthetics but I can’t see them catching up in terms of consumer grade audio/video editing any time soon. Unfortunately, the state of politics in the PC world right now is such that its basically impossible to get the best of breed apps for consumer grade multi-media bundled with a new PC. Because everyone is always fighting for such a ridiculously large slices of the pie, you’re just not likely to see Google’s Picasa, Sony’s Acid Music Studio or Adobe’s Premier Elements gracing the same PC default installation voluntarily. Although obviously vigorous competition is good, its unfortunate that in the PC world, the winners of the meritocracy race rarely get to stand on the default installation podium where they deserve to be. In Apple land, by fluke or by foresight it just so happens that the folks who make the best consumer grade software are also the people who also just sold you the hardware. The over-all impact this has on the quality of user experience is difficult to over-state.


For all of these reasons and more, I just can’t see myself ever buying a windows based PC ever again -barring of course a radical shift in values and behavior on Apple’s part, which of course isn’t impossible. Maybe by then however, Linux will have beefed up its consumer grade multimedia offerings and we’ll finally have a much more healthy three way standards based platform war on our hands.