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acroyearTim O'Reilly made a comment in his blog about how Microsoft seems to be aiming to try to clone the iLive marketting buzz that Apple currently has, and reflects on the new Apple multimedia customer vs. M$'s office productivity customer.
Microsoft has, through its acquisition of or maintainance of its monopoly, replaced IBM, Intel, Lotus, and Wordperfect, in defining what makes up the personal business computer. But its still in the business of making the operating system for the personal business computer, like it has been since the first meeting with IBM. Its just become in charge of everything else about business computers as well.
However, as history shows, the Mac has always been advertised as the counter to the business PC, from their first advertising campaign with the Orwellian commercial to the present, give or take the later Sculley era (a promotional campaign with mixed results at the time, and negative over time given that it led to little innovation in the company for years resulting in low sales and lost market share).
Jobs came in and restored that aspect, that the Mac is best used for things that the normal PC gets in the user's way of doing, only replace desktop publishing with multimedia generation. This is Jobs' genius for which he holds many people's respect (even as they hate him) -- he recognizes a hole and moves to fill it. Bill doesn't recognize a hole; he only recognizes when someone else has filled one and he wants to remove that someone else and put himself in its place.
By providing standard software (yet high-quality stuff), Apple avoided the image of all the conflicting applications and standards and competitiveness over features (that people don't realize they don't even need) that dominates the multiple entries in these types of applications, and also avoids the image of bugginess, expiration dates, or weak user interfaces found in shareware or opensource apps, like those that usually are licensed and packaged with the drives or OEM-installed systems to start with.
Do you want a box for multimedia that happens to do office productivity on the side, or do you want an office productivity box that happens to do multimedia (not very well), provided you pay a separate software vendor and install your own dvd writer drive and deal with dvd-r or dvd-rw or dvd+rw or whatever. People who want to do multimedia just want "something that works", and Apple gave it to them when Microsoft and other windows companies kept arguing over standards so much they forgot useability. And for the first time in a long time, Apple did it WELL.
Microsoft has, through its acquisition of or maintainance of its monopoly, replaced IBM, Intel, Lotus, and Wordperfect, in defining what makes up the personal business computer. But its still in the business of making the operating system for the personal business computer, like it has been since the first meeting with IBM. Its just become in charge of everything else about business computers as well.
However, as history shows, the Mac has always been advertised as the counter to the business PC, from their first advertising campaign with the Orwellian commercial to the present, give or take the later Sculley era (a promotional campaign with mixed results at the time, and negative over time given that it led to little innovation in the company for years resulting in low sales and lost market share).
Jobs came in and restored that aspect, that the Mac is best used for things that the normal PC gets in the user's way of doing, only replace desktop publishing with multimedia generation. This is Jobs' genius for which he holds many people's respect (even as they hate him) -- he recognizes a hole and moves to fill it. Bill doesn't recognize a hole; he only recognizes when someone else has filled one and he wants to remove that someone else and put himself in its place.
By providing standard software (yet high-quality stuff), Apple avoided the image of all the conflicting applications and standards and competitiveness over features (that people don't realize they don't even need) that dominates the multiple entries in these types of applications, and also avoids the image of bugginess, expiration dates, or weak user interfaces found in shareware or opensource apps, like those that usually are licensed and packaged with the drives or OEM-installed systems to start with.
Do you want a box for multimedia that happens to do office productivity on the side, or do you want an office productivity box that happens to do multimedia (not very well), provided you pay a separate software vendor and install your own dvd writer drive and deal with dvd-r or dvd-rw or dvd+rw or whatever. People who want to do multimedia just want "something that works", and Apple gave it to them when Microsoft and other windows companies kept arguing over standards so much they forgot useability. And for the first time in a long time, Apple did it WELL.
