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Is Apple Doing All It Can to Beat Vista?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Sep 16, 2007 07:09 AM
from the both-barrels-double-shotgun-explosive-bullets dept.
from the both-barrels-double-shotgun-explosive-bullets dept.
aalobode writes "The New York Times is running an article on the narrowing window that Apple has for beating Microsoft's Vista. According the Times, not enough has been done to capitalize on the Mac user experience versus the 'world of hurt that is Vista'. It also points out that that restructuring of Apple leaves ambiguities about Apple's exact commitment to the computer end of its business. The article calls MS Vista's certified vendors, developers and driver writers a flywheel that takes a while coming up to speed - and then becomes unstoppable."
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service pack (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:service pack (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know, Apple products? Ableton products? Native Instruments products? Steinberg products? Propellorhead products? Corel products? Quartz? Colour matching built right into the drawing engine? A whole slew of audio, video, modeling, graphics, typesetting and printing (as in not your rgb inkjet) and media applications?
"UI looks as funky (if not funkier), more available software, albeit most of it is OSS or free."
"Looks". Heh. It's never been about how the UI looks. The UI is more or less the same as it's been since System 7. It's about how the UI _works_, it's about how the UI acts and feels, it's about integration, simplicity and slickness. It's about doing what it does and doing it responsively with a minimal resources. I'll guarantee you that KDE won't be nearly responsive on a 233 G3 w/ 192mb ran as Tiger was. Only people who don't actually use Macs figure that it's how the UI looks. (and I'll concede, I think Enlightenment 17, and certain KDE setups are allot prettier, but neither works as NextStep did, and OS X does.) These are the same people who pitch compiz as the greatest thing since the colour monitor, sure it looks pretty, but it in no way boosts functionality, and all it exists for is to look pretty. And lets not forget the CLI, all the power under the hood of a full-out POSIX compliant BSD core, and weather or not you ever actually use the command shell is entirely a matter of preference and choice, and that's how it *should* be.
"more available software, albeit most of it is OSS or free."
Again, it's fairly clear you've never actually used a Mac. Fink (apt for Darwin), and DarwinPorts offer the free software. What, you thought the POSIX compliant, BSD core was for show? Ad don't forget all the wonderful non-free software availible for the platform. How's that for choice, you get your pick from the best of both worlds.
"The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case, and even THAT is a matter of taste."
SGI cases were prettier, but I digress. If all you're doing is checking emails, word processing and some dev work, Ubuntu is fine. But once you get to any level of _serious_ creative work, Macintosh is the only viable option left with the demise of Irix. And let's not forget the bit about everything working with minimal hassle on the Mac. Ever tried using a graphics tablet as your core pointer in Ubuntu? Or using a KAOS pad? Or just about any higher end, vaguely exotic multimedia hardware, for that matter? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Just as an FWI, I've used various Unices for the past 15 years (Irix, Solaris, AIX, Free/Open BSD, Interix, Linux, and Darwin/OSX) Linux for close to 10. But there's this way of thinking tat doesn't seem to be too common these days, "using the best tool for the job". Linux has it's uses, serious creative work isn't one of them. It may be good enough for what YOU do, but don't assume that everyone else's needs match your own. And for fuck's sake, if you're going to criticize something, use it first. You read like one of those pointless Linux distro reviews that bases the whole thing on the install sequence, then offers a generic gnome screenshot, and somehow thinks there's anything even remotely useful in the article.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Interesting)
God bless you.
Slashdot is full of people who type plaintext for a living and seem to think that that is all anyone does with their computers. As long as there's a working keyboard driver, they're happy. The suggestion that I (or my friends who do design, or my parents who use enterprise software, or my colleagues who do stats) could make do with Linux is laughable. In my case, I have a very hard time even using a Mac, because of the statistical packages I use, only SPSS (which I use infrequently, but is essential) has a Mac version, and it doesn't even run on Intel (yet). I have all these packages running on XP in VMware Fusion on my Mac laptop (which I have been extremely impressed by).
Further, I'd like to point out that those "pointless Linux distro reviews" never explain how to get, say, your nVidia card to spit out more than 640x480 (the problem which stymied me last time I tried Linux), or how to get wifi to work, or any of the real problems you actually have after install.
Bah. My sig is sufficient to communicate my basic opinion.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. First of all: This is not about Linux not being all you make it out to be. Your depiction seems accurate, and desktop Linux distributions are continuously improving. This is about Macs being put down. I've used a Mac for a number of years now, sliding over to using it full time (in the place of Windows + Linux where I used Linux mostly for server stuff) and I can testament that it's not just about the look of the case.
The number one reason I use a Mac is not to get to act all "look at me, I'm special" or to pay more for my computers. It is because of the applications and the operating system. Some of the third party Mac applications are, in my opinion, unsurpassed in their genre on any platform. Like the app I'm writing this in - NetNewsWire, a feed reader (full disclosure: I'm a beta tester, but I'm not saying nice things because I'm a beta tester, I'm a beta tester because I like the app so much). Generalization is dangerous, but paying more attention to detail, especially in the user interface, seems more pervasive on Mac OS X than on any other OS.
I am a developer. I'll admit it: my bread-and-butter today is (and has been for the last year or so) .NET. I love Perl and Ruby and PHP, and I can use them as good on OS X as on any other OS (and significantly easier than on Windows). But I also really like Cocoa and Objective-C, and I believe it's a good example of what .NET could have become had they actively tried to keep the class count down. You can't really claim "marketing" or "RDF" on developer APIs - you start to notice as soon as you use it, and while Cocoa might seem eclectic at the start, it works really well.
There's also a level of chutzpah in the frequent OS updates that I appreciate, even if I have to shell out $129 before rebates every two years or so. When was the last time your OS added automatic backups with one-button setup (and easy full-disk restoration), a layer animation engine and resolution independence in an update? They're also following existing standards (like CalDAV, Open Directory and soon ZFS) - or creating extensions or new standards and publishing them and open source implementations (like HFS+ and launchd) - almost across the board (yes, except for anything possibly involving DRM where they have to deal with the **AAs; I don't like that any more than anyone else). I think the best thing I can say about the operating system and software is that I'd rather use Mac OS X in a regular PC than I would use Ubuntu or Vista in a MacBook.
There's tons of valid points of criticism for Apple, for their computers and for Mac OS X. None of this passes me by unnoticed. QuickTime Pro and .Mac upsell offers are persistent and horrible, for one thing. They're not perfect. But putting off Macs and Mac OS X by the blanket statement "The only good thing about Macs is the look of the case" is simply unfair.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Insightful)
But I must ask: did you try to research the "OS X" way to do it before you tried the Linux way to do it? If you didn't, why not? Because a quick search for NFS in Mac Help brought up four topics about mounting network shares; Go -> Connect to Server in Finder and entering "nfs://servername/pathname". You're now going to say that "well, then it won't connect on startup", at which point I will ask you to go into System Preferences, Accounts, select your account, go to the Login Items tab, click the + button and choose the mount.
The reason I asked the first question was because it wasn't much harder in OS X than in UNIX variants that use fstab - if you're used to fstab, it's a minor inconvenience to push a bunch of buttons, and if you're sitting down in front of any sort of UNIX for the first time (or the second time), editing a text file to do so simply isn't going to occur to you. This doesn't make your experience with OS X any less annoying in hindsight, of course, and it doesn't mean that you had a worse time with it than with Gentoo. And it certainly doesn't mean that OS X is now on equal footing with Gentoo as a capable OS for you personally. Your investment in how Linux traditionally works and where you go to edit, install, configure and fix things is only partially applicable on OS X, for example. But it's something to think about.
Additionally, not to cast any blame, and just to clarify, if you happened upon a Firefox extension that didn't work with your applications on Gentoo, but that worked with applications on Windows or OS X, you wouldn't blame Gentoo, you'd think that the Firefox extension was written with another platform in mind, and find an alternative. Naturally.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Interesting)
You say that no matter what you did, you couldn't get to mount NFS shares on her Macintosh. Did you try the following steps:
1. Go to the Finder.
2. Select the "Mac Help" item in the "Help" menu.
3. Type in "NFS share" into the search box and hit the return key.
4. Follow the instructions given?
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, I'm typing this post on my Ubuntu Fiesty desktop. That said, I've also got a MacBook running OSX, which I absolutely love. The reason why I have a Mac? It's all about the apps. Most of the apps that I use on a regular basis in my workflow are free, awesome, and Cocoa or otherwise Mac-only. I'm thinking particularly of Quicksilver, Journler, iGTD, and Skim. There just aren't apps of these types that work this cleanly (and work *together* this cleanly) available for Ubuntu (at least, afaik--I'm happy to be proven wrong).
That said, there are some apps that I run on my Ubuntu box that beat the pants off of anything with a similar function for OSX. Amarok, for instance, so far outstrips iTunes (and anything else I can find for OSX) that it's not even funny. Long story short? As to the question: "Why buy a Mac when you can have Ubuntu?" The answer is: Get the best tools for the job. It just so happens that, for many of the jobs that I do (and the way I like to do them) the best tools I've found are available only for OSX.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Insightful)
That is crazy talk.
If your main application, the core of your computing, is a text editor, then Ubuntu is a gift because you can run your text editor on an entirely free stack and have a much better experience than Windows. For a Web engineer for example, the text editor, Apache, PHP, Firefox, and Unix are killer apps and all free.
But if your main application is anything with graphics or publishing or audio or video you are so much better on the Mac. That's where the tools are for that stuff. In the same way that Ubuntu makes your text editor better by adding Apache, PHP, Firefox, and Unix, the Mac adds all kinds of stuff to your Photoshop, or publishing tools, or music or audio tools. Your 32 channels of 24-bit 96kHz digital audio don't glitch on the Mac, and your 24-bit mixes play in all of your apps, and your virtual effects and instruments work in all of your apps, and you can run two Digital Audio Workstations at once (e.g. Logic and Live, which I do) and they share your pro audio hardware automatically and everything just works. You make music you don't do any IT, that is done at the factory. They spent the last 20 years building in support for pro audio, how long has Ubuntu been working in music and audio?
Photoshop and an Art Tablet and a Mac and a visual artist is on top of the world, takes above 20 minutes to set that all up from scratch, the majority of the time you are watching the Photoshop installer run. When you're done it all just works, even RGB color spaces are managed for you. And you can fly around the interface with the one-button Art Pen and no mouse. The Art Tablet is $299 and includes a coupon for the full Photoshop for $299 more, and a MacBook is $1200 and you want for nothing. That's the full pixel airbrush nirvana. If you have to take a second job to make up the difference from an Ubuntu system then do it. Even if you are a beginner, if you apply yourself for three years with that $1800 art toolkit you'll be working professionally with them somewhere for real money. The $1800 you paid will make your friend's college loans look ridiculous.
It's way past time to get over the idea that all computers are the same. They're more different than ever. Offering Ubuntu as an alternative system for media work, music and audio, video, graphics, publishing, that is just doing a huge disservice to those users, pretending Ubuntu has something to offer them. It's also doing a disservice to the Ubuntu project who are offering a really good system to an entirely different set of users.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, let's be honest -- Vista isn't bad. It may not be as pretty as OS X, but it's got the most attractive UI Microsoft has ever produced, and on modern hardware it runs beautifully fast, is very stable, and is far more compatible with previous versions of Windows than anyone gives it credit for. (On compatibility, I just can't help remembering all the whining that went on when XP was released and didn't run all DOS programs perfectly. We've been here before, guys. We got over it.)
Note that, far from being a Microsoft shill, I'm saying this as someone who divides most of his computing time between Ubuntu and Solaris, and has a Mac Mini perched on top of his primary desktop PC. I use Vista when I want to play games or to test programs on Windows. I'm a pragmatist who values having different tools for different jobs... and I have to say, I wish there were more of us around. This constant bickering and zealotry is nothing if not tedious.
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Re:service pack (Score:5, Funny)
Running "beautifully fast" on modern hardware is what it's supposed to do. You don't get extra credit for not fucking up. Running "beautifully fast" on modern hardware is somewhere between "I've never been to jail" and "I shower daily" on the list of human accomplishment. Not that bragworthy.
By the same token, it was years after XP came out that it was worthwhile to switch from Windows 2000. Maybe Vista will be worthwhile around the time Windows 7 comes out.
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Steve picked the Phone over the PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Steve picked the Phone over the PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Steve picked the Phone over the PC (Score:5, Interesting)
How is that? Agreed, when I'm on the move I will naturally turn to handheld devices that can offer basic services (multimedia playing, communication, web browsing). But there's no way I'm going to resort to them when I need actual work done, or for serious entertainment purposes. They're good to keep you going from one place to another, but for productivity's sake I will need to sit at a desk, use a full size keyboard, a normal mouse, and enjoy a large screen and sensible performance. And if I want to watch movies or play games I will also require the kind of hardware that doesn't travel easily.
Furthermore, that desktop computer paradigm itself is very hard to surpass. There are specialized devices that offer niche services (multimedia players, game consoles, handhelds, laptops), and there are desktop computers, which can be used for anything. That versatility is very hard to throw aside. Niche devices come and go, but a universal purpose device like the desktop computer will be around for a lot of time.
The only possible change I foresee is extreme miniaturization, which would at some point reduce the desktop computer to something like a pen that you take out of your pocket, place on the desk and it expands to a full size interface (keyboard, mouse, display, or all in one). Perhaps using holography and motion sensors. But for all practical reasons that kind of thing is a long way from the mainstream.
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apple doesn't care about beating windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Ultimately, to take any significant chunk of the PC space, apple would need to start releasing hardware on a much smaller profit margin in order to compete with Dell, Gateway, Acer, and Lenovo. This would destroy Apple's profits and company, as the Apple clones fiasco empirically demonstrated.
On the other hand, Apple's current strategy of releasing high profile hardware to a niche market has done phenominally well for them. They've stayed profitable, and have boosted their marketshare to an incredible high compared to historical values.
If you'd bought apple stock and google stock at the time google went IPO, your apple stock would have outperformed your google stock by 3 or 4 times. Apple is doing *very* well and has no incentive to move away from their current low volume, high profit margin strategy. They are essentially skimming the creme of the consumer crop with their products.
Platform of choice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Silly people. Jobs was talking about this numerous times.
Apple never targeted broad audience. True, it can sell to very broad audience, but still Apple prefer to have few but loyal customers.
What also crossed my mind, is difference between Windows/Vista and Mac OS X. How does MacOS becomes platform of choice? Because you have to choose MacOS (as well as Apple hardware) by yourself. This establishes kind of barrier. But people who would cross the barrier are people who made their choice. The barrier works both ways: it takes some money investment to cross it (acquire hardware/software) and it takes some paining experience to come back to Wintel (which lacks all the polish, integrity and utility of Apple offering). But still, you are to make the choice by yourself.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
Troll (Score:5, Insightful)
Vista is a sh!t, but you will use it anyway. (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO Vista is a sh!t. But, IMHO, you are doomed to use it anyway.
Below is all my IMHO, folks. Be friendly, don't take me as troll. But you still doomed to see Vista, no matter how shitty Vista is. Because:You would say what is the proposal? Let's try to think. ;-) In my opinion:
P.S. I am MacOSX, Solaris, Linux and BSD advanced power user and developer of software for more than 10 years. Don't tell me soap stories about "nice Linux Desktop", please. Just fucking please.
The article is rife with errors (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's start with his sales figures. "The Mac's *worldwide* market share was 3 percent as of June 2007, according to Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a consulting firm in Wayland, Mass." (Emphasis mine) Worldwide market share is a poor indicator of Apple's markets. It is mostly a US-focused company and will stay that way in the near future. In the US, Apple's market share is around 5-6%, according to the most recent figures I could find. More importantly, the growth rate is more than four times higher than the industry growth rate, 32% vs. 7.2% (IDC estimates via Apple's latest quarterly report). It doesn't take long for that kind of second order effect to dominate. Comparing the market share now (after the events of the 1990's) to Apple's market share when its mainstay was the Apple II is really bad analysis. I would expect better from the author, a professor of business who presumably knows basic microeconomics.
His figures for the share of computers in use are suspect as well. "Funny thing, though: based on the ratio of Windows and Macs actually in use, no gains can be seen for Apple. The Mac's share of personal computers has actually edged a bit lower since Vista's release in January, and the various flavors of Windows a bit higher, according to Net Applications, a firm in Aliso Viejo, Calif., that monitors the operating systems among visitors to 40,000 customer Web sites." Measuring OS usage share by measuring browser hits is a seriously flawed methodology. There are know sources of bias that lead to higher than actual market share figures for Internet Explorer on Windows, including sites that require users of other browsers to spoof the user agent header, measuring usage on sites that have ActiveX elements that drive away non-Windows users, and extra files being sent to Internet Explorer in order to work around problems in the IE rendering engine. Furthermore, the author is looking at the wrong figures and the drop that he's looking at is statistically insignificant anyway. The figures that he refers to are 4.68% (2007Q1) vs. 4.63% (2007Q2). Windows Vista was released to the general public on January 30, 2007. Thus, the base figure he should be using is 4.06% (2006Q4), which predates the release of Vista. A simple statistical test based on the Net Applications market share figures for 2004Q4 through 2007Q2 shows that a 0.05% difference is not statistically significant. Heck, any reasonably trained economist should be able to eyeball this and say that given that trend, a 0.05% difference is not statistically significant.
As far as the whole Best Buy thing goes, the author completely misses the point behind Apple opening its own retail stores. Apple tried for years to work with CompUSA, Sears, Best Buy, and other consumer electronics retailers to sell Apple computers to the masses. Each attempt was a dismal failure, as the personnel at the retailers could not sell something as complex as Apple's equipment. They were barely able to sell TVs. The only sort-of, kind-of successful experiment in there was the store-within-a-store at CompUSA, which was done by putting Apple employees into CompUSA stores. Even that didn't work too well, as the Apple section got lost in the middle of all of the other stuff. Apple is trying again to expand it's retail reach, but I would put the odds against it. Big box retailers' emphasis on low price and minimal service is completely at odds with how to sell Apple computers.
"Apple has not even begun to try to re-enter another domain from which it had withdrawn its Mac sales teams: large corporations." That would be news to Apple's entire Enterprise Sales team -- several hundred people. I work with them on a daily basis, even now. They've been there all alon
Re:The article is rife with errors (Score:5, Insightful)
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well.. duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
The author talks about not taking advantage of this small window of opportunity to attack Vista. He also goes into great lengths about all the fabulous things Apple has already done to position itself as an alternative to Vista including the transition to intel processors, the fantastic ad campaigns, and the refinement of OS-X. Although he only says that "the official Mac line is that it has gone swimmingly" which seems imply falsehoods, he does manage to mention that sales are up over 30% across the board!
To me this sounds like unprecedented growth and execution, not a failure.
He then answers his own unproven assumption (that Apple isn't doing enough) by expressing "what could be done" as:
- ramping up their retail presence
- offering more for corporations.
But these two things are exactly what Apple *has* been doing for the last couple of years. In fact, Apple's focus has been so intent in these areas that it's on the verge of dropping the ball this year on a number of other issues as a result. How could Apple could ramp up the retail expansion any faster than they already have lately without stumbling? How could they focus any more on their high end and back-end server stuff for corporate environments with Leopard? Being certified as UNIX this year doesn't give them enough cred? Coming out with a fully exchange compliant server and simultaneously offering it's own end to end solution to compete with exchange server based on open formats and open source code is not enough? Coming out with a brand new corporate smart phone to challenge RiM is not enough?
Apple is already going through intense, rapid expansion on all fronts probably more than at any time in it's history and the very issues he mentions are already already major focii of their expansion plan.
I'm not saying it's a stupid article, but it's kind of pointless in that all it really does is restate some recent history, (MS took five years off and OS-X has come in from the cold), add some overly obvious business advice, (expand retail, expand markets, consolidate marginal markets), and then it just kind of wrings it's hands and worries about how far Apple can get before the "giant flywheel" of Vista gets it.
I'm worried about the flywheel too, but I fail to see what more Apple can do on any of these fronts that it isn't already doing. In particular, expanding retail locations any faster than it already is, would be a dangerous course for Apple and in the end probably bad business advice.
Mandatory comparison with Porsche (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a little German car maker you might have heard of named Prosche. They make sehr viel money. Their stock is doing sehr gut. They don't really care about market share. Now, nobody bothers them about this or writes little essays about how Porsche will never catch up with Toyota or GM, because everybody understands they are playing for profit, not market share. For some reason, many people don't understand this with Apple. They keep talking about market share.
Apple has no debt. They are making lots of money -- okay, so is Microsoft. Their stock is up, what, 70 per cent this year -- Microsoft's has been dead in the water for years. Apple has two different product lines that are doing fine: Computers and iPods. They are working on a third, the iPhone. Microsoft has two products of the same type, Windows and Office, that make money. Everything else they have touched, like the Zune and the Xbox, has been a financial disaster.
Let Microsoft keep its market share. Apple is making money and making its shareholders happy. Like Porsche.
Re:world of hurt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not a question of how many issues there are, its a question of perception. Neither 98 nor XP were significantly different at 1 year old compared to 3 years old, but the perception of them changed massively in that time.
In all likelyhood that pattern will repeat with Vista.
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Re:of course it's not (Score:5, Insightful)
Without a monopoly no matter how gained selling just an OS will fail. Apple is worth more than Dell because they keep things locked down, and stay out of the cut throat market of cheap hardware.
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Re:Apple can't sell HW to everybody (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I have been in charge of IT (for a small company, granted) and I have to say, your post reflects a fundamental, dangerous, and regrettably common misunderstanding of what corporate IT is for. The purpose of IT is not IT; the purpose of IT is to enable users to get things done. And if users can get things done better on Macs, then by God, it's IT's job to support those Macs. And "support" does not mean willful ignorance -- the latter, unfortunately, being what a lot of shake'n'bake IT techs show any time the word "Apple" is mentioned in their presence.
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Re:Neither can compete with the cost of Ubuntu! (Score:5, Funny)
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