Microsoft and Apple Rumble Into Middle Age 367
Hugh Pickens writes "Bill Briggs writes on MSNBC that the two tech titans are rumbling into middle age as Microsoft marked its 35th birthday on Sunday and Apple turned 34 late last week. But while Microsoft, to some, appears a tad flabby in the middle — a Chrysler Town & Country driver with a 9 pm bedtime — Apple, in some eyes, looks sleeker and younger — a hipster in a ragtop Beemer packed with chic friends sporting mobile toys. 'The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind,' says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps. 'Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers, but its inability to leave the past behind has left their product line bloated and dysfunctional.' On current accounting ledgers, Microsoft overshadows Apple: Microsoft's market cap is $255.75 billion; Apple's is $213.98 billion. But Apple is getting awfully big — awfully fast — in Microsoft's rearview mirror. Consider that a decade ago Microsoft's market cap was almost $590 billion and Apple's was about $16 billion. So while Apple cheered its opening weekend of iPad sales, what wish should Microsoft have made when it blew out its birthday candles Sunday? 'More than anything, Microsoft's birthday wish should be for fearless leadership,' says Ayers. 'Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come.'"
Not really so (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft has always been loath to change and risk alienating some of its customers
Uh, maybe if you're only looking at Windows and/or Office products. They also seem to do greatly, so why fix something that isn't broken?
But with some of their other divisions I wish they didn't change. Anyone else remember such from Microsoft Games as Flight Simulator, Age of Empires series, Halo, Train Simulator, MechWarrior, Links, Midtown Madness, Motocross Madness.. Now that they changed they're not publishing or developing those kind of games anymore. In fact no one is. Microsoft Games is just for Xbox 360 anymore.
"Without someone at the top who feels an urgency to constantly innovate in meaningful ways, Microsoft will shrink and become less relevant with each birthday to come."
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?
Re:Not really so (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not really so (Score:3, Insightful)
Just yesterday slashdotters laughted how Microsoft is burning money on their online division like Bing and other properties, how it's completely useless. Which one it is now, to think long term or not to think?
They're burning money, yes. But not on anything that gives people surprises. If they're truly doing something massively innovative and useful at the same time, people should be surprised. In terms of investment, it's always possible to increase your risk a whole lot, but it's much more difficult to increase your profit.
Fanbois spew summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Why Compare Anymore? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe 20 years ago they competed but that is no longer the case.
Nothing bias against either side but Apple's main focus is gadgets while Microsoft's main focus is software. Yes, Apple makes software and yes Microsoft makes hardware but neither are their main focuses.
This isn't a troll, just my opinion. (Score:1, Insightful)
Something that is vital to Apple overtaking Microsoft is a shift in attitude of the "zealous Apple consumer". Most folks that use Apple products are fine, but holy jeebus do Apple zealots piss me off. We get it, your brand of choice is shiny and pretty. Shut up about it.
Again, I know this only applies to a small portion of the Apple userbase, but that small portion is unbelievably annoying.
The usual "this is only my opinion" disclaimer applies.
Fearless Leadership? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's another component you need if you want to use fearless leadership and disruptive innovation to be the bedrock of your success: you need to also be right. Apple's taken some big product risks. None of them were exactly bet-the-company-big risks, but pretty risky. The fact that we're still talking about Apple is that they've taken chances and been right. There are plenty of companies out there that had a scary-cool product or technology, something transformational, but missed something along the way: misjudged the market, misjudged their capital needs, rushed a buggy product to market, etc. Don't hear much from those companies anymore.
While there's something to be said for bluffing in poker and going all in, it's much better to go all in when you've got the cards. You can bluff and buy the pot only so many times before someone calls you on it and you're out of the game.
Not that hard to understand (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has been consistently successful - in and of itself, that makes it hard to "leave the past behind". Over the same period, Apple made a slew of really bad decisions which brought the company pretty much into irrelevance by the mid-1990s. For Apple, leaving the past behind was an asset - Apple basically had to make itself over just to survive. That's served Apple well this decade, but let's not forget where they were (compared to Microsoft) previously.
Your Description Of Apple As Hipster (Score:5, Insightful)
Market Cap is Meaningless (Score:2, Insightful)
Market capitalization is essentially meaningless as a measure of a company's strength, i.e. it's ability to continue operations while also facilitating growth in a competitive environment.
All that market capitalization ever tells you is what some fool would pay to acquire the company whole at the current market price quotation.
It doesn't reflect what one should pay.
It doesn't reflect what the book value of the company is (Assets minus liabilities minus intangibles).
It doesn't reflect what the intrinsic value of the company is (book value plus discounted operating cash flows forward - i.e. a measure of its effectiveness as a cash generating engine).
It doesn't tell you anything about product presence, sales, operating income, debt load, or any other metric that has anything to do with the actual "strength" of a company.
Journalists need to stop referencing "market cap" as if it bears greater meaning than "The (typically) overinflated price only a sucker would pay."
Market capitalization? (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow, apple fanboy much? (Score:1, Insightful)
This comment will probably go down in flames, but it seems like this article is just an excuse to brown nose Steve Jobs. Apple makes fad devices; pretty nice devices but they are still playing to a fad (just take a look at their stock price). Microsoft, on the other hand, makes business computing possible on over 90% of the world's computers.
If you want an analogy here goes. Apple may be the hip guy who shaved his head to hide his middle aged bald spot, and hangs out with trendy friends. However, Microsoft is driving the minivan around because he actually has shit to get done while Apple is living off a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Re:Not really so (Score:2, Insightful)
What would be "massively innovative and useful"? I think Courier [engadget.com] looks innovative and way better than iPad and other tablets. Live and the community on Xbox 360 is something not on other devices and the in-game interface quite innovative. But I wouldn't say it's massively innovative, in fact nothing is. Are Google or Apple in some way massively innovative? No, neither one of them are. Apple just takes an open source project and polishes the user experience and interface. There was existing search engines before Google, but they just did it better. Nothing massively innovative there.
In fact, most of the time innovations come from small startups. Most of those fail, but some happen to come across something innovative and gets bough by larger companies.
Re:Fearless Leadership? (Score:3, Insightful)
Both Microsoft and Apple are big enough that they can make large bets on new technology and ideas and have them fail. You are right that other companies flame out when they make a large bet and it doesn't work out, but that doesn't apply here.
If the iPad were a complete flop and nobody bought it, that wouldn't kill apple. It wouldn't even cripple them. It would represent a large waste of time and capitol, but the company would go on doing what it does. that is the advantage of being a big company.
Re:Not really so (Score:3, Insightful)
Well having owned both MS products and Apple products, I prefer the MS model of long-term support (so too do businesses apparently).
"The difference between the two companies is that Apple has been fearless about transformational change while Microsoft has been reluctant to leave its past behind," says Casey Ayers, president of MegatonApps.
That sounds really negative against Microsoft doesn't it?
But another way to look at this quote is that Apple abandons machines too fast, leaving users with computer than refuse to run the latest software. EXAMPLE: I used to have a Mac but since it could not be upgraded higher than 10.3 (2003), it was unable to run the latest browsers. They wouldn't even install.
In contrast I can still use my old Win98 laptop and run the latest browsers. Microsoft's willingness to maintain backwards-compatibility over approximately TWICE the lifespan of Apple makes MS more user-friendly. MS policy also more cost-efficient than Apple's insistence that you MUST upgrade to the newest machine, otherwise you won't be able to run the newer programs (not Safari 4, not iTunes, not Firefox).
In my humble opinion.
Re:Steves coolaid (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk about bias.
Love or hate Apple its more than mere marketing hype. Instead of being the end all and be all for everyone, they focus on very specific groups and very specific features that suit the small chosen area well. Of course for us that want more from our hardware we are screaming for more but for that catered group its often a perfect fit.
Apple is making the transition from a computer company to an appliance company. Expect more and more companies to starting do this as the industry starts moving to more focused products and unfortunetaly that also means controlled content.
Re:Maybe not how I would phrase it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not really so (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft Games as:
You've put together a lovely homage to MS's buying out and ruining of good game companies since every good game you came up with was developed by a company that MS bought out after they made something good, or which you thought was made by MS but was actually not. More than half the companies no longer exist having been mothballed by MS.
Microsoft is all about business (Score:4, Insightful)
If Apple suddenly disappeared, people could easily get equivalent products from other manufacturers, since other companies sell equivalent phones, MP3 players and computers. While they don't have the Apple brand and may not be as polished in some aspects, they do essentially the same things.
On the other hand, the reason Microsoft has so much overhead is that they provide infinite backwards compatibility for their corporate clients. People love bashing Microsoft, but they forget that MS must provide binary compatibility for their clients who unconditionally have to run really old apps, because their businesses depend on it. Windows must run on a huge variety of hardware combinations, and must be supported over 10+ year lifespans. For example, Windows XP licenses were sold from 2002 to early 2009, and Microsoft will support this platform for many years into the future.
Apple products and Linux distributions often break compatibility between revisions, for legitimate technical reasons. But Microsoft can't do that even when they want to, because their hundreds of thousands of corporate clients can't be expected to update all their software accordingly. The thousands of hardware manufacturers won't all update their drivers either. Regardless, Microsoft tried doing that and Vista happened. It took several years for manufacturers and Microsoft itself to catch up, and we got Windows 7, which works quite well.
So if Microsoft is reluctant to leave the past, it's because it has contractual obligations to support its clients. Apple makes no such commitments and sells primarily to end users. Thus, it can afford to make more aggressive changes.
Re:Microsoft is a Dinosaur (Score:3, Insightful)
. Due to their business strategy to lock customers into their products, i.e. not complying to standards, they don't need to innovate, they just have to make sure that the locks are still firm. A good indication of the beginning of the end is that it is starting to get lucrative for companies to break out of the Microsoft prison. Apple is doing the right thing, they keep their products simple, they don't try to appeal to every human crawling the face of the earth, and they emphasize on products that actually *work*.
Hold the fuck on. Are you really suggestion that Apple is less restrictive than Microsoft? Seriously?
Oh yeah, I forgot... the App Store and iTunes are the pinnacles of consumer empowerment. I mean, it doesn't get much better than having to hack your device so you can use non-Apple approved programs, or having your music player wipe itself completely because you hooked it up to a different computer.
Yup. Apple really knows how to let people use their purchases freely. ::golf clap::
News of our death are highly exaggerated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Steves coolaid (Score:4, Insightful)
It's all hype eh?
Ok, show me a video editing suite with 3/4 the ease and power as final cut pro suite for windows and I'll switch.
I've tried EVERYTHING under windows, and none of it can hold a candle to the workflow and speed of quality production as the FCP suite. Even AVID. I'd utterly kill for something that was 1/2 as effective as FCP for linux. but sadly nothing exists except toys that crash all the time or are for making really low quality home movies.
I'm not a fanboi, I am cringing hard at the though of having to spend $3500.00 on a new PC to be able to buy the current update to FCP. My Quad core G5 still works great, but I see the need to upgrade in the next year in order to maintain a speedy render time and workflow. and I cant build a hackintosh that will run stable as a rock to save my life....
Re:This isn't a troll, just my opinion. (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft fanboys don't pretend they are better than you...they pretend the products they use are better than the products you use. I'm fine with that. I've been a gamer and internet lurker for a very long time, I'm used to that sort of thinking. While I personally think it's stupid to lock yourself into only one option (i.e. I owned both an SNES AND a Genesis), I understand why some people have that kind of mentality.
Apple fanboys, however, go beyond mere brand loyalty. Apple fanboys insinuate that they are a better person than I am simply because they use Apple products and I don't. That is something I have absolutely zero patience for.
Market cap? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fanbois spew summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple is the THE most monopolistic company involved in electronics today. At one time, the fanboys used to point fingers at MS at being the big monopoly. Now Apple controls all software, hardware, distribution for everything the touch. Sure they make good products, but they were also positioned in such a way that they could screw over their base and make huge OS changes over the past 30 years and leave all previous software behind. You upgrade to new OS, you buy all new software too. Apple could do that with only a handful of buyers. MS on the other hand had millions of corporate and individual users that couldn't afford to purchase completely new versions of all of their software they bought.
Did MS lack the ability to change and advance fast, OR did market mandate that they move slow? I think a reasonable argument could be made for the latter. I know that through each new version of OS that MS produced, I was able to keep the thousands of dollars of software I had invested in. Now with Win 7 working wonderfully, I would expect to see more Apple attacks so they don't lose ground against MS.
Re:Been saying this for years. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not a matter of if Apple will pass Microsoft now, but when. Google's also making a run at it, but they've got a lot further to go.
Apple's market cap is driven by the same hip image as their hardware. Now, I like Apple products. They are executing extremely well, and delivering high quality, market leading products in their niches. But this is already part of their stock price, and then some. Apple has a 50% higher P/E than Microsoft, and that is a bit much.
Re:Not really so (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact is, you have unreasonable expectations regarding life expectancy of computers. 12 years old is old. Heck even XP is 8 years old and is showing its age.
Who made you the authority to decide what is reasonable? GP is right - it is more user-friendly to provide support longer term than what Apple provides.
Re:Been saying this for years. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tell me in which universe was Microsoft ever "hip"? Young, yes of course, in chronology; but I don't ever recall them being anywhere near "cool."
-dZ.
Re:Steves coolaid (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Not really so (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft bought most of those games, and as you've pointed out those games have generally gone downhill since MS bought them...
Windows/Office only sell because of inertia, they are far from being best in class and wouldn't be able to stand on their own in a freely competitive market.
MS is wasting lots of money trying to out-do google, but they are pretty much following the same strategy they always have - release inferior products, and leverage existing market share in other areas to promote the inferior products... Do you think anyone at all would use msn/bing if it wasn't the default on windows? and the fact that despite being the default, it's market share is so low says a lot.
Re:Not really so (Score:2, Insightful)
>>>The commercial world in general is about moving you away from older hardware to make you buy new stuff...
I think you hit-upon the key difference:
- Apple wants to sell hardware, therefore they will BLOCK you from installing new OSes on 4-5 year old machines, in hopes you'll go out and buy a new one for $1000+.
- Microsoft does not sell hardware, so if you want to install your shiny new WIN7 on a 300 megahertz machine, or a mere 256 megabytes, you can. Even though that's below the suggested requirements MS won't stop you, because they don't care about selling more machines.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)