It could have been IBM.
Or Hewlett-Packard.
Or Dell.
Maybe even Microsoft But it wasn’t.
It was Apple that came out of the PC era as
the world’s biggest computer maker.
Almost like they knew stuff that the others
didn’t.
APPLE IS WINNING. The never-ending queue of customers eager to buy iPads, iPhones,
iPods and, yes, even Macs has put the company in a unique position. With more
money in the bank than it knows what to do with and a solid bedrock of
platforms on which to build the hardware and software of the next few years,
it’s unrecognisable as the shambolic company of the early 1990s. How on Earth
did this happen?
itunes,
iPads, iPhones, iPods
Back then, Microsoft and Intel were the
unassailable leaders in software and hardware. Their splitting of the operating
system and processor businesses suited them and the industry very well. PC
makers bought chips from one and an OS from the other, and cobbled up the bits
in between as best they could. Real innovation was scarce, so the key was to
drive down prices and give users more megabytes and megahertz for their money.
Apple, with its emphasis on hard-to-define benefits like usability, its
non-standard system and its inflated prices, had nothing to offer that the
market seemed to want. And, trapped inside its own bubble of proprietary
hardware and software and dwindlingly tiny user base, it had no way of tapping
into the advantages of scale that were helping the ‘doners’ to clean up.
Today, what used to be Apple’s perceived
weaknesses are now its biggest strengths. By controlling both the hardware and
software of its platform, it can create products that are more than just
cheaper and faster. No longer dominated by corporate volume buyers, the tech
market has expanded into the general population, and while consumers are still
reluctant to pay extra for ease of use, they’re more than happy to shell out
for a device that seems pleasurable to own and use, and discover its practical
benefits later.
As corporates finally - and now at an
accelerating pace - move towards ‘BYOD’ (bring your own device), the principle
of enabling employees to use the devices they already own and prefer to access
software and systems at work rather than providing dedicated computers, Apple’s
popularity in the consumer market gives it a foothold in the business arena too
- while Microsoft’s rapidly eroding dominance in enterprise is of little or no
help in selling to consumers.
It would be tempting, then, to conclude
that Apple hasn’t changed, but the market has. On the contrary, however, Apple
is a vastly different company from the one that emerged in the 1980s from the
startup that spat out Steve Jobs almost immediately after the launch of the
Mac. The ethos we now associate so strongly with the company didn’t spring
fully formed from the partnership that built wooden-cased micros in a Los Altos
garage; it’s taken years to hone. And more than just ethos has been required to
build Apple into a company richer and more powerful than Microsoft, Intel or
any of the rivals it’s seen off along the way.
UNLIKE MICROSOFT, apple doesn’t have to support all the endless permutations of
components that a whole independent hardware industry can dream up. In fact,
Apple has been brutal since 1997 in denying support for technologies it deems
either outmoded or inferior. At times this attitude seems to extend to its own
products: you only have to glance down the short list of Macs that will be able
to run Mountain Lion (apple, com/osx/how-to-upgrade) to see that some customers
maybe left less than satisfied by OS X’s next great step forward. Mac minis,
MacBook Pros and even top-end Mac Pros sold as recently as 2007 are excluded.
Later
versions of OS X improved speed and added major features
But without such ruthlessness, the Mac
platform wouldn’t be in the resurgent position it enjoys today. Ditching the
whole code base of Mac OS 9 in 2001 to introduce a totally new operating system
derived from Jobs’ Next step was hardly a popularity contest-winning move, but
it was the right one at the time and allowed Apple to pull decisively ahead of
Windows, which Microsoft continued to resist changing fundamentally for fear of
startling the corporate IT department horses.
Switching its entire hardware platform from
lBM’s RISC-based PowerPC processors to Intel’s CISC-based x86 line in 2006 made
life no easier for anyone, but turned the Mac from an expensively idiosyncratic
niche architecture into a superior PC, ready to run Windows or Linux if the
user preferred, but more importantly a way to put the best components being
developed for the whole industry to the service of Apple’s unique user
experience.
When MacUser ran the provocative 1996
coverline ‘How NeXT will give your Mac its balls back’, the sentiment could
hardly have been more prescient. Having the guts to force discontinuities on a
sceptical market has enabled Apple to achieve what the monolithic ‘Wintel’
industry, for all its breakneck Moore’s Law progress, has proved disastrously
bad at: change.
IN NOVEMBER 1997, shortly after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the nearby Stanford
University proudly announced that it had acquired ‘the museum and historical
collections of Apple Computer Inc, as a gift’ (bit. ly/NEdTuA). The truth, or
so the story goes, is a little more mundane.
Nosing around the Infinite Loop campus for
some office space for a new project, Jobs came across a set of rooms stuffed
with old Macs. Hardware and software, product manuals, plans, sketches and the
like. Far from sentimentally preserving the stash, Jobs’ immediate reaction was
to get rid of it - he had other plans for the space. And thus Stanford was
bequeathed its legacy. It probably worked out cheaper than a skip.
It’s that sort of attitude to its past that
prevents Apple falling victim to inertia or complacency. As recently as April
this year, senior VP Phil Schiller reiterated it in an email response to David
Greelish, a computer historian and president of the Atlanta Historical
Computing Society. Responding to Greelish’s proposal that Apple should create a
museum of the company’s history, Schiller wrote, according to Greelish’s
account on the Cult of Mac blog (bit. Iy/M66uc2): ‘I don’t think this is a good
idea for Apple. We are focused on inventing the future, not celebrating the
past. Others are better at collecting, curating, and displaying historical
Items. It is not who we are or who we want to be.’
It’s hard to appreciate just how
fundamental this approach has been to everything Apple has achieved during its
resurgence, and how great the leaps of faith it enabled. Hindsight tends to
mask how difficult and dangerous were the decisions that now seem obvious.
In the mid-1990s, under CEO Gil Amelio,
Apple was moving towards focusing entirely on software, and this was regarded
by Wall Street analysts as a step in the right direction. After all, the big
success story of the day was Microsoft, and Microsoft didn’t make hardware. So
the Mac OS was licensed out to other companies who made Macs with no Apple
logo. This, obviously, would take the pressure off Apple’s struggling
manufacturing operation, offer users a lower cost of entry and more choice, and
grow the Mac OS user base.
Apple's
logo
Except, of course, that all it actually did
was give other companies a chance to take sales that Apple would otherwise have
made anyway, trading on the Mac’s pedigree to filch revenue while diluting the
very thing that made the Mac O S worth owning: its image as a coherent, quality
brand of physical products embodying superior systems. Of course, Steve Jobs
killed the Mac cloning experiment as soon as was possible after his return to
the company. Attempts to revive it unilaterally, by companies such as Psystar,
without a licence have been crushed by Apple lawyers. The company now
understands very clearly that controlling its platform lock, stock and barrel
is an advantage too enormous to ever throw away.
As we go to press, Microsoft has announced
plans to manufacture its own iPad rival, Surface. Belatedly, reluctantly, it’s
finally embracing the Apple model. Whether it can make it work is another
matter.
Surface won’t be Microsoft’s first in-house
hardware project. Its Xbox games console, like its Sony and Nintendo rivals, is
a closed and proprietary platform whose hardware and operating system are made
exclusively by its owner, which also licenses all third-party software titles.
This model has been the norm in gaming since the earliest days and would quite
possibly have dominated general-purpose computing, too, but for I BM’s decision
- although ‘decision’ makes it sound more organised than it was - to open its
hardware design to cloners in the 1980s. That did bring an immediate benefit to
the market: rather than one company trying to figure out how to build the
computer of the future, dozens could compete to do it. If you go it alone, you
really need to be good at it. Microsoft must have questioned its own
credibility as a hardware company in the mid-2000s, when the second iteration
of its console, the Xbox 360, suffered a notoriously high failure rate. The
resulting replacement programmes, lawsuits and additional development cost
Microsoft at least a billion dollars, and probably considerably more, although
it remains tight-lipped about the whole fiasco.
the
Xbox 360
Zune, a line of music players intended to
compete with the iPod, never quite set the world alight, either. It was
abandoned in 2011.
So Surface, the first computer product for
which Microsoft has acted as hardware manufacturer (although, like Apple, it’ll
outsource the actual production), will be a big test. Specific details of the
product are thin on the ground, and journalists were prevented from handling
the prototype devices freely at the single demo that’s been given so far -
perhaps another indication that this is not an area where Microsoft is entirely
confident of avoiding missteps.
One thing we do know is that there’ll be
two versions of Surface. The first will run Windows RT, a touch-driven mobile
version of the O S, on an ARM-based processor - the exact same strategy Apple
has pioneered with iOS. But even mimicking a tried and tested formula isn’t
sufficiently reassuring, apparently. There’ll also be a bulkier, more expensive
edition of the tablet that runs Windows 8. It would be accurate to call this a
laptop PC without a keyboard, but for the fact that it does come with a
keyboard.
Microsoft has learned from Apple that it
needs to move forward, but it just can’t get the hang of letting go of the
past.
