3 ms·

The author has entirely missed the reasons for Apple's successes and failures. I was a Mac guy in the '90s. The Macs of the day were uninspired beige boxes. Th

by Zak 17y ago

The author has entirely missed the reasons for Apple's successes and failures. I was a Mac guy in the '90s. The Macs of the day were uninspired beige boxes. They were also expensive and used connectivity technology that made peripherals more expensive[0]. The OS also sucked. The UI was nice, but from a technical standpoint, NT4 was easily and clearly superior[1]. Even Windows 95 had better memory management and multitasking. Everything Apple made from about 1988 to 1998 would have gotten the Steve Jobs "This is shit!" stamp. Apple lost ground in the '90s because it made average products and sold them at premium prices; it had little to do with third-party developers. The success of the iPhone also had little to do with third-party developers. It simply has the best user experience, and a "wow-factor" that makes people want to buy one when they play with it. The iPhone would be the most popular smartphone even if it had no third-party apps at all; most people by the iPhone for the iPhone, not the apps. [0] Not inherently, in many cases, but the result was less competition between peripheral makers than on the PC side. [1] It pains me to say this. I've always hated Windows.

pohl 17y ago
Maybe it's too early and I need my coffee, but I can't tell where you differ from the author. He also says the success of the iPhone had little to do with developers. ("Developers never had anything to do with it." is his closing line.) What you call "wow-factor" translates to the author's "awesomeness".
- Zak 17y ago
  The last paragraph of the article is Microsoft won on the desktop by being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile by being developer-hostile. Quite a bit of the rest of the article doesn't seem to support that conclusion, but that does appear to be the conclusion of his article. I'm saying that Microsoft being developer-friendly has little to do with them winning on the desktop instead of Apple. Incidentally, on the desktop Apple is now making good products and being developer-friendly. They don't have a huge market share, but I recently read that they're getting 20% of the global profits from PC sales.
  - pohl 17y ago
    I see where you're coming from now, thank you. FWIW, the sentence that followed made me interpret it more like this: Microsoft won on the desktop [while] being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile [while] being developer-hostile. (I didn't think the author meant to imply causality)

by Zak 17y ago

pohl 17y ago

Maybe it's too early and I need my coffee, but I can't tell where you differ from the author. He also says the success of the iPhone had little to do with developers. ("Developers never had anything to do with it." is his closing line.) What you call "wow-factor" translates to the author's "awesomeness".

Zak 17y ago
The last paragraph of the article is Microsoft won on the desktop by being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile by being developer-hostile. Quite a bit of the rest of the article doesn't seem to support that conclusion, but that does appear to be the conclusion of his article. I'm saying that Microsoft being developer-friendly has little to do with them winning on the desktop instead of Apple. Incidentally, on the desktop Apple is now making good products and being developer-friendly. They don't have a huge market share, but I recently read that they're getting 20% of the global profits from PC sales.
- pohl 17y ago
  I see where you're coming from now, thank you. FWIW, the sentence that followed made me interpret it more like this: Microsoft won on the desktop [while] being developer-friendly and Apple won in mobile [while] being developer-hostile. (I didn't think the author meant to imply causality)