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It really depends on what your definition of 'best' is, doesn't it? This article seems to suggest that Apple was the better computer in 1996 while Windows was

It really depends on what your definition of 'best' is, doesn't it? This article seems to suggest that Apple was the better computer in 1996 while Windows was dominating. But Windows was dominating because it was the platform of choice for business users who had trained on it, built custom applications for it, and networked their offices with it. It was the best solution at the time for the customers who needed it. Path dependence is not evidence of the market not working; just the opposite. It's evidence that products the author of this article likes better aren't necessarily as successful on the market as products most consumers know how to use. The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor. Hence their famous saying: "You already know how to use it"

scottLobster 9y ago
Yeah it's a classic case of projecting one's personal values onto the market. A lot of startups fail in part because they design an enthusiast product that they think will have appeal outside of enthusiasts. Because clearly it's better in every way, right? So how could people not switch to this new thing that they've never seen, take the time to learn how to use it, all for a marginal increase in efficiency, if you use it perfectly, over the incumbent product they already know that currently does the thing? Outside of enthusiast circles companies are about psychology more than anything. Make the customer feel empowered, even if they aren't, and they'll buy your thing over the technically better option.
- cirgue 9y ago
  Cultivating an enthusiast base is very much a viable strategy toward marketing a product if you also play the rest of the game correctly. Apple products are viewed as luxury goods because of their appearance and interface, but they also had a 'cool' factor to them as a consequence of being favored by creative professionals circa 2005-2010 when the iPod and then iPhone were coming into their own. People like easy-to-use, but being one of the 'in' crowd also has a huge influence on how people adopt technology.
msla 9y ago
It's hard to say which of two technologies is better when they're not substitutable. For example, you can't replace a gas-burning truck with a lot of carrying capacity and a long range with a small electric car with basically no carrying capacity and much shorter range. They don't do all of the same things. You can argue that nobody needs the truck, or at least that the person you're talking to doesn't need the truck, but that's a "you're holding it wrong" or, at the extreme, a "you're living wrong" argument, and it comes down to moral arguments in the extreme case. > The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
- theoh 9y ago
  The line about the nipple should be qualified: it's currently thought that face detection is also innate. (though, intriguingly, it's apparently unknown whether this is because recognizing faces is important specifically for babies, or because the human visual system is evolved to process that kind of thing. i.e. maybe there are other stimuli, not face-shaped, which would also intrigue babies because they push the visual system's buttons: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00969/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... )
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- js2 9y ago
  Even the nipple is learned. Lots of mothers struggle with breastfeeding initially. Some even give up in frustration since it's expected to be easy.
  - MengerSponge 9y ago
    Babies learn how to use a nipple more efficiently, but the initial use is innate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes#Rooting_reflex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes#Rooting_ref...
sldoliadis 9y ago
Not disagreeing with you, but I think the underlying, bigger point of pieces like this is that there are network effects that provide dominance to products that are outsized relative to their actual quality. That is, you might make a good case that Wintel systems in 1996 were as good as Apple products in some sense, or even somewhat better, but I think it would be difficult to argue that the difference in quality was such that it paralleled the difference in market share. A lot of the things you mention are maybe things I think the author would say are examples of social factors that push the dominance of a product outside its objective quality. In the end, I think lots of these issues come down to semantic vagueness, but I think there's a reasonable point in there. What people tend to forget is that ironically, Windows I think came to dominate initially because it was more open. That is, you could buy it with whatever hardware you wanted, and didn't need Apple's permission. Apple later succeeded I think because of something more nebulous, including quality on the software side, but also an appeal to the fashion-and-status-conscious (I say this as someone typing this from a MacBook, so I don't mean that as a slight). The bigger, more serious problem is really freedom of choice and how network effects restrict that. It's one of the reasons I'm so in favor of open standards. We could argue until we're blue in the face about what X is the higher-quality product, but in the end the thing that drives these kinds of discussion is the fact that in certain fields, once a product becomes dominant, you are obliged to use that product because of others' use. You might like to use some obscure word processing program that meets your needs better, but if the publishers you're submitting to all require Microsoft Word for some obscure feature, you are forced to use that. If your employer requires the use of some software that's only available on Windows, you might prefer Macs or Linux, but then you are forced to spend a lot of money just to run that software. You might not want to use some messaging software, but if everyone else is using it, you often kind of have to. Even with programming languages there's something similar, where you might want to program in a language, but if everyone else is writing libraries in something else, that kind of coerces you to use that something else. That is not intrinsic to the language; it's about societal use of that language. In some ways, it's life, but I think with tech the problems get amplified because of interactivity and communication demands. At the extreme end you end up with de facto monopolies that are impossible to get out of. In fact, I think a big case could be made that often when monopolies are established in tech, it's been open standards that have allowed for the destruction of those monopolies.
goatlover 9y ago
Marketing also matters, and marketing can help determine what's "best" in the consumer's mind.
api 9y ago
PCs have the advantage of an open hardware platform. Apple won in laptop and mobile where open hardware either doesn't really exist or is very hard and inferior. The shift to smaller portables leveled the playing field. It's also important to note that Apple won in part by embracing a more open software ecosystem. OS X is Unix and inherited compatibility with a massive open source ecosystem. I predict that if Apple locks down macOS(X) like iOS and locks out this ecosystem they will once again decline, especially since both Windows and Linux have improved as desktop/laptop OSes since OS X became dominant at the high end. I would not argue that Apple was best in the 80s or 90s. They were actually kind of overpriced, closed, and original macOS was not that great. The best of the closed PCs was probably the Amiga, but Commodore's mismanagement botched that one. If Commodore were better managed they could have survived and become Apple. Windows and Linux still dominate larger desktop workstation machines.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Amiga was well above the offerings from Apple. Amiga had a AppleOS emmulator and the Amiga was actually faster in emmulation then on Apple's metal. My dad's friend had a store and we had a Mac sitting next to the Amiga and he would get so mad when we would run the emmulator on Amega and compare it to the Mac OS 6. The Amiga's analogue color (4,096) was 8 years ahead of Mac's digit color which took FOREVER to come out. I was always so frustrated that people just asumed that the Apple computer was just better for graphics back then since it was SO easy to see the difference. Seriously Mac had monochrome and Amiga had this! Amiga 2000 1987 tv commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw My friend had this beast and we had it hooked up to a WHOLE 1 GB Hard drive. We then got a Video Toaster for our church in 1991 and gave the computer to them. They used it till 2000.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    Owning the Amiga back in the 80's taught me my first lesson that it's not always the technologically superior product that wins in the marketplace. Much more important than technological features are things like marketing, conformity, and groupthink. The lesson was reinforced when so many developers and companies started jumping all over the earliest versions of Java, which was complete and utter garbage, and was untested, slow, and immature back then. Yet people were drooling over it. Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them. Similar things have happened again and again, making me sometimes suspect that if the worse a technology is, the more successful it is likely to be. Worse is better indeed.
jimbokun 9y ago
"The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor." And because they did a much better job at building the platform the second time around. iPhone was not just first product in its category, the App Store provided developers a way to quickly make money on the platform, in turn making the iPhone the default choice for consumers and businesses. Jobs learned a lesson from losing to Windows, and made sure it didn't happen again.
- icebraining 9y ago
  The App Store only came later (in fact, after unofficial "stores" like Cydia were already available), the original plan for the iPhone were "web apps": https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...

scottLobster 9y ago

Yeah it's a classic case of projecting one's personal values onto the market. A lot of startups fail in part because they design an enthusiast product that they think will have appeal outside of enthusiasts. Because clearly it's better in every way, right? So how could people not switch to this new thing that they've never seen, take the time to learn how to use it, all for a marginal increase in efficiency, if you use it perfectly, over the incumbent product they already know that currently does the thing? Outside of enthusiast circles companies are about psychology more than anything. Make the customer feel empowered, even if they aren't, and they'll buy your thing over the technically better option.

cirgue 9y ago
Cultivating an enthusiast base is very much a viable strategy toward marketing a product if you also play the rest of the game correctly. Apple products are viewed as luxury goods because of their appearance and interface, but they also had a 'cool' factor to them as a consequence of being favored by creative professionals circa 2005-2010 when the iPod and then iPhone were coming into their own. People like easy-to-use, but being one of the 'in' crowd also has a huge influence on how people adopt technology.

msla 9y ago

It's hard to say which of two technologies is better when they're not substitutable. For example, you can't replace a gas-burning truck with a lot of carrying capacity and a long range with a small electric car with basically no carrying capacity and much shorter range. They don't do all of the same things. You can argue that nobody needs the truck, or at least that the person you're talking to doesn't need the truck, but that's a "you're holding it wrong" or, at the extreme, a "you're living wrong" argument, and it comes down to moral arguments in the extreme case. > The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.

theoh 9y ago
The line about the nipple should be qualified: it's currently thought that face detection is also innate. (though, intriguingly, it's apparently unknown whether this is because recognizing faces is important specifically for babies, or because the human visual system is evolved to process that kind of thing. i.e. maybe there are other stimuli, not face-shaped, which would also intrigue babies because they push the visual system's buttons: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00969/full http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... )
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
js2 9y ago
Even the nipple is learned. Lots of mothers struggle with breastfeeding initially. Some even give up in frustration since it's expected to be easy.
- MengerSponge 9y ago
  Babies learn how to use a nipple more efficiently, but the initial use is innate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes#Rooting_reflex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes#Rooting_ref...

sldoliadis 9y ago

Not disagreeing with you, but I think the underlying, bigger point of pieces like this is that there are network effects that provide dominance to products that are outsized relative to their actual quality. That is, you might make a good case that Wintel systems in 1996 were as good as Apple products in some sense, or even somewhat better, but I think it would be difficult to argue that the difference in quality was such that it paralleled the difference in market share. A lot of the things you mention are maybe things I think the author would say are examples of social factors that push the dominance of a product outside its objective quality. In the end, I think lots of these issues come down to semantic vagueness, but I think there's a reasonable point in there. What people tend to forget is that ironically, Windows I think came to dominate initially because it was more open. That is, you could buy it with whatever hardware you wanted, and didn't need Apple's permission. Apple later succeeded I think because of something more nebulous, including quality on the software side, but also an appeal to the fashion-and-status-conscious (I say this as someone typing this from a MacBook, so I don't mean that as a slight). The bigger, more serious problem is really freedom of choice and how network effects restrict that. It's one of the reasons I'm so in favor of open standards. We could argue until we're blue in the face about what X is the higher-quality product, but in the end the thing that drives these kinds of discussion is the fact that in certain fields, once a product becomes dominant, you are obliged to use that product because of others' use. You might like to use some obscure word processing program that meets your needs better, but if the publishers you're submitting to all require Microsoft Word for some obscure feature, you are forced to use that. If your employer requires the use of some software that's only available on Windows, you might prefer Macs or Linux, but then you are forced to spend a lot of money just to run that software. You might not want to use some messaging software, but if everyone else is using it, you often kind of have to. Even with programming languages there's something similar, where you might want to program in a language, but if everyone else is writing libraries in something else, that kind of coerces you to use that something else. That is not intrinsic to the language; it's about societal use of that language. In some ways, it's life, but I think with tech the problems get amplified because of interactivity and communication demands. At the extreme end you end up with de facto monopolies that are impossible to get out of. In fact, I think a big case could be made that often when monopolies are established in tech, it's been open standards that have allowed for the destruction of those monopolies.

goatlover 9y ago

Marketing also matters, and marketing can help determine what's "best" in the consumer's mind.

api 9y ago

PCs have the advantage of an open hardware platform. Apple won in laptop and mobile where open hardware either doesn't really exist or is very hard and inferior. The shift to smaller portables leveled the playing field. It's also important to note that Apple won in part by embracing a more open software ecosystem. OS X is Unix and inherited compatibility with a massive open source ecosystem. I predict that if Apple locks down macOS(X) like iOS and locks out this ecosystem they will once again decline, especially since both Windows and Linux have improved as desktop/laptop OSes since OS X became dominant at the high end. I would not argue that Apple was best in the 80s or 90s. They were actually kind of overpriced, closed, and original macOS was not that great. The best of the closed PCs was probably the Amiga, but Commodore's mismanagement botched that one. If Commodore were better managed they could have survived and become Apple. Windows and Linux still dominate larger desktop workstation machines.

baldfat 9y ago
Amiga was well above the offerings from Apple. Amiga had a AppleOS emmulator and the Amiga was actually faster in emmulation then on Apple's metal. My dad's friend had a store and we had a Mac sitting next to the Amiga and he would get so mad when we would run the emmulator on Amega and compare it to the Mac OS 6. The Amiga's analogue color (4,096) was 8 years ahead of Mac's digit color which took FOREVER to come out. I was always so frustrated that people just asumed that the Apple computer was just better for graphics back then since it was SO easy to see the difference. Seriously Mac had monochrome and Amiga had this! Amiga 2000 1987 tv commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw My friend had this beast and we had it hooked up to a WHOLE 1 GB Hard drive. We then got a Video Toaster for our church in 1991 and gave the computer to them. They used it till 2000.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  Owning the Amiga back in the 80's taught me my first lesson that it's not always the technologically superior product that wins in the marketplace. Much more important than technological features are things like marketing, conformity, and groupthink. The lesson was reinforced when so many developers and companies started jumping all over the earliest versions of Java, which was complete and utter garbage, and was untested, slow, and immature back then. Yet people were drooling over it. Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them. Similar things have happened again and again, making me sometimes suspect that if the worse a technology is, the more successful it is likely to be. Worse is better indeed.

jimbokun 9y ago

"The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor." And because they did a much better job at building the platform the second time around. iPhone was not just first product in its category, the App Store provided developers a way to quickly make money on the platform, in turn making the iPhone the default choice for consumers and businesses. Jobs learned a lesson from losing to Windows, and made sure it didn't happen again.

icebraining 9y ago
The App Store only came later (in fact, after unofficial "stores" like Cydia were already available), the original plan for the iPhone were "web apps": https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...