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I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary, the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actu

I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary, the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it. I'm sure there are a lot of Microsoft execs right now that are saying "we already do that with product X" and pretty pissed off that they were never able to sell product X over 5 years the way Apple did in an hour. The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers, and Microsoft doesn't. Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need. They might be the same thing in the end, and Microsoft might have even gotten there first, but Apple really gets marketing.

sigzero 15y ago
I agree. It is the simplicity of things that Apple gets right. Most of the time when Apple says "it just works" that it does and consumers like that.
Tyrannosaurs 15y ago
I agree not massively innovative but it's not just the presentation, they're very good at removing all the rough edges and creating a coherent whole.
peterb 15y ago
The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program manager's rule, and a PM is neither a technologist nor a designer. They represent "the user". As a result Microsoft is great at feature-rich products that solve many problems. At Apple, they focus on the human side of technology. They try to make things easier to use. They focus on design details and strive for minimalism while still being feature rich. At Microsoft a PM could never remove an on/off button from an MP3 player. Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  Don't designers represent "the user" also? Maybe a closer analogy would have the program managers representing "the business".
  - schrototo 15y ago
    I think the difference is that designers have a vision of what the users really want, as opposed to what they say (or even think) they want. Whereas the PMs (in that example) are more the focus-group types.
    - marklabedz 15y ago
      To (mis)quote Henry Ford: "If had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse." The iPhone, iPod, and especially the iPad represented a near-total re-conceptualization of the product in that space.
    - peterb 15y ago
      Design is more than that. It is what users really want, but it is also how they feel when they use it, how it works, how it looks, etc. PMs are great at getting projects done. They herd cats. But very few have studied design, industrial design, art history, architecture, literature, etc. Jonathan Ive studied industrial design. Steven Sinofsky studied computer science.
      - contextfree 15y ago
        I'm not sure if there's any particular significance to this, but the current head of PM for Windows is Jensen Harris and his degree was in music composition.
Kylekramer 15y ago
Apple is indeed good at marketing, but how do we know they going to succeed at marketing iCloud? We haven't even really seen any marketing about iCloud beyond the keynote, which is them preaching to the choir and frankly anyone watching already "got it". After all, Apple pretty much never pitches software, and the idea of an iPhone/iPad/Mac commercial saying we keep everything in sync is fairly weak (most consumers already have that experience with their phone without even thinking about it). iCloud after all is in part a rebranding of a product that has already failed multiple times already. Past success doesn't even imply future success, and past failure is even worse.
- Jd 15y ago
  Actually, past success is probably the best single indicator for future success.
- danieldk 15y ago
  Apple is indeed good at marketing, but how do we know they going to succeed at marketing iCloud? [...] iCloud after all is in part a rebranding of a product that has already failed multiple times already. Good question. But from a user perspective MobileMe syncing already works very well. When I buy a new Mac or iOS device, I simply configure my MobileMe account and automatically have my contacts, calendars, notes, and on the Mac preferences, dock items, etc. They could have made the synchronization functionality of MobileMe free, and slowly add the features announced for iCloud. But announcing it as a new product is a far smarter marketing move. iCloud has dominated deadlines for days now, and people see it as something different from MobileMe.
brown9-2 15y ago
The difference might be that on a new OS X install in the near future, pressing Save on a document open in even a simple text editor will automatically sync that document to "the cloud" and all my devices. No desktop app that I'm aware of from Microsoft does that today out of the box, as the default action. Sure you can easily sync stuff with Dropbox or whatever Microsoft's product is, or you can do word processing in your browser with Google Docs - but it sounds like with iCloud that Apple will be the first to offer this type of syncing as the default, no-extra-steps-or-thinking option.
- rimantas 15y ago
  > pressing Save on a document open You will not need to even do that. It's autosaved. Coming to Lion next month.
  - CoryMathews 15y ago
    Auto-save coming to office, docs etc. since.. years ago.
    - michaelcampbell 15y ago
      Lion has revision history though, no?
    - sjs 15y ago
      Auto-save coming to games since 10 years ago. Who cares? This is OS-wide auto save and heavily promoted as how all modern OS X apps should behave. That's far bigger than implementing it in one suite of software and stopping there.
  - lukifer 15y ago
    It's downright embarrassing how long it has taken the computer industry to make that the default behavior.
Pewpewarrows 15y ago
> Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need. Actually, Chrome and Nexus-branded Android phones are the only Google products that I've seen advertised, ever. Of their hundreds of products, those 2 are the only ones that they're trying to "sell". In fact, Wave was pretty much their only product that comes to mind that didn't address a need (or at least that was the public perception), hence its inevitable demise. The rest (Search, Gmail, Docs, Android, Chrome, etc) were all direct responses to problems that people had.
- nolok 15y ago
  There is A LOT of ads for google chrome in France. By a lot I mean that there were entire metro stations with every single ad spots paid by google for chrome in Paris.
- whopa 15y ago
  Google advertising for non-Chrome/Android isn't common, but it does happen. For example, I was in Vegas a few months ago and the airport had a bunch of ads for Hotpot.
- btilly 15y ago
  Actually ou probably saw the very first Google ad on TV. It was a very cute ad for search. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU for the ad.
raganwald 15y ago
I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People want A, B, and C, so Apple builds that. People don't care about technology X, Y or Z, so Apple doesn't build that or hides it under the covers. http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha... People want their stuff to just be there. People actually don't care about the cloud or whatever, they just want their documents and their presentations and their calendar and their music to just be there for them on every device they use. So Apple built that. I don't think this is about presenting the idea differently, I think it's about actually doing the idea differently. I go back to Joel Spolsky: When talking about Architects, he said: Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html Remember that? Apple does, because with the iTunes Music Store, people could type the name of a song and listen to it right away, and Apple has made billions of dollars making that work simply and easily. I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.
- tjogin 15y ago
  Agreed. An obvious example from the real world is the tablet. Prior to the introduction of the iPad, Microsoft and its partners had shipped lots of models of tablets for over a decade and they were all failures. Then came the iPad. The iPad didn't succeed because Apple presented it well. It succeeded because unlike all of its predecessors it didn't suck.
  - 15y ago
Androsynth 15y ago
Thats not true about Google. They consistently develop products that address needs I didn't even know I had: Chrome, Docs, Maps, all the way back to gmail. Hell, their business is based on search, which embodies this concept.
dkarl 15y ago
The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers, and Microsoft doesn't I disagree. Apple isn't selling a product to consumers, they're telling consumers, "Hey guys, by the way, Apple stuff just got a lot better. You're going to like the new way it works. Come check it out." iCloud is "the new way to store and access your content." Apple knows they're in the business of selling Apple stuff, and iCloud is an improvement to that stuff rather than something separate. The fact that iCloud is a "product" is incidental and only matters to people who are used to thinking in those terms: stock analysts, MBA school marketers, shareholders, etc. To consumers, needing another "product" to do exactly the same things they've always been doing is a nuisance. Another complication? Fuck that. I like what I've got. I don't need them ramming another product down my throat. Apple's on their wavelength: they just want people to keep using Apple products and they want more people to switch. This is all about making existing products work better. Honestly, it would be more attractive to consumers if the this new non-product had no name at all, but Apple had to cater a little bit to all the journalists and analysts and bloggers who need a product name so they can talk about it. So Apple gave it a name that isn't catchy and only means something to people who follow technology trends. I don't think Microsoft's slowness is just incompetence, though. There's also an issue of trust. Microsoft can't just roll out a cloud service and a whole bunch of cloud-enabled software to desktop users and expect them to use it. Who would trust Microsoft? Apple is just a company and shouldn't be considered trustworthy from a consumer's point of view, but it is regarded with trust and affection by a large number of users. Besides, if jack-booted thugs arrived on my doorstep as a result of something I stored in Apple's iCloud, it would probably be the Fashion Police coming to take me to a gulag for frumpy people (which I'm convinced is Apple's intended endgame.) Not only is Microsoft trusted less by its users, Microsoft wants enterprise customers as much as or more than individual consumers, and the number of businesses who won't trust Microsoft because they see themselves in competition with Microsoft or its business partners (or in violation of Microsoft software licensing terms) is pretty big. Microsoft needs a more complicated solution with better security and probably a productized cloud storage platform so users can manage their own cloud servers if they don't trust Microsoft. Apple is concentrating on consumers and has a loyal customer base that is willing to trust them with storage, so it's no wonder they've found it easier to make the jump.
- 15y ago
napierzaza 15y ago
You're right, every Apple customer watches hours of keynotes before purchasing the device. It's not Steve Job's explanation that makes them so understandable. The device itself explains its own purpose better than any other device.
cletus 15y ago
> I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary Apple is proof that there is a very fine line between good and great but it's hard to make something good great. Apple has a long history (now) of taking things that suck and making them not suck. How do you define revolutionary? > the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it. Marketing people will tell you that good marketing sells products. They have a vested interest in fermenting this view. The truth is simpler: good products sell themselves. Marketing just helps. The real success of Apple isn't in the success of their market (although their ads are really quite brilliant generally speaking), it's that their products are simple enough TO get. > The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers Apple is a consumer hardware company. That's all they really do and care about and it shows. Microsoft is an OEM and enterprise Windows and Office license selling company and it shows. Apple can (and did) change their desktop OS to make the best experience possible. In Microsoft there would be a turf war (particularly with Ballmer at the helm, given his history) to make sure that any new product somehow pushes the Windows agenda. A new OS? No way that'll happen. It's not about marketing, it's about singularity of purpose. The guy with one goal is more often than not going to do better at achieving that goal than the guy with that goal and another one.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 15y ago
1) I think you underestimate how much good old fashioned engineering goes into Apple products. Clunky versus seamless is a major substantive benefit for the customer, and it takes a lot of engineering to get there. 2) Being good at sales also yields benefits. Customers benefit substantively when there is a big ecosystem around a solution. The iPhone is the perfect example. The iPhone UI works because it's FLUID. The lack of lag and the responsiveness is the difference between feeling like you're operating a computer an feeling like you're manipulating something real. That took engineering. They needed a responsive touchscreen, hardware accelerated UI stack, etc, to get that effect. Did other people have capacitive touchscreens and hardware acceleration before? Who knows, what's clear is Apple was the first one to engineer a complete solution.
checoivan 15y ago
It's not about marketing, Apple is brilliant in making a feature easy and discoverable. On spot comment. Cloud file storage and auto replication, file and document automatic sync,Web versions of office. Msft has that. You can even extend sync through API's. Features are there, but seems like nobody knows about it, discoverability is lacking.
neuroelectronic 15y ago
Exactly, all this is is marketing, yet a lot of the commenters here have been swept up in it.

sigzero 15y ago

I agree. It is the simplicity of things that Apple gets right. Most of the time when Apple says "it just works" that it does and consumers like that.

Tyrannosaurs 15y ago

I agree not massively innovative but it's not just the presentation, they're very good at removing all the rough edges and creating a coherent whole.

peterb 15y ago

The difference is more nuanced than sales. At Apple designers rule, and because Steve understands design, they higher excellent designers. At Microsoft program manager's rule, and a PM is neither a technologist nor a designer. They represent "the user". As a result Microsoft is great at feature-rich products that solve many problems. At Apple, they focus on the human side of technology. They try to make things easier to use. They focus on design details and strive for minimalism while still being feature rich. At Microsoft a PM could never remove an on/off button from an MP3 player. Microsoft's cloud strategy is very good for their business. They will run many enterprise products in the cloud successfully (Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) that generate revenue. You just won't read about them in sfgate.

brown9-2 15y ago
Don't designers represent "the user" also? Maybe a closer analogy would have the program managers representing "the business".
- schrototo 15y ago
  I think the difference is that designers have a vision of what the users really want, as opposed to what they say (or even think) they want. Whereas the PMs (in that example) are more the focus-group types.
  - marklabedz 15y ago
    To (mis)quote Henry Ford: "If had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse." The iPhone, iPod, and especially the iPad represented a near-total re-conceptualization of the product in that space.
  - peterb 15y ago
    Design is more than that. It is what users really want, but it is also how they feel when they use it, how it works, how it looks, etc. PMs are great at getting projects done. They herd cats. But very few have studied design, industrial design, art history, architecture, literature, etc. Jonathan Ive studied industrial design. Steven Sinofsky studied computer science.
    - contextfree 15y ago
      I'm not sure if there's any particular significance to this, but the current head of PM for Windows is Jensen Harris and his degree was in music composition.

Kylekramer 15y ago

Apple is indeed good at marketing, but how do we know they going to succeed at marketing iCloud? We haven't even really seen any marketing about iCloud beyond the keynote, which is them preaching to the choir and frankly anyone watching already "got it". After all, Apple pretty much never pitches software, and the idea of an iPhone/iPad/Mac commercial saying we keep everything in sync is fairly weak (most consumers already have that experience with their phone without even thinking about it). iCloud after all is in part a rebranding of a product that has already failed multiple times already. Past success doesn't even imply future success, and past failure is even worse.

Jd 15y ago
Actually, past success is probably the best single indicator for future success.
danieldk 15y ago
Apple is indeed good at marketing, but how do we know they going to succeed at marketing iCloud? [...] iCloud after all is in part a rebranding of a product that has already failed multiple times already. Good question. But from a user perspective MobileMe syncing already works very well. When I buy a new Mac or iOS device, I simply configure my MobileMe account and automatically have my contacts, calendars, notes, and on the Mac preferences, dock items, etc. They could have made the synchronization functionality of MobileMe free, and slowly add the features announced for iCloud. But announcing it as a new product is a far smarter marketing move. iCloud has dominated deadlines for days now, and people see it as something different from MobileMe.

brown9-2 15y ago

The difference might be that on a new OS X install in the near future, pressing Save on a document open in even a simple text editor will automatically sync that document to "the cloud" and all my devices. No desktop app that I'm aware of from Microsoft does that today out of the box, as the default action. Sure you can easily sync stuff with Dropbox or whatever Microsoft's product is, or you can do word processing in your browser with Google Docs - but it sounds like with iCloud that Apple will be the first to offer this type of syncing as the default, no-extra-steps-or-thinking option.

rimantas 15y ago
> pressing Save on a document open You will not need to even do that. It's autosaved. Coming to Lion next month.
- CoryMathews 15y ago
  Auto-save coming to office, docs etc. since.. years ago.
  - michaelcampbell 15y ago
    Lion has revision history though, no?
  - sjs 15y ago
    Auto-save coming to games since 10 years ago. Who cares? This is OS-wide auto save and heavily promoted as how all modern OS X apps should behave. That's far bigger than implementing it in one suite of software and stopping there.
- lukifer 15y ago
  It's downright embarrassing how long it has taken the computer industry to make that the default behavior.

Pewpewarrows 15y ago

> Microsoft and Google both suffer from the same disease, they try to sell a product, not address a need. Actually, Chrome and Nexus-branded Android phones are the only Google products that I've seen advertised, ever. Of their hundreds of products, those 2 are the only ones that they're trying to "sell". In fact, Wave was pretty much their only product that comes to mind that didn't address a need (or at least that was the public perception), hence its inevitable demise. The rest (Search, Gmail, Docs, Android, Chrome, etc) were all direct responses to problems that people had.

nolok 15y ago
There is A LOT of ads for google chrome in France. By a lot I mean that there were entire metro stations with every single ad spots paid by google for chrome in Paris.
whopa 15y ago
Google advertising for non-Chrome/Android isn't common, but it does happen. For example, I was in Vegas a few months ago and the airport had a bunch of ads for Hotpot.
btilly 15y ago
Actually ou probably saw the very first Google ad on TV. It was a very cute ad for search. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU for the ad.

raganwald 15y ago

I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People want A, B, and C, so Apple builds that. People don't care about technology X, Y or Z, so Apple doesn't build that or hides it under the covers. http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha... People want their stuff to just be there. People actually don't care about the cloud or whatever, they just want their documents and their presentations and their calendar and their music to just be there for them on every device they use. So Apple built that. I don't think this is about presenting the idea differently, I think it's about actually doing the idea differently. I go back to Joel Spolsky: When talking about Architects, he said: Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html Remember that? Apple does, because with the iTunes Music Store, people could type the name of a song and listen to it right away, and Apple has made billions of dollars making that work simply and easily. I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.

tjogin 15y ago
Agreed. An obvious example from the real world is the tablet. Prior to the introduction of the iPad, Microsoft and its partners had shipped lots of models of tablets for over a decade and they were all failures. Then came the iPad. The iPad didn't succeed because Apple presented it well. It succeeded because unlike all of its predecessors it didn't suck.
- 15y ago

Androsynth 15y ago

Thats not true about Google. They consistently develop products that address needs I didn't even know I had: Chrome, Docs, Maps, all the way back to gmail. Hell, their business is based on search, which embodies this concept.

dkarl 15y ago

The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers, and Microsoft doesn't I disagree. Apple isn't selling a product to consumers, they're telling consumers, "Hey guys, by the way, Apple stuff just got a lot better. You're going to like the new way it works. Come check it out." iCloud is "the new way to store and access your content." Apple knows they're in the business of selling Apple stuff, and iCloud is an improvement to that stuff rather than something separate. The fact that iCloud is a "product" is incidental and only matters to people who are used to thinking in those terms: stock analysts, MBA school marketers, shareholders, etc. To consumers, needing another "product" to do exactly the same things they've always been doing is a nuisance. Another complication? Fuck that. I like what I've got. I don't need them ramming another product down my throat. Apple's on their wavelength: they just want people to keep using Apple products and they want more people to switch. This is all about making existing products work better. Honestly, it would be more attractive to consumers if the this new non-product had no name at all, but Apple had to cater a little bit to all the journalists and analysts and bloggers who need a product name so they can talk about it. So Apple gave it a name that isn't catchy and only means something to people who follow technology trends. I don't think Microsoft's slowness is just incompetence, though. There's also an issue of trust. Microsoft can't just roll out a cloud service and a whole bunch of cloud-enabled software to desktop users and expect them to use it. Who would trust Microsoft? Apple is just a company and shouldn't be considered trustworthy from a consumer's point of view, but it is regarded with trust and affection by a large number of users. Besides, if jack-booted thugs arrived on my doorstep as a result of something I stored in Apple's iCloud, it would probably be the Fashion Police coming to take me to a gulag for frumpy people (which I'm convinced is Apple's intended endgame.) Not only is Microsoft trusted less by its users, Microsoft wants enterprise customers as much as or more than individual consumers, and the number of businesses who won't trust Microsoft because they see themselves in competition with Microsoft or its business partners (or in violation of Microsoft software licensing terms) is pretty big. Microsoft needs a more complicated solution with better security and probably a productized cloud storage platform so users can manage their own cloud servers if they don't trust Microsoft. Apple is concentrating on consumers and has a loyal customer base that is willing to trust them with storage, so it's no wonder they've found it easier to make the jump.

15y ago

napierzaza 15y ago

You're right, every Apple customer watches hours of keynotes before purchasing the device. It's not Steve Job's explanation that makes them so understandable. The device itself explains its own purpose better than any other device.

cletus 15y ago

> I don't know that anything Apple is doing is that revolutionary Apple is proof that there is a very fine line between good and great but it's hard to make something good great. Apple has a long history (now) of taking things that suck and making them not suck. How do you define revolutionary? > the difference is that Apple and Jobs are phenomenal at presenting the idea so that people actually get it. Marketing people will tell you that good marketing sells products. They have a vested interest in fermenting this view. The truth is simpler: good products sell themselves. Marketing just helps. The real success of Apple isn't in the success of their market (although their ads are really quite brilliant generally speaking), it's that their products are simple enough TO get. > The bottom line is that Apple knows how to sell products to consumers Apple is a consumer hardware company. That's all they really do and care about and it shows. Microsoft is an OEM and enterprise Windows and Office license selling company and it shows. Apple can (and did) change their desktop OS to make the best experience possible. In Microsoft there would be a turf war (particularly with Ballmer at the helm, given his history) to make sure that any new product somehow pushes the Windows agenda. A new OS? No way that'll happen. It's not about marketing, it's about singularity of purpose. The guy with one goal is more often than not going to do better at achieving that goal than the guy with that goal and another one.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

rayiner 15y ago

1) I think you underestimate how much good old fashioned engineering goes into Apple products. Clunky versus seamless is a major substantive benefit for the customer, and it takes a lot of engineering to get there. 2) Being good at sales also yields benefits. Customers benefit substantively when there is a big ecosystem around a solution. The iPhone is the perfect example. The iPhone UI works because it's FLUID. The lack of lag and the responsiveness is the difference between feeling like you're operating a computer an feeling like you're manipulating something real. That took engineering. They needed a responsive touchscreen, hardware accelerated UI stack, etc, to get that effect. Did other people have capacitive touchscreens and hardware acceleration before? Who knows, what's clear is Apple was the first one to engineer a complete solution.

checoivan 15y ago

It's not about marketing, Apple is brilliant in making a feature easy and discoverable. On spot comment. Cloud file storage and auto replication, file and document automatic sync,Web versions of office. Msft has that. You can even extend sync through API's. Features are there, but seems like nobody knows about it, discoverability is lacking.

neuroelectronic 15y ago

Exactly, all this is is marketing, yet a lot of the commenters here have been swept up in it.