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Apple has always been a hardware company though. Software has just been for the purpose of selling their hardware. MSFT is the opposite. So it makes sense it b
by solarmist 5y ago
Apple has always been a hardware company though. Software has just been for the purpose of selling their hardware.
MSFT is the opposite. So it makes sense it be much slower/harder to get going in this area.
- ChuckMcM 5y agoI completely agree with that, Microsoft's foundation was software. What is intriguing is that when they decided to "go hardware" (which started with Mice and Keyboards and later game consoles, tablets, phones, and laptops) their execution strategy didn't evolve to making their own silicon until much much later. Apple was much more aggressive here with the PowerPC alliance after Motorola let them down followed by later moves into chip design. I am always fascinated by seeing how the "core competency" of a company constrains its execution options later in its existence. Sun, for example, really was a 'sales' company first and it couldn't "sell its way" out of the wave of Linux clusters that started displacing its servers. Now as a hardware company it too was let down by Motorola and that was some of the genesis for SPARC much like Apple's move. But as a sales company Sun kept shooting anyone who used their "open" architecture CPU by ruthlessly out selling them.
- mcovalt 5y ago> Apple has always been a hardware company though. Software has just been for the purpose of selling their hardware. I'm not sure that's the right perspective. Steve Jobs said in an interview [0] that "Apple views itself as a software company." [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeyaAUCyZs
- solarmist 5y agoThey definitely don't behave like a hardware company. And arguably much (most?) of their value comes from their software. But at their core selling hardware is where the money comes from.