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I wish Apple's proprietary computing platform keep niche but continue building good products. However iPhone become top share on some market and perhaps is it m

I wish Apple's proprietary computing platform keep niche but continue building good products. However iPhone become top share on some market and perhaps is it much higher share on enterprise?

derefr 4y ago
PCs and "sealed consumer information-consumption appliances" (phones, tablets) are different market verticals — they will never converge, because the buyers of them have different needs that result in mutually-exclusive design constraints. Even in Japan, where "nobody" owns a home PC, offices are still full of PCs; nobody is being handed a Macbook to do their work from, let alone a phone or tablet. In my opinion, it's perfectly fine for Apple to win the "sealed appliance" space — since ~everybody else (your Samsungs, your Xiaomis, even Google) is just trying to do the same proprietary vertical-integration play that Apple is doing in that space; they're just worse at it than Apple is. In contrast, Apple will never win the PC space, since their whole market strategy — "give people something different that forces them into our ecosystem" — is (and always has been) anathema to how boring, non-IT businesses want to use computers. Even companies whose workflows depend entirely on macOS "killer apps" (like desktop publishes back in the 1980s), who begrudgingly buy Macs to fulfill those needs, constantly lobby their app-developer ISVs to go multiplatform, so that they can toss out the Macs and revert to doing the same boring PC-centered IT that every other company around them is doing. (And do note that Apple isn't trying to win the PC space. They were trying, historically — maybe up until the year 2001 or so. But ever since the iPod, and then the iPhone, Apple's strategy has moved to treating the Mac as a halo product category — a nice-to-have for those already in the Apple ecosystem for other reasons — rather than as something that's going to usurp the PC in its place one day. It's why, around that time, they killed XServe and Airport routers: they saw no further benefit in attempting to achieve corporate ubiquity, rather than complementarity.)

I wish Apple's proprietary computing platform keep niche but continue building good products. However iPhone become top share on some market and perhaps is it much higher share on enterprise?

derefr 4y ago

PCs and "sealed consumer information-consumption appliances" (phones, tablets) are different market verticals — they will never converge, because the buyers of them have different needs that result in mutually-exclusive design constraints. Even in Japan, where "nobody" owns a home PC, offices are still full of PCs; nobody is being handed a Macbook to do their work from, let alone a phone or tablet. In my opinion, it's perfectly fine for Apple to win the "sealed appliance" space — since ~everybody else (your Samsungs, your Xiaomis, even Google) is just trying to do the same proprietary vertical-integration play that Apple is doing in that space; they're just worse at it than Apple is. In contrast, Apple will never win the PC space, since their whole market strategy — "give people something different that forces them into our ecosystem" — is (and always has been) anathema to how boring, non-IT businesses want to use computers. Even companies whose workflows depend entirely on macOS "killer apps" (like desktop publishes back in the 1980s), who begrudgingly buy Macs to fulfill those needs, constantly lobby their app-developer ISVs to go multiplatform, so that they can toss out the Macs and revert to doing the same boring PC-centered IT that every other company around them is doing. (And do note that Apple isn't trying to win the PC space. They were trying, historically — maybe up until the year 2001 or so. But ever since the iPod, and then the iPhone, Apple's strategy has moved to treating the Mac as a halo product category — a nice-to-have for those already in the Apple ecosystem for other reasons — rather than as something that's going to usurp the PC in its place one day. It's why, around that time, they killed XServe and Airport routers: they saw no further benefit in attempting to achieve corporate ubiquity, rather than complementarity.)