I agree that some of Apple's advantages over Wintel are due to the fact that Apple creates both the hardware and the software. This makes life a little easier for the engineers. However, I don't think this is the main reason that Apple's products are superior, nor even why they are more reliable or easier to user.

From the beginning, Apple has built a corporate culture that values innovation and attention to detail. "Corporate culture" is in many ways an intangible quality, and you can't just make a decision to adopt one type of culture or another. But in this respect Apple is incredibly fortunate. By and large, it's employees really care about creativity, simplicity, and for better or worse, coolness. These are the concepts which govern Apple's design teams. These are not the central concepts in play at Intel, Dell, or Microsoft. All three are great companies in their own way, but they are driven by different values. Offhand, I would say Intel cares about Power and Moore's law. Dell is all about efficiency. Microsoft is about competitive dominance.

To a large extent corporate culture is a reflection of management, and that is certainly the case at Apple. Steve Jobs cares first about being able to show off the most awesome, high quality products. He cares about profit and stock price only to the extent that they are essential to achieve his goal of changing the world one insanely great product at a time.

Moreover, it is well-documented that under Steve Jobs, Apple has a collaborative product design process, where employees are empowered to contribute, and communication between the different types of engineers is surprisingly productive. No doubt the system has it's imperfections, but apparently, Jobs and the upper management have done a very good job of structuring the company.

The negative spin on all this is that Apple is full of a bunch of elitist snobs who create expensive, cooler-than-thou objects of art, where what might be preferred is affordable appliances. Obviously I don't see it that way (though as Mac users we all ought to be a little careful of our arrogance).

But I'm mainly writing because I think the employees at Apple don't usually get the credt they deserve for their work. What they do is damn hard - ask the engineers at Microsoft trying to get Vista up to speed! Maintaining compatibility with lots of hardware is one headache that's contributing to Microsoft's problems, but it is not the only one, nor the main one.

Good article, Vern. We do indeed live in interesting times.

BTW, have you given up on Grammarian Pro?

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goodjello wrote:
From the beginning, Apple has built a corporate culture that values innovation and attention to detail.
<snip>
To a large extent corporate culture is a reflection of management, and that is certainly the case at Apple. Steve Jobs cares first about being able to show off the most awesome, high quality products.
<snip>
Moreover, it is well-documented that under Steve Jobs, Apple has a collaborative product design process, where employees are empowered to contribute, and communication between the different types of engineers is surprisingly productive. No doubt the system has it's imperfections, but apparently, Jobs and the upper management have done a very good job of structuring the company.

Apologies in advance for my pedantry. But when you say that Microsoft 'owns ... the worldwide PC market', you surely mean 'own' in the barbaric modern sense it has acquired whereby it means roughly 'has control over'. So Microsoft 'owns and/or controls' is really redundant.

Make no mistake Microsoft's end game is to control the content coming into your house. It wants all that content wrapped in its DRM where it will dictate the licensing, price and terms.

When you buy a Microsoft product, you are making that dream become a little closer to reality. If Microsoft is partially successful with its player and service, Apple will start getting the shaft from the labels. They will start telling Apple things like you have to use Microsoft's DRM. The labels are on Microsoft's side.

Vern -
We all know that Apple managed to lose their way before Jobs return, despite having that vertical integration, so it's not just the business model, but something to do with corporate values too.

While you can easily imitate someone's products, and even their business processes, it's pretty hard to change values. It becomes like a politician looking for votes with a policy they don't really believe in.

And of course there's Steve's famous quote about Microsoft's biggest problem being that they have 'bad taste'. It's amazing when you see commentators describe the XBox as having an 'Apple-like' design. You realise that for a lot of people any element of 'design' becomes 'designer' - just as they mistook Windows for MacOS or GEMM.

As for whether Mapple - it looks like Otto the Automator has a cousin :

http://www.microsoft.com/max/

There are certainly PARTS of Microsoft that want to be Apple, and probably have the skills, but unlike Apple they are a huge corporation with conflicting interests. As Ballmer says, they have a Sony inside them and a Google (and an Oracle and an IBM). It's hard to see how a company that has to chase every market can ever start focusing like Apple has (or IBM has on business customers, to the extent of exiting the PC business altogether).


Terrin - I once read somewhere (years ago) of Microsoft's intention to make something like 1c out of every financial transaction on the web, by providing the platform. The banks were not keen on this idea. The record labels are NOT interested in getting into bed with Microsoft. For all the public threats they know they can negotiate with Apple because Apple are still a 'small' company.
They are not naive about Microsoft. While Microsoft is providing a platform to third parties they are an ally, but in a two-horse race with Apple, Apple will start looking a lot more appealing.

JulesLt: I agree with you, it is the 'whole ball of wax'that sets Apple apart from the others, which begs the question; what will happen to Apple after Jobs? Sounds like another article.

Terrin: I would like to think that Big Redmond has matured somewhat over the last few years, and is not so bent on world domination, but if I listen to the rhetoric coming out of Redmond recently, I think they've proven me wrong.

Still, whether MS likes it or not, they are not the only game in town, and that's good for everyone, even MS.

iJack: Thanks, and no, I haven't, but I think it's given up on me.

Thanks

Vern Seward

Terrin, your assertion that the record labels will dictate to Apple that they use MS DRM is absurd. Apple has over 1 billion sold and hndreds of thousands of iPods in the market. What does MS have? Failed attempts to unseat iTunes. Many in the music industry do not care for the iTunes business plan, but they grudgingly admit that it has been successful and music download sales have been increasing. There is an old saying that "it is better to deal with the devil you know" that I believe will keep the labels in Apple's camp. Music people only care about sales, and Apple is moving the music and they are getting paid, so there is no reason to change.

Hundreds of thousands of iPods?

They've sold something like 48 MILLION of the little blighters!