Re: Apple, IBM and PCs (Re: Apple, Jobs, and the irony of it)

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Rubywand wrote:

>Gabriel Morales writes ...(responding to supertimer >> >):

<snip response that I'm largely in agreement with>

>> > Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were cut from the same cloth.
>> 
>> I don't fully agree.
> ....
>
>     Me neither. One seems to know what he's doing and one doesn't.

I think it's a little more complicated than that.  ;-)

Maybe it's more like Jobs is leading a rag-tag band of rebels, while
Gates is leading an army of armies of tens of thousands of hardware
and software manufacturers and a billion users.

Apple can "turn its users on a dime" with sufficiently charismatic
speeches, while steering the wintel axis is like piloting an aircraft
carrier.

While many companies contribute ideas to the PC world, in the
final analysis, the selection and pacing of innovations is set by
an interaction between:  1) Microsoft, waving the baton, 2) dozens
of lead manufacturers (hardware and software) investing and
taking the market risk, and 3) hundreds of millions of users
deciding when and how much to change.

In the Apple world, Apple totally controls the hardware environment,
the software houses can only decide to ante up or fold, and the
users can only decide to move with the crowd or drop out (maybe
to a PC).

Given the traditionally clubby attitude of Mac users (who often
sound like an oppressed minority), they are much easier to
"move along" than the more pragmatic PC hoards.

But they all do eventually move along...as the technology improves
and their aspirations grow.  (Ultimately, only hobbyists are resistant
to the relentless march of Moore's "law".)

>> SuperTimer wrote:
>> 
>> > My bet is still on evolution.  Jobs thought the
>> > same thing when he drew the line between
>> > the Apple II and the Mac and the result was
>> > Apple losing much of its existing user base
>> > (we went to the PC).
>> 
>> > In contrast, the PC has evolved rather than
>> > breaking from the past and its user base
>> > has grown tremendously. 
> ....
>> 
>> Evolution is not bad. It may even be difficult to differentiate
>> "evolution" from "revolution" sometimes. But, I think too many
>> compromises have been made on the PC side. "Competition" of cloners
>> who only copy motherboard and chip designs may have actually slowed
>> progress.

Talk of evolution and revolution always reminds me of something
computer science guru Brian Randell said many years ago (probably
paraphrasing someone else):  "A philosophy of evolution instead of
revolution is actually a philosophy of fewer but bloodier revolutions."
Put another way--brace yourself for the "big one"!

What the next "big one" will be is anyone's guess...  A lot of folks
are betting on a convergence of computing and consumer electronics.
The CE folks figure that the computer's complexity will hand the
market to them on a platter, while the computer folks think that
the computer's versatility will cause specialized CE markets to
implode to the computer's advantage.  Neither scenario is easy
to believe, so maybe they're both wrong.  ;-)

I recall making the projection in 1994 that a full-bore HDTV with
all the processing power you could use would, by 2005, cost
less than $200 and plug onto the back of a big, beautiful display--
which would cost about $1000.  So by then, the display will so
dominate the cost of a computer that it will be hard to find the
computer's cost in there!  And a decade later, the computer will
have come down by a factor of 10 for 10 times more computing,
and the display will have dropped only a factor of 2-3 (or not at
all if it fills a wall by then)--even more dominant in the cost equation.
(So, clearly, the computer does not actually "plug onto" the
display, but is simply built into it.)

>> It all comes down to who has the cheapest prices. This type of market
>> leaves very little room for major innovation, which is why you end up
>> with a multitude of copy-cat cloners, like Dell, and would-be
>> innovators move on or die off. It takes a lot of money, dedication and
>> resources to do true R&D. Meanwhile your competitor has cheaper
>> systems.

Yep--if you can't create perceived customer value, your innovation
is, quite literally, worthless.

>     That era could be drawing to a close. The competition for speed among the
>chip makers is going to force increased integration if only because the traces
>on circuit boards introduce excessive delays. At the least, main memory and
>graphics will need to be combined in a single module with the main processor
>
>     The closer hardware gets to being a relatively simple, low cost black
box,
>the easier it will be to produce a variety of new machines.

And those machines will differ from each other primarily in the shape
and color of their cabinets--now _that's_ real innovation.  ;-)

No worries--as the computer and its peripherals become commoditized,
there will always be high-margin opportunities--think Monster cables!

Right now I think my LCD display would be much prettier if I had a big
oxygen-free copper, litz wire digital video cable with colorful gold-plated
connectors as big as my fist...yeah, that's the ticket--and innovative as
hell.  ;-)

(Doesn't it make you crazy that most people fall for this junk?  Don't
you wish that the educational system could actually educate people?)

-michael

Check out amazing quality sound for 8-bit Apples on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/