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James B. Stewart writes in the NYT that in 1998 Bill Gates said in an interview that he “couldn’t imagine a situation in which Apple would ever be bigger and more profitable than Microsoft" but less than two decades later, Apple, with a market capitalization more than double Microsoft’s, has won. The most successful companies need a vision, and both Apple and Microsoft have one. But according to Stewart, Apple’s vision was more radical and, as it turns out, more farsighted. Where Microsoft foresaw a computer on every person’s desk, Apple went a big step further: Its vision was a computer in every pocket. “Apple has been very visionary in creating and expanding significant new consumer electronics categories,” says Toni Sacconaghi. “Unique, disruptive innovation is really hard to do. Doing it multiple times, as Apple has, is extremely difficult."
According to Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, Microsoft seemed to have the better business for a long time. “But in the end, it didn’t create products of ethereal beauty. Steve believed you had to control every brush stroke from beginning to end. Not because he was a control freak, but because he had a passion for perfection.” Can Apple continue to live by Jobs’s disruptive creed now that the company is as successful as Microsoft once was? According to Robert Cihra it was one thing for Apple to cannibalize its iPod or Mac businesses, but quite another to risk its iPhone juggernaut. “The question investors have is, what’s the next iPhone? There’s no obvious answer. It’s almost impossible to think of anything that will create a $140 billion business out of nothing.”
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @06:01PM
Bill Gates was pushing tablet PCs in 2001.
There were several problems with the early tablets that MS never fixed.
1) single touch screens. The many touch screens we have now are pretty fng cool. They had them then but they were wildly expensive. Think 2-3k for a 'huge' 8-9 inch screen.
2) input control was clunky because of one touch and needed a stylus to work properly
3) they were basically laptops. That cost a premium. The touch screen easily added 300-500 BOM. Never mind the middle man markup.
4) Laptops of the time were THICK and clunky. Think 3-4cm. SoC was just a dream at the time.
5) ARM was no where able to run a decent OS of the time. It was basically an embedded controller chip. That left x86 or powerpc. Those things roasted thru batteries. Adding thickness and weight.
So at the time in 2001 it was pure demo tech. A few people bought them but that was mostly for people to show off how cool they were.
Very spot on about Ballmer.
The desperate desire to have the same OS running everywhere
iOS is MacOSX with a different gui. WinCE never made sense it should have been NT with a different GUI...
The other problem that MS had was the carriers themselves. They wanted to charge 15-20 dollars per megabyte. It is why verizon did not get the apple phone first. AT&T who had the arguably worse network at the time was willing to make a deal with the devil to get that phone. They created 'unlimited data'. It took VZW another 3 years to even consider not charging 15-20 dollars per megabyte. The WinCE phones were decent enough. But cost was way out of wack with them. You could get one on contract for 300-400 dollars then get raped on data every month. That and they would randomly reset to default and activesync sucked hard.