“Apple is very good at maintaining degrees of freedom. Flexibility, problem solving, and fast responses are the same virtues that one needs in war in order to win. Of course, these aren’t the only virtues. Good communication, intelligence gathering, and efficient logistics are also required,” John Martellaro writes for The Mac Observer.

“Thinking about Apple, I recall of the degrees of freedom they have maintained for themselves as a company so that they can engage in discovery. Steve Jobs sees the computer industry as everyone else does, but thinks thoughts that no one else has thought. It’s not an engineering approach to problem solving. (That’s left to the real engineers on the Apple campus.) Steve does the grand scale problem solving,” Martellaro writes.

Martellaro writes, When an organization as a whole digs in and fights the war against Internet assailants with Windows, there is a certain amount of inflexible thinking. ‘Microsoft supplies all the business software we need, our MSCE certified people are not familiar with Apple products, we can’t afford distractions from the war, and so keep those patches coming so we can make our system incrementally better and better!’

“Worse, Microsoft makes you pay a heavy financial penalty if you even think about changing the game. Your loss of flexibility maintains their cash flow and, conveniently, makes you feel that you’re accomplishing something,” Martellaro writes.

Martellaro writes, “As we know, there is no light at the end of this tunnel. Microsoft never made the big commitment [with Windows Vista], never bit the bullet like Apple did in the transition from Classic/legacy Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X. Microsoft, because they had too many constraints, too few degrees of freedom, too many business commitments and concessions, too much technology locked up in the old APIs and kernel design, never made that leap. And so Vista is basically Microsoft’s version of Mac OS 9.3. Pretty snazzy. Cool graphics. Slightly better security. But basically deficient, built on a poor foundation, and not able to confidently face the war against Internet assailants with a new footing and a new technology.”

Martellaro writes, “In summary, Apple’s focus on degrees of freedom, inspired problem solving, and a modern approach to OS security has allowed them to win on multiple fronts. They provide their customers with the technologies they need to win their own wars. Conversely, those who engage in the eternal, incremental, war-patch mentality will find themselves hard-pressed to win any endeavor, any war.”

Much more explanation and detail in the full article here.

[John Martellaro is a senior scientist and author. A former U.S. Air Force officer,he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple Computer. During his five years at Apple, he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager for science and technology, Federal Account Executive, and High Performance Computing Manager. His interests include alpine skiing, SciFi, astronomy, and Perl. John lives in Denver, Colorado.]

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