“It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry,” Steven Levy reports for Wired. “At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. ‘I don’t think about that,’ he said. ‘When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.’”
Levy reports, “Here’s what’s amazing about the Mac as it turns 25, a number that in computer years is just about a googolplex: It can look forward. The Mac’s original competition—the green-phosphorus-screened stuff made by RadioShack, DEC, and then-big kahuna IBM—now inhabit landfills, both physically and psychically. Yet the Macintosh is not only thriving, it’s doing better than at any time in its history. Much of the attention directed at Apple over the past few years has focused on new products like the iPod and the iPhone. Click wheels and touchscreens have distracted us from the news that the Mac market share has quietly crept into double digits. That’s up from barely 3 percent in 1997, just before the prodigal CEO returned to the fold after a 12-year exile. Any way you cut it, the Mac is on the rise while Windows is waning.”
“Those original Mac rebels (including their leader) are now in their fifties, but the Mac itself has managed to avoid middle-age wrinkles and creaky joints,” Levy reports. “Forever young, it’s associated more with Millennials than geezers, even though many Millennials weren’t even born when that famous first commercial—Ridley Scott’s ’1984′ spot—ran during Super Bowl XVIII.”
Levy reports, “That generational perception is why Apple’s long-running PC-versus-Mac ad campaign, with the nebbishy John Hodgman portraying the PC, has deeply unhinged Microsoft despite the company’s dominant market share. When I mentioned the ads to Bill Gates at the January 2007 Vista launch, he went Vesuvius on me. ‘I don’t know why they’re acting superior,’ he said. ‘I don’t even get it. I mean, do you get it? What are they trying to say? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it!’ But that’s not what the public thinks, and the sales figures prove it. Microsoft is now so rattled by Apple’s advertising that it’s running a $300 million counterpunch. The whole point of the ‘I’m a PC’ campaign is to assure customers that they aren’t pathetic losers.”
Full article, with a nice “25 Years of Mac” timeline image, here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Bill Gates hasn’t figured it out by now, he’ll never get it.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader "Chuckles the Microsoft CEO" for the heads up.]
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