“Computer administrators spent much of August fending off a series of computer worms that infect only machines embedded with the DNA of Bill Gates. Meanwhile, Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintoshes are immune, as are Unix and Linux boxes,’ reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe.
“We’ll skip the tedious arguments over which operating system is best — although, come to think of it, have you ever heard anyone claim that Windows was the best? Never mind. The real issue isn’t superiority, it’s diversity. We live in a computing monoculture, in which nearly everybody uses the same type of software running on the same type of hardware, and consequently gets infected with the same kinds of malware,’ Bray writes.
“The great culprit, of course, is… no, not Microsoft. Instead, blame Apple — or at least the company Apple used to be. Its current leadership is doing a first-class job of introducing elegant, innovative products, and turning a profit despite holding just a sliver of the market,” writes Bray. “But in the late 1980s, the days when the desktop computer market was still young and fluid, Apple blundered in ways that ensured it would never gain mass-market popularity. At the same time, Microsoft made pretty nearly all the right moves.”
“Yes, the company cheated a bit, but less than its critics allege. For the most part, the Microsofties succeeded by working hand in hand with the chip makers at Intel Corp. to drive the cost of personal computing through the floor,” writes Bray. “Apple could have joined this merry race to the bottom — by porting its wonderful software onto Intel hardware. But it didn’t. And so, instead of half of us using Mac software and half Windows, it’s more like 3 percent Mac, 95 percent Windows, with Linux thrown in as a rounding error.”
Bray writes, “And now the bill has come due. Our stagnant software monoculture is so susceptible to worms and viruses that the more potent ones sweep around the planet in under a day. Some say that Macs and Linux boxes are inherently less susceptible. Maybe yes, maybe no. But they certainly aren’t susceptible to the same malware, and if more of us used them, they’d serve as a sort of digital firebreak, protecting us against the worst of the worms’ impacts.”
Full article here.
This is a great tack to take, Hiawatha. Next, let’s blame Sony for not making the superior Beta tape successful enough for us to have a choice to avoid the crap VHS non-quality we had to suffer through in the pre-DVD days. Any way they can think of not to blame the cause of the problem, Microsoft, they will try. How much MSFT stock do you own, Bray?
Still – in the end – buy more Macs – it works for me.
Amen, Fred. The inherent assumption in this article is that consumers don’t have a choice.
Hiawatha = Troll.
Do not click through to the full article. That’s exactly what the Globe wants us to do by publishing this drivel.
Don’t we all have better things to do? OK, we don’t. 😀
Great. Of course, blame Apple because lemmings don’t have enough brains to choose the better Mac choice over Windows dreck. Makes perfect sense.
Get a Mac. Enjoy your time on a computer for once.
There is some truth here. I hate Microsoft because they won and that is Apple’s fault to some degree. Not because they did not move to intel in the 80’s – but because they did not reduce margins in the 80’s and flood the market. The 680×0 line was the superior line back then. But Apple did what makes sense for a business – they held the margins high for maximum profits. Microsoft essentially did the same – but they were not hardware manufacturers. So R&D was their only expense, and we know that back then they were selling DOS, that they bought for $50,00 – so they could have great profits selling to all the many harware manufacturers willing to undercut Apple (and more importantly IBM). Other than Compaq – they all died out – but Microsoft climbed their dead body to the top.
Had Apple reduced their gross margins to 28% when they were the only GUI game in town, we would all be using Macs now. But as it stands, I have to use Windows at work and my Mac at home.
Sure I hate Microsoft, but I do blame Apple. I just hope they can capitalize on the mass discontent in the windows world to gain market share.
To a certain extent, he’s right. Not about running on Intel and not about making cheap (as in crap) machines. I do think that in those days macs were just too expensive. Now the problem of excessive prices sticks. People still think macs expensive, but they’re not. They’re just not cheap (crap). Apple could make cheaper machines, bu only by making them with crap low grade components, which I certainly do not want.
I do see ads in the newspapers with 2.4 or 2.8 GHz wintel machines, including monitor, printer, scanner etc for a third of the price of my 2x2GHz G5 (no I don’t have it yet, but it’s on order). I check the specs and it kind of look like good value, makes me hesitate and wonder for a moment about my decision to spend three times as much, but they’re surface specs. 80gig hard drive is next to useless if it’s 5,400 rpm. 64MB graphics means nothing if it’s on the motherboard using system RAM.
oops that was $50,000 not $50.00 for DOS – I gues I was think of the value of DOS not the actual price Microsoft gave the college kid for his CP/M clone.
And it’s okay to only cheat “a little bit”? And by cheating “less than its critics allege” that makes it just fine to go ahead and rip off someone else’s hard work and pass it off as your own? Just so I’ve got this straight – stealing is only stealing if it’s not going to be worth billions of dollars someday. Gee, thanks for the clue. Now I know where this country’s notions of “right” and “wrong” are headed.
How utterly assinine can this writer be? This is all just total drivel. And flawed logic. And a sad commentary on the state of commentary these days.
I do also agree with Fred & Michael.
Should we also blame Chevrolet for not lowering the price of Corvette to make it the dominant car in the market?
Should we blame TV producers for the insanely high number of bad reality shows on television? Don’t viewers have the option of watching the History Channel or Discovery instead even though they may have to pay an extra few bucks for it?
Point is, people have a choice. The decisions Apple made were — as they felt — in the company’s best interest. And I think they were. If Apple made the moves most think they should have, they would likely be just another ho-hum computer/software maker (if they even lasted this long) with one of a zillion x86 OS’s that much of the world doesn’t give two craps about.
The author does have one thing right — the strength will be in diversity. I figure there will ultimately be a few dominant OS’s, but it’ll take time.
Flawed argument at best. More like propaganda if you ask me. Cheating a little? Ummm, since when is cheating a little ever really tolerated? Also, blaming Apple masks the fact that Microsoft software is practically a piece of swiss cheese in terms of security.
And oh, wasn’t it M$ who copied Apple’s idea of a GUI interface? Wow, geee, I think we forgot something there.
Finally, Boston is a second rate town and this reporter does a wonderful job representing a so-so newspaper.
Hiawatha wrote a great article and history lesson here. And he is mostly right. I think its a clever and creative way to expalin the mess we are all in. He is also a very strong Apple advocate. Anyone that doesn’t get the tad of sarcasm should get a life.
macster, we get the sarcasm, but the excusing MS crap is BS.
OK, so following the writers logic here abit, should mean that Apple is now in the ascendant by being the superior product and virtus free and Microsoft are about to blow their 95% market share because they wont port Windows to RISC?
Microsoft has ported windows to RISC, both the Alpha Chip and the PowerPC chip. If either had any competitive marketshare today, they could easily do it again.
Chomper wrote:
“Boston is a second rate town…”
Where the hell were you educated??? Probably some 14yr old who couldn’t get into Harvard or M.I.T. (or the Sloan Management school, etc…)
Idiot.
Damn, Damn, Double-Damn! I clicked through, allowing myself to perpetuate this sort of willy-nilly-facts-are-fun-to-skew journalism. It was a fun read though. fun!
The article make a true statement based on a flawed diagnoses.
The truth: Apple blew it’s opertunity to dominate the market.
The falsehood: It was due in any way to Apple’s design
This was a marketing issue, and apple chose to demand higher prices for superior products – what a good tech company at the time should have done.
Microsoft facilitated the development of a commodity computer industry – where you simply buy based on price, not quality. When Macs were selling at twice the price as their DOS counterpoints, people bought in. Apple was getting 80%+ in gross margins when the PC industry was sinking close to single digits. They currently get 27-28% margins – If they had chosen to do that in 1988, nearly everyone would have paid a 20% premium for Mac OS. But they would have made less money back then. Windows won because DOS won – they were the only GUI that would run on the 75% of the machines that were in existance at the time, but in the 80’s Apple had 23% of the market at twice the price, they could have gone over fifty if they had lowered the prices then. They did not see that Microsoft was altering the market by providing only the OS. IBM had messed up by producing a very simple – easily cloned computer and not owning the OS that made it work. They were creating OS/2 to solve that – but Microsoft crossed them. If they haddn’t, then it might have been a better outcome.
Microsoft was the bad guy, but Apple could have difused it early if they had read the writing on the wall. If I had been running Apple I proably would have done no better.
macster, I got the sarcasm in Bray’s article. The problem is that many, many readers of his article will not take it as sarcasm. Many, many of his readers will take this as one more swipe against Apple and believe: “Apple screwed up years ago and now I’m paying for it because MS being dominant is Apple’s fault. I’m getting all these viruses because Apple screwed up. Damn, I hate Apple even more now.”
As a person who wrote tech editorials for the Chicago Tribune a few years back, I can speak from experience that many, many readers (maybe even most) just don’t get it when you use sarcasm (or say something as an outright, outlandish joke).
The one statement you made of “He is also a very strong Apple advocate.” is either very stong sarcasm, an outlandish joke, or just plane wrong. I have followed Bray’s writings on and off for several years (since the dark age of Macs), and he has never been a strong advocate of Macs. Occasionally he does acknowledge Macs have some advantages. However, Bray a strong Mac advocate? Never happen.
Very few if any people will read this article to mean that they are getting viruses because Apple screwed up. Come on people. He’s saying that if Apple had acted differently, the shit in a box that is Windows wouldn’t be as prevalent. That’s not the same as saying it’s Apple’s fault Windows has viruses. And most of the people who read this article will clearly understand that.
Is it not interesting to see that reality is almost ignored in the process of perception. And that perception creates its own reality, indeed that what we call “reality”?
Fact is, at last the whole world is complaining about Microsoft software (not just OS, mind you) because of the virii and worms of last months. It has happened before (continuously to be sure); – but now it seems like a majority of people are not taking it anymore (Mac-people never did).
Experts tell us that this is possible because of the enormous security flaws of MS-software. MS can’t deny (because Billy himself declared security priority no. 1 last year, so in essence he admitted that MS-products have this huge problem) and in fact: they don’t.
These are reality facts. Perception comes into play when people are going to try to direct the attention (and attention is nothing more than the focus of perception) away by writing things, most of them without knowledge or any study, that has nothing to do with it. What the F*ck has Apple, Linux etc. to do with the security flaws of MS? Or the problems of MS-users? Perception makes them think we can compare, relate or whatever when in fact that’s not the issue (like I said: the security flaws of MS are NOT only in the OS; – just check the vulnerable elements: OS, Office, Explorer, Outlook, Media Player etc).
Point is: MS has a BIG problem. Apple, Linux etc don’t. MS should take the responsibility that 95% of the world is using their products. One cannot, never, make a 100% secure system. We don’t ask for that. But they know that a marketshare like that creates unwanted attention and should put all their efforts in protecting their users.
I’m not a seer, but I see that MS is going down slowly because the law of economics is not the only law in play anymore. Unless they recover from their sweet dreams and start working. In the meantime, Apple, Linux etc are eating the dying monopolistic corps while it’s still alive.
By the way, I use Windows and Mac. I’m a professional and have an hourly rate. Believe me: when I use Windows intensely, I must reinstall my whole system every 2 months! (that’s a day wasted! That’s a lot of $!) or it will start to crash or crawl. I’m quit secure from the attacks, because I’m not ignorant about MS-products and ‘ve taken my measures on my Wintel-box. But no reason to explain why I prefer OsX.
What ever excuses you want to make for M$, who ever you blame besides M$ for the problems that exist with windows the fact remains M$ sucks big times. Not even Bray’s twisted logic can erase that fact. His use of the 3% stat marks him as just another lazy journalist Idiot whose writing belongs on the bottom of the litter box.
I would like to believe what rageous says is true — that most people will read the sarcasm in Bray’s article properly and put the blame squarely where it belongs. However, my experience as a columnist for a while does not support this. I wrote one article laced with sarcasm (but not heavily so) and my editor warned me that most people won’t get it but instead read it word for word and take it by the straight denotations of the words. I convinced him to publish it anyway (deadlines and all that) and quickly found out he was right. People don’t understand sarcasm and tongue in cheek in most editorials. Most of my reply emails to readers were explanations that I meant something 100% different from what they thought I meant. Thus, based upon personal experience, I’m confident a large percentage of Bray’s readers will not get the sarcasm in the article.
solipsys:
What’s all this psyco-bable about!
j/k!
Seriously one of the best comments I’ve ever read here. You understand what most connot. That’s refreshing! Cudos.
For once I agree with the premise.
Apple did F*CK up bad in the early days with high prices and arrogance which gave MS the chance to leapfrog them, rip-off their GUI and mouse and begin the long road to mediocrity that 95% of the computer users on the planet now consider the status-quo.
I have used a Mac for most of my professional life as a graphic designer, but it does pain me to think of how much more productive the world could have been if only Apple hadn’t been so greedy in the early days and simply waited to dominate the market 20 years later.
Frank:
I too have written articles before. I did so for my local newspaper until two years ago. My personality is highly sarcastic and I was given the opportunity to apply that to my articles. And I too received many calls from people who didn’t understand the sarcastic tone to my articles.
However, I also learned that the vast majority of people who call in about an article are those who don’t get it or don’t agree with it. That is to say those people who did actually get it rarely call in. So the fact you heard negative comments does not accurately reflect the overall understanding readers have toward a published piece.
“Sure, they cheated a little”
This statement by this article’s author shows his lack of integrity and moral wit.
Do people like him really make money as writers?