“For the last 20 years Apple has been leading the charge in making computing easier for mere mortals. Microsoft has always strived to attain the kind of elevated status Apple has for its user experience and emotional attachment, but has consistently fallen short. Some of the compelling user interface features found in Mac OS X, such as the underlying graphics foundation, won’t be available in Windows until Longhorn ships in the second half of this decade,” Dan Farber writes for ZDNet.
“Nonetheless, Microsoft’s lagging behind Apple in some areas of user interface design and experience hasn’t adversely impacted Windows dominance. You can conclude that the Windows user experience is ‘good enough’ for 90 percent of computer users,” Farber writes. “But, the stakes are getting higher as digital convergence becomes more of a reality. The gap between personal and professional technology is closing, and the difference between a PC and a TV, set-top box, and phone is narrowing.”
Farber writes, “Microsoft aspires to become more emotionally connected to users. [Like the way] Starbucks makes coffee drinking a compelling experience and has a brand allegiance that garners premium pricing. The coffee chain is growing at about three and half new stores opening per day… You can imagine Microsoft boardroom discussions about what the company needs to create a brand and a user experience that elicits positive feelings and emotion. Microsoft has the time, talent and money to push Windows into those environments, but becoming relevant to people on a personal level that evokes emotion will continue to challenge the company’s brain trust. Right now, Microsoft is branded as the company that has virus- and worm-infected code. Until that problem is resolved, Microsoft will have a hard time convincing the masses that it has mastered the fundamentals.”
Full article here.
..and they’re barely catching on to the superiority of our experience. oh well, better late then never
Microsoft needs to go away
Microsoft tries too hard to please everyone. Software that does everything almost never does anything really well. Does anyone use all the features of Office? I think you could even call MS software schizophrenic.
I believe Apple’s software is aimed at a fairly specific goal. Each Apple program has one goal. That goal is to make the program do its purpose with the best usability possible. If that means cutting the multipage word processor from Final Cut Pro, so be it.
I guess they are missing the whole part where people hate loud, sweaty, ape like CEO’s and disgusting monopolistic practices that hurt the consumer.
I have an emotional connection with Microsoft. It’s probably not the emotion they want however.
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Gates and his boys can talk all they want…but it’s just talk, they have never gotten IT and never will. And they don’t even copy well.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Where’s the Mac news?
Yeah, they’re tryin’ hard alright. Read what happened to Longhorn today when they were demoing it at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WINHEC):
“In a side-by-side demonstration comparing an early version of Longhorn and Windows XP, Allchin showed two PCs with the current and newer operating system displaying memory-intensive graphics.
The Longhorn machine, although slightly better than the Windows XP at displaying graphics-heavy Windows, failed to respond when Allchin also tried to bring up another graphics-intensive application, the popular first person shooter game Quake. Allchin said that the computer, which had worked earlier, was unusually slow to respond.”
“It Worked Earlier” — Is this the new MS Longhorn catch phrase?
Full article here: http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/04/technology/microsoft.reut/index.htm
Enjoy,
Chris
This is like a bunch of computer geeks sitting in a room trying to reproduce art. They have all the brains and (computing) resources in the world, but it just doesn’t click.
Microsoft does well at what it does well; offering software that clears the hurdle for the unwashed. Unfortunately, the unwashed seem to represent 95% of those who buy computers (including mass corporate purchases).
Face it, while the Mac is great at things MS will never match, in many cases it just doesn’t matter. God help us all if MS ever figures it out. But they can’t because they are facing certain systemic problems:
1. Their market share makes them “non-nimble” to the point that they cannot dump the legacy code that makes Windows the garbage heap that it is;
2. A monolithic organization cannot obtain the culture that is necessary to sustain the creativity that Apple does;
3. Since their hardware is such an open mess of loose standards, they cannot control the user experience like Apple can (and because of #1, they cannot change this).
Apple makes great products but they will never have a significant market share until they make some junk boxes that will appeal to the WalMart crowd. Here’s hoping Steve is not aspiring to such lows.
Dude
I live in Seattle I’ll go over to bill gates’ house and egg it.
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Its 2050 & my granddaughter walks in proudly displaying the latest must-have cool thing from Microsoft. She asks “how come you hate the cool stuff from Microsoft Grandma.”
i wake-up in a cold sweat shuddering OMG NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!
One of the fundamental differences in the ideology of Microsoft and Apple is the following. Microsoft is having a bunch of geeks and are trying to achieve elegance. Apple has people who are musicians, artists, etc. who also happen to be good in programming! There’s a huge difference in these two ideologies.
In my opinion, Programming can be learnt, elegance/artistic are qualities that you must be born with.
There’s another major difference between Apple and MS. Apple actually cares about making the world a better place while MS only cares about controlling EVERYTHING and making sure they suck up ALL the money.
microsuck is teh sux0rs…
moo.
Comment to: beg
“disgusting monopolistic practices that hurt the consumer”
Ah, you must be talking about Apple, right? How many Apple clones have you seen lately? Oh, right. None. You can have MY Apple, if you want it. It’s a nice shiny APple II+. Too bad Apple just dropped the whole line one day.
Did it hurt? Well, if losing a $4000 investment hurts, then I guess I was hurt.
to “me”: i wouldn’t refer to apple’s actions as “monopolistic,” as: a). they definitely do not have anything resembling a monopoly that would lead to such practices in today’s market and b). their actions toward preventing clones are a wise choice, as they have little market share as it is, allowing a clone market would drain from their already meager sales..
AND let’s not forget that the past is gone, and incidents that happened so long ago cannot effectively reflect the current situation (or lack thereof) in the company.. I recall that the Nazis did some rather nasty stuff during the holocaust, but that does not effectively represent the beliefs of their descendants..
C’mon guys and gals! we need microsoft, especially the way it is now.. their relative overall lack of quality allows us to feel superior, and.. considering that man has a natural instinct to bring himself up to place himself above others, who doesn’t love a good dose of non-harmful superior feeling?
Microsoft has lowered consumer expectation of the majority but for some it has done exactly the opposite. For them MS represent what an OS should NOT be and what exactly to avoid: makes them to look for better stuff and precisely so.
Help me, Bill-ze-bubb!
Help me feel good about this operating system you sold me. Sure, my idiot friends ridiculed me when one of them caught me surfing store.apple.com. But I need something more in this relationship besides dysfunction and fear.
I thought this shiny Dell was something special when I saw it online. But I feel so empty inside. And I’m afraid if I add something, it’ll break like a house of cards falling. So I’m supposed to buy a new one, right? Yeah, that’s it. I’ll buy a new one, now. And then get short-horn (shoe-horn?) next year and all the virus updates in between!
Hmmm. Intel or AMD. What should I decide?
Thank you, bill-ze-bubb for all your eternal glory!
me wrote: Ah, you must be talking about Apple, right? How many Apple clones have you seen lately? Oh, right. None</>
How many Windows clones have you seen?
Have you ever considered what might have happened if Microsoft had approached Apple to license the Mac OS before they reverse-engineered it sans gestalt? The whole point of the article is that since the beginning, Windows has never been more than the sum of it’s parts.
(paraphrasing the MS lawyers, so long ago:) But your honor, the Mac has a trash can, and it’s in the lower-right hand corner. But Windows has a recycle bin! And it’s way over here on the left!”
You can send that Apple II+ to me. I gave mine to school children 20 years ago after I got my first Mac! You don’t by chance also have a copy of Ultima II, do you?
Ever noticed how windoze users will talk about how much they hate Macintosh but will never talk about how much they love windows? That is the opposite of what you see in the Mac User world.
Micro$oft are a necessary evil. We don’t want everyone using OS X, I like feeling superior, especially when I type ‘uptime’ in the terminal and show my Pee Cee friends. That always grates them
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Sara: You are too funny.
Y argue which 1 is better. mac was perfectly good befor mac os X and then apple brought out mac os x making less and less programes compatible with 9.
Both operating systems do what they need to do and that is running programes, why care about how deos it look like if when you doing work you dont’t care what it looks like you just want it to do what you need it to, which is running programes.
artiom:
You’re such a troll…clearly not a mac owner. Design helps function.
artiom: what about getting slightly deeper than eye-candy. Granted, on XP what else would you focus if not eye-candy compared to NT or 2000.
But we are on OS X for other reasons.
Sasser any one? spyware, adware, lack of reliability, etc.
Less programs wrt OS 9 like the vast universe of Unix programs now available? Most – if not all – important OS 9 programs are now native OS X, and for the little remnants you can still run them under Classic.
OS 9 is dead. OS X is the best thing ever Apple had done under Jobs, maybe in par with exclusive partnership with IBM.
Other good news from WinHEC:
Bill Gates can officially confirm that the floppy disk is dead!
Which makes me wonder what I’ve been doing since 1997 and my Lombard PowerBook.
Emotional bonding is all good and well. But it does not work, it seems to me, for computer users. It’s still a M$ world simply because the majority of computer users don’t care to give their computer a name or stroke it or admire its’ looks. They need to get email, do basic word-processing, spreadsheets, etc. A PC does these things. The article may make us Mac users feel good about ourselves, but we are in the minority – and always will be. Folks the war was over a long, long time ago. Some battles are going to be won from time to time, but in the end the 5% or less is not going to get any bigger. As a matter of fact, Apple itself has been inconsistent in its’ objectives. Two years ago they said they wanted to double market share. Now they say, they don’t care about it. (Covering their asses because they didn’t achieve that objective).
2 cents from ][+ wrote: Have you ever considered what might have happened if Microsoft had approached Apple to license the Mac OS before they reverse-engineered it sans gestalt?
Er, they did. And Apple knocked them back. Microsoft made the second-biggest mistake in computer history, and Apple made the biggest.
I disagree! The operative words here are “emotional attachment.” With M$ having 90% of the marketshare they’ve done an excellent job of keeping users over time. Although not the brightest users, they’re not connected to M$ emotionally at all. Come to think of it, they are exactly like those mindless drones in the 1984 Macintosh ad. So, while Jobs captured the minds of the few that escaped the drudgery, Gates has captured the rest of the world and enslaved them to use his garbage OS.
The war isn’t over if 90% of the people don’t really care what kind of computer they use. Who’s to say that m$ will be able to hold on to their users when Longhorn comes out and people have to pony up twice as much money just to get a new os. Longhorn is going to take longer to catch on than any previous operating system they’ve produced. That’s a lot of opportunity for m$ to lose users. Especially if m$ dumps support for previous systems. People can move over to Linux without buying new hardware. Once a strong Linux desktop takes off, it’ll be days or weeks before there’s a “Move2Linux” software out there that makes the move simple. That may not be beneficial for Apple, but m$ certainly hasn’t won the war yet.
Never fsckin’ happen
Actually the only reason that Microsoft has the marketshare that it has is the simple fact of market visibility and mere ignorance of consumers overall. I was over at my Dad’s house over the weekend. He bought a Dell a couple of years ago and now the thing is doing what a lot of Windows machines do; weird stuff. His complaints were that the system was mysteriously slow, it would have windows popup from time to time and have little apps and utilities crash at startup and shutdown. So I meddled with the machine for about an hour cleaning up what I could to at least make his computing life somewhat sensible again.
Here’s the other problem; I told dad that he needed to stay away from Internet Explorer because of all the adware, spyware and other junk the infiltrate his system. Well for one, he didn’t know what Internet Explorer was, he actually would open an email with a url attached (through Outlook) to access the web. So I explained to him that Mozilla would lessen some of his grief and of course he was worried he wouldn’t be able to surf his usual sites and/or how would it affect Yahoo (because he thought Yahoo was an actual application, not Internet Explorer). So I had to educate him on what a web browser is and its function. I Then went on to install Mozilla and set it as his default web browser.
To make a long story short; the computer illiterate world is getting dumber by the day and this only helps the tyrant Microsoft in getting more and more of hard earned dollars from folks who have no idea of what they’re doing. Our school systems need to educate people beyond just using Microsoft only products, we need to teach them what an email client is, what a web browser is, what an office suite is, etc…
Microsoft profits from the dumb and dumber crowd!
DudeMac, did you set his start page at store.apple.com?
…”DudeMac, did you set his start page at store.apple.com?”…
No, it had to remain Yahoo.com.
But I’m working on him though
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“Microsoft tries too hard to please everyone. Software that does everything almost never does anything really well. “ – escaport
I disagree. MS does not give a damn if you are pleased or not. It’s your pocket they are interested in, not you. All these extra features are designed to get you to pay up for an upgrade. Once a while, they introduce incompatibilities just to make you upgrade. That doesn’t happen if MS tries to please everyone, does it?
“Ah, you must be talking about Apple, right? How many Apple clones have you seen lately? Oh, right. None. You can have MY Apple, if you want it. It’s a nice shiny APple II+. Too bad Apple just dropped the whole line one day.
Did it hurt? Well, if losing a $4000 investment hurts, then I guess I was hurt.” – me
Ah, how many punch card readers have you seen lately? Damn, the whole industry dropped that line one day. Did it hurt? We lost thousands of dollar investment with the punch card reader and those cards… that hurt.
*sigh*
If you buy a $4000 computer and expect that it lasts forever, you are stupid. If you buy a $4000 computer for your business and get nothing back at all, you should have kept your S4000 and stayed away from business.
If any non computer company brought out a product that is as consumer unfreindly as Windows, the governments of the world would be howling and the product subject to massive recalls. Windows is vulnerable and its market share is a “clear and present danger” to the economies and financiel systems of the world. Where are the howls demanding a recall of the software?
RECALL WINDOWS NOW.
I have read about this “emotional” bonding and how Mac users love their machines while Window users are non committal or hate Windows. That is why Windows is so popular. The Western world lives, thrives and promotes hate. Cripes even the head of the US said he was a “war president”.
Windows is an act of war, Macs are an act of love. Being at war for about 43% of US history shows where the emphasis is based. Its a war like economy and society.
1. iPod “killer”
2. Why does a US citizen ask where you are from? So that they can insult your country. Been a while since I have heard a US citizen say something good about a foreign country.
3. War war war. MS makes the war go on.
Enjoy it while you can.
How aboout an advertizing play on Starbucks? Something along the lines of “A latte a day keeps the viruses away.” The idea would be that for the cost of a grande or two you could buy an Apple Macintosh and largely put aside your worries about viruses, works, etc. (and have more fun to boot with iLife).
Microsoft doesn’t have any heart in thier products…they care just about the dollar. Apple stays profitable and thier products have thought and heart going into them
Another ego booster for the Mac Minions…Do you need butter to get through that door?
Aw by the way some one sad that I’m not an apple user, well at the moment I’ve got a dula G4 on my desk and i dont belive thats its running anything but an os X
How can you be attached to a buggy piece of shit?
artiom, learn some proper English (not Engrish) before you get onto the internet and fire away – or if you really use OS X then you should know how to do system-wide spell check… I can smell someone’s pants on fire.
no Windows and Office do not need to be connected. Split up the company and I’ll be fine.. that’s the point. Make windows separate from their other applications