Cringely: Apple vs. Microsoft, which company will remake the entertainment business?

21 years ago

“Even the most powerful industrialists with the biggest bets on a particular version of the future can at most influence where things are going. We saw Bill Gates do that recently when he predicted the ultimate demise of the iPod at the hands of mobile phones. Because we’ll eventually all carry phones, Bill argued, and because smarter and smarter phones will do more than just make phone calls, we’ll have no need for an iPod. That’s the impeccable logic of a man who makes mobile phone software and has no horse in the portable music player race. He’s trying to influence the future, not predict it. That’s a subtle difference, I’ll grant you, but it is a difference. And if you’ll look at Bill’s record for predicting the future, it is mainly about influencing, and therefore, hasn’t been very accurate. Mine is better,” Robert X. Cringely writes for PBS.

“It is one thing for a Microsoft, with 95 percent market share (and then some), to try and influence the future, but very much another thing for an Apple, with around two percent. But maybe market share isn’t all that important. I know that Steve Jobs is thinking in terms of his place in history, and he isn’t even remotely satisfied with the current story. Bill Gates once told me that Steve could never win, but Steve doesn’t know that, which is a decided advantage. Apple’s story is an example of seeding technology and having to wait to harvest. IPods help, of course, but there are still 20 times as many personal computers as iPods, so iPod is only part of the story. The bigger part is Apple’s QuickTime, which they’ll be happy to tell you is installed in more than 400 million devices, of which 98 percent are NOT made by Apple,” Cringely writes.

“Microsoft’s vision of the future inevitably has at its center a device that costs at least $250 and averages closer to $500. Apple, as a software-centric maker of consumer electronic devices, can set its device price much lower, say around $125. That’s a market intrinsically four times the size of the one envisioned by Microsoft. We saw this in last week’s column, where it became clear that the endpoint of Apple’s video strategy isn’t a Mac or a PC at all, but a hardware decoder device the size of a pack of cards. That’s a much easier sell, but it has to be backed up with Internet services to make it work,” Cringely writes.

“These Internet services, based on QuickTime, are what Apple has spent so many years building and seeding in the marketplace. Apple doesn’t need to increase Macintosh market share to be successful in the movie download business. Nor do they require a large end-user installed base to be a dominant player in back-end services. Apple’s goal is to remake the entertainment business and so is Microsoft’s, yet in the entertainment industry, where it counts, Apple’s presence is as great or greater than Microsoft’s. This didn’t happen by chance, but is a clear result of Steve Jobs’ attempt to create the future in his own image,” Cringely writes. “Only time will tell if it works.”

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