“Should Microsoft fear Apple’s Macintosh? Maybe not quaking-in-your-boots scared, mind you, but Redmond should certainly be concerned,” Scot Finnie writes for Computerworld.
“I’ll tell you why. Apple has gotten smarter about how it competes with Microsoft. Clearly the underdog, Apple has to make moves that can be seen as both supportive of the Windows marketplace and good for its Mac customers at the same time,” Finnie writes.
Finnie writes, “The switch to Intel was just such a chess move. Intel hardware makes it easier for Microsoft to create apps for the Mac. It solves a performance problem Apple had. It creates a better experience for Intel-Mac owners because it better supports Windows applications. The CPU architecture also puts Mac and Windows hardware on an easy-to-understand, level playing field. Perhaps most significantly, though, all these advantages appeal to potentially millions of Mac-curious Windows users because it makes the Mac more familiar.”
“For the first time in its 23-year history, the Mac is finally able to move fluidly into and out of the world of Microsoft Windows and its applications — both in the workplace and at home. Microsoft’s own Office suite plays a big role in that. Microsoft’s commitment to Office 2008 for the Mac lends additional support,” Finnie writes.
“OK, so full disclosure: I am a recent Mac convert. But before you chalk me up as an apple-eyed Mac fanboy, I’m not your average Windows-to-Mac switcher. No one knows better than me (well, maybe Microsoft’s accountants) how firm a grip on the computer industry Microsoft has. As a Windows reviewer since almost the beginning of Windows (my first tests were of Windows 2.11), I have no illusions about Microsoft’s market lock,” Finnie writes.
“If the Mac or any other desktop OS were to truly put a dent in Microsoft’s desktop market share, it would take 15 years for Windows to ‘die.’ And that’s assuming Microsoft stood still and did nothing. In other words, it ain’t gonna happen. I also don’t hate Microsoft. I’m not a fanatic. I’m just someone who recognizes a good thing when he sees it. I undertook a simple three-month trial of the Mac last autumn, with no intention of sticking around, and realized four months later that I wasn’t going back,” Finnie writes. “But here’s the kicker: I am very definitely not alone.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Excellent article, highly recommended, but, one quibble: things can change faster that Finnie seems to realize. Embrace and extinguish works exponentially.
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“But before you chalk me up as an apple-eyed Mac fanboy”
newsflash. every mac user I meet says this. and it’s true.
the lunatic fanboy types..? they don’t exist. like bigfoot. get it?
realize that, and you realize there is no downside to switching. Unless you’re a gamer, in which case (sorry) I wouldn’t associate with you anyway, hence, would never meet.
@Reality Check
I can’t agree with you on any point except perhaps that it may not be Apple who capture the corporate desktop. But that doesn’t mean Microsoft won’t lose it.
Imagine a low-cost, relatively low-powered, small form-factor desktop running a centrally-managed “windows-like” Unix/Linux desktop with a high function email client (exchange support required especially), a medium function WP client (Word file support required) and a medium function spreadsheet client (Excel file support required).
The basic components are already there – and such a client would meet the needs of the vast majority of corporate clients.
Add optional virtualisation for client-specific windows apps, and you have a non-microsoft solution for the corporate desktop.
HP could do this. Any why wouldnt they? They won’t do it until they feel that Microsoft are too weak to do anything about it but it would be very attractive for HP – it would completely wrong-foot Dell and others. And HP’s move to abandon the microsoft strategy for the home is a sure sign that HP are moving to create their own answer to the rise and rise of Apple…
And if HP don’t, then Lenovo/IBM will.
It will only take one or two major corporations to announce that they have successfully piloted such a solution and are now rolling it out across their enterprise – and that, as they say, would be the end of that!
MW=short
Fifteen years. No way. One of two things will happen. (1) Microsoft is going to have a change in leadership (with no Gates or Balmer) and recover from its Vista fiasco using it’s still considerable Windows/Office revenue. The new leadership will do what Jobs did at Apple. Focus on what’s important and be merciless with what’s not. Or (2) Microsoft will be around but mostly irrelevant within 5 years.
gspank has friends???? I doubt it.
All very interesting, but – in some ways – this analysis fails to look beyond the visible light spectrum at some of the more arcane factors at work in the marketplace.
Let’s play some games…
Apple is now the second most valuable personal computer manufacturer in the world and, although a significant element of that valuation is based in iPods and related income, it should be noted that Apple still makes around 17-20% gross margin on its personal computing products.
Apple is actually sandwiched between HP (which itself generates a lot of income from inkjet cartridges) and Dell. In fact, Apple is now worth around 50% more than Little Rock’s Little Shop oF Horror. Dell’s performance is now so dire that it has sacked its CEO and bought Michael Dell back into the driving seat – the worrying thing being that Dell (the man) believes that the solution is milking more “efficiency” from component suppliers and assembly operations.
These are all obvious observations, but how do they relate to Microsoft’s future?
Quite simply, MSFT’s future is predicated on it’s partners’ continuing willingness to act as Redmond’s tax collector and that situation will only continue as long as the business of PC assembly and distribution remain profitable to a level which maintains a viable return on investment.
In other words, if it ultimately becomes more profitable to simply stick the money into the corporate treasury than to compete in the PC marketplace, some companies (and I’m thinking of Dell here) will ultimately be confronted by investors who’ll be asking why their money is being used to generate far more ROI for Microsoft (and that company’s investors) than for HP/Dell/Gateway/GenericPOSBoxAssembler.
This problem doesn’t affect Apple: it’s not competing to sell 10 million boxes on razor-thin margins every quarter, especially when it can sell 1.5 million units and make more money by providing a better holistic experience at the premium end of the market.
The logical end point of the constant deflation in the PC marketplace is that, ultimately, Microsoft will – in order to convince corporates that the Windows industry is still viable – have to become a hardware company just like Apple, subcontracting its assembly to the Far East. Such a move would immediately bring MSFT’s margins down to levels that will choke its arrogance at source by adjusting its market cap and much of its power downwards – no more trying to dominate every market as a loss-leader and the unprofitable elements of the empire may have to go.
A similar analogy would be masturbation. I’ll masturbate easily three to four times a day. Do I prefer my wife? Of course I do, but she doesn’t like it three to four times a day so I stick with masturbating. Sometimes that is all that people can get.
TowerTone: <sniff> You had me at masturbate. <sniff>
@Towertone
Mate, that is WAY too much information…
Apple. The Mercedes of computing.
Hewlett-Packard. The General Motors of computing.
Dell. The Yugo of computing.
AlienWare. The ’59 El Dorado of computing.
Microsoft. The Standard Oil of computing.
@ TT
I’m totally with you on the masturbation.
Talk amongst ye’selves.
No, that wasn’t me at 9:21. I don’t even have a wife. Or if I do have one, she isn’t mine…
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”tongue wink” style=”border:0;” />
Thanks for the tears, anyhow TMF.
MCCFR-
‘ than Little Rock’s Little Shop oF Horror. Dell’s’
That would be ‘Round Rock, TX’ for Dell.
Little Rock is in Arkansas, and has its own ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ known as the Clinton Pesidential Library.
I would hope it is more obvious when I speak. At least I TRY to be humorous…
@C1
So that was YOU I heard in the closet….?
“It will only take one or two major corporations to announce that they have successfully piloted such a solution and are now rolling it out across their enterprise – and that, as they say, would be the end of that!”
I disagree because there’s support issues. Microsoft has the best enterprise support in the business. You need to hire a sys admin? It’s easy to find one that’s Microsoft-trained. Try finding a linux admin – they’re too expensive and hard to find one that’s trained on your particular flavor of linux. Even IBM, the big linux company, announced in January 2004 that they were going to be “Microsoft Free” on their internal desktops by switching to linux by the end of 2005 and it never happened. They tried it but it didn’t work. The problem was their internal support staff could not support it and the linux desktops could not run their internal web client/server apps without major money being spent on porting.
It’s not as simple as somebody coming along with a new solution and a company just switching to it. You end up with lost productivity because the client base is using something they’re not used to, the costs in IT and support are huge, and switching software suites to a new platform is many times prohibitively expensive.
Your scenario where we use basic client/server applications (perhaps Google’s proposed suite?) is over simplistic because in reality the enterprise depends on client/server database applications. Email, Exchange, etc are minor compared to migrating a huge enterprise database from SQL server (which it most likely is running on) to Oracle or similar on a different platform.
It’s not about the platform, it’s about the apps. The cost of the operating platform is VERY minor compared to the cost of the apps. And once the enterprise has invested both time and money in support, development and deployment of an application suite, the likelyhood of that company just suddenly switching to a different application suite, just so they can switch operating platforms, is none to nil. In business you pick the application suite needed to do the job, which in turn automatically determines the platform needed to run it. You guys got it backwards – you’re advocating a platform first, then the application suite. That’s called “putting the cart before the horse”.
In my case, even if I could switch from Windows 2003 Server Data Center to a different platform for our database applications, it would be a daunting task. And I would not select linux or Mac OS X Server to run it because neither is robust enough, nor is the support infrastructure there to keep it online. For instance, when build 2721 became available to Microsoft Connect users for testing, Microsoft engineers worked directly with the enterprise staff with compatibility testing and bug squashing to insure 100% uptime at deployment. Apple simply is not big enough to do this type of support on a wide scale enterprise basis in businesses with 50,000+ desktop computers. Period.
It’s not that us IT people dislike Apple like many think – it’s the fact that Apple can’t do it because they don’t have either the expertise or the people. Microsoft does.
The enterprise computing environment happens to be my specialty as a systems administrator, so that’s my 2 cents on the topic.
I am so not in the closet.
It’s not about switching the application base to a new platform. It’s about de-coupling the application base from the platform entirely.
@Reality Check
Windows 2003 server more robust than Linux?
Are you really kidding?
Sorry, there’s NO WAY in the world I can buy it.
I can accept that MIcrosoft has a more organized support organization, I can accept you can get cheaper MS people, I can accept Windows is more homogeneous, but….
… There is NO WAY in the world Windows 2003 Server is more robust than Linux or UNIX (and Mac OS X IS UNIX). Sorry, but, after running a Linux box for 6 years in a row without rebooting, and after seeing every single version of Windows servers reboot every time a security upgrade is released, seeing it crash by viruses, being attacked by malware (just as their desktop cousins) and having the same kernel flaws…
It’s a very bold statement, I’ll grant you that. But unfortunately is not a accurate one.
Reality Check!!
MW: “expect”, as “expect your Windows server to crash”
Scot Finnie writes in his article,
“After six years of waiting, it was time for something significantly better. We didn’t get it.”
I think a lot of people are getting it, just like Scot. That’s why Microsoft (and a few chairs) are worried.
“… There is NO WAY in the world Windows 2003 Server is more robust than Linux or UNIX (and Mac OS X IS UNIX).
Then you have no clue about enterprise level server platforms. Windows 2003 Server Data Center outperforms RHEL/Oracle by 14% on our database benchmarks, running on 32-cpu Itanium hardware. Mac OS X Server/MySQL, running on Fibre Channel clustered G5 Xserve’s in a telco rack, is so slow with threading under heavy query load that it’s not even worth looking at – Windows Server performs 1,000+% over OS X Server in our internal database benchmarking suite.
There have been<a > other public benchmarks</a> that show OS X’s terrible performance as a server platform as well.
If you know anything about database servers you know they can’t be shut down because no matter what platform you run a relational database on, it can take many hours to bring a 15TB database back online and verify that the database table structure is intact. Our Windows Servers were upgraded on April 16, 2003 and they have been running without reboot, and with 100% database uptime, to date.
@Reality Check
I only agree partly with you. A great many users in corporateville don’t run any “real” apps at all – just Office and Outlook. And a lot of apps these days use a browser client. It doesnt matter what the server is if the user interacts with it via Firefox…
Also, if HP put their mind to it they can create a supportable Linux-based platform. I don’t think many corporates will be windows-free, but i think a lot of corporates will run cheaper, microsoft-free, clients for lots of their users.
Is the OS/X database performance an inherent problem in OS/X or is it because MySQL is not well designed for high throughput applications?
Microsoft doesn’t “perform” worth jack. Puhlease! Let’s leave abstract, never-gonna-happen-in-reality benchmarks out of the discussion, because as nearly every corporate user knows, Microsoft’s real world performance is awful. If you’re a cube dweller, you’ll have run up against this more times than you can count.
I really don’t imagine that Apple is going to dominate the server room any time soon. Personally, I didn’t ever think that, and this is the big distinction that Ballmer, Dvorak, and pretty much everyone else that suckles a living from the Windows Economy doesn’t understand.
Apple is a hardware company, yes. We all know this. But it’s not a Computer Company any more. It’s a Consumer Electronics Company. There is a huge difference that we must remember.
Apple sells cool. They do it very well. Who are their buyers? Regular people. People who don’t read feature lists and do head-to-head comparisons or cost analysis. They see something they like, it works in a pleasing way, and they buy it.
This is how the consumer industry works, and this is where Microsoft comically falls in its face every time it tries to dance. They do not understand this market, that’s why Apple always wins here. Apple will continue to win as *personal* computers leave the realm of business hardware and enter the realm of home stereos, TVs, media players, walkmen, etc. THIS is what people want for their homes, not the Soviet Beige Boxen that IT dumps into their cube at work.
Microsoft owns that market, and ass far as I care, they can have it. That’s not what Apple is going after, and it’s clear that this disturbs Ballmer when he talks about how unsuited iPhone is to business users. He would LOVE Apple to try to break into corporate IT in a big way, because they would loose, for all the reasons that RC points out above.
But in my home, I really don’t give a shit if my machine is IT Approved™. I am my own IT department, and all I have to worry about is if it runs my own apps like I want, and can connect with the office. Macs can do this in almost all cases. I run Cisco VPN to connect to work, and VM Ware for the one or two tiny little tasks that require IE. It all works wonderfully.
Now, at work, I have a Mac, too. I also have a Thinkpad, that I once used for those odd PC tasks, but VM Ware has rendered it a permanent screen saver. On my home level, and even on my work desktop level, I’m on my desired platform. I’m not bound to the platform of our corporate apps, even though Microsoft and Dell would love it if I was.
Corporate systems will remain as they are for many years, this is how corporations are – conservative and prudent. Good for them. Headway will be made for non-Windows systems as platofrm-neutral web apps become more and more common, but that’s going to be a long road. Apple won’t take over, not to the level that MS has. But MS *WILL* loose its top-to-bottom hold on computing. It’s happening right before our eyes. Computing has taken the irrevocable turn toward personal electronics, and Apple has the power to crush the competition here. Microsoft, as has been demonstrated time and again, doesn’t have a prayer.
-c
MW: ‘seem’ (‘ed like a good idea at the time)
“Is the OS/X database performance an inherent problem in OS/X or is it because MySQL is not well designed for high throughput applications?”
From what I could gather it appears to be a flaw in the way OS X’s XNU (Mach) kernel handles threading and memory management. Server applications that depend heavily on launching child processes (threads) to handle ever increasing client load, such as MySQL and Apache, do not perform well on OS X Server because of this core flaw.
Despite the senseless rant of “BustingTheSkullOfIdiots”, who obviously has ZERO experience running enterprise-level client/server applications, Windows 2003 Server Data Center Edition, in combination with Microsoft’s SQL Server, is currently the most robust relational database server you can buy. HP-UX on PA-RISC, Solaris on SPARC, AIX 5L on Power, or RHEL on Itanium, all running Oracle, can achieve better performance than Windows on some query sets and get worse results on others, depending on the nature of the database query. But Windows Server/SQL Server was still our platform of choice when we chose our relational database suite back in 2003 due to overall better throughput than the competition. We had previously been running Solaris on SPARC.
BTW – I work for ExxonMobile and our case study and migration from UNIX-based systems to Windows-based systems is on Microsoft’s website.
So IMHO, saying Apple is ready for the enterprise is a misnomer. Apple is oriented to the high-end consumer space and I do not see them being ready to play with the Big Boys.
And BTW – thanks for at least SOMEBODY on this forum having enough common sense to have a real, productive discussion for once!
@Reality
Thanks for the insight. I agree wholeheartedly that Apple does not have anything to offer in the high end database space – they only offer one server in a few variants after all…
The current OS/X server is still very much command line oriented except for a few simple GUI tools grafted on top. Which means it has not had much focus at Apple. I hear that this is changing and Leopard Server will be quite a significant advance.
Apple will make inroads into the corporate space, but I imagine Apple will most likely focus on the low-end of the SME space, where Microsoft’s solutions are now way too complex for most businesses. I will be interested to see how well Leopard addresses my beefs with OS/X server – particularly in the area of DNS configuration and mail. Still, for the price, you get a lot of bang for your buck at this end of the market.
“The other fact is that he who owns the server owns the desktop. Linux owns the web server market…”
..but they own no desktops to speak of. Pretty much negates your point, doesn’t it?
-c
I have to agree with Reality Check on the Enterprise issue.
I work for the Feds, and know that he’s talking facts, and not for medium sized businesses. Large Enterprise customers really are in the boat he speaks of, and Apple has shown NO interest in that market at all!
My Agency, for better or worse, is a Microsoft bastion, except that we use Oracle as our default data base. We run over 700 servers, some virtual, and there is some mix between Linux and Windows, but the main servers running the AD, Exchange, etc., are 2003 now.
Because of budget restraints, I am sure that even if Microsoft inexplicably died tomorrow, a market would develop for those with Microsoft expertise that could and would support those products that Enterprises like ours have and could never afford to migrate from in less than five years.
Microsoft won’t die. It will divest itself of unprofitable parts of itself, reorganize around those core business competencies such as Enterprise and Office and keep on doing business, just not as a monopoly.
Apple is happy, I am sure, to leave that market to Microsoft, as in such a new paradigm, Microsoft will have to learn to integrate many different desktop OSes into working with its networking systems in order to remain competitive.
I do believe that one of the devisions Microsoft will be forced to spin off is its desktop OS division. THAT one’s gonna die!
MW= clearly, as in clearly, things are muddled in the computer industry!