“Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function — killing Microsoft,” Bob Cringley writes for I, Cringley.
“The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped,” Cringley writes. “But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn’t about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.”
Cringley writes, “What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.”
MacDailyNews Take: When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms… PCs are going to be like trucks… They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people… This transformation is going to make some people uneasy…because the PC has taken us a long ways. It’s brilliant. We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it’s uncomfortable. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, June 1, 2010
“This transition will take at most two hardware generations and we’re talking mobile generations, which means three years, total,” Cringley writes. “With no mobile market share to speak of and Windows 8 not due until 2013, Microsoft is likely to be too late to the party…”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Whether Cringley is right or just writing out of his rear-end as usual, Microsoft, and especially Windows, has retarded progress for far, far, far too long! The Dark Ages of Personal Computing, which we successfully avoided all these years (even if the best we had at one time was Mac OS 8 “Tempo” – it was still significantly better to the end user than Windows 95), is finally coming to an end. In the end, one fact will remain: Most of the world chose wrong. What a colossal waste of time, energy, and money that frustrating clusterfsck was! Good riddance to Windoze! Welcome to the Renaissance (where some of us been waiting for the rest of the world starting as far back as January 1984)!
We still need the Mac to develop software. Whether final users use the Mac or not, we developers need the Mac. Power Users need the Mac. There’s a wide spectrum of people needing the Mac. The Mac will not die overnight.
His premise is flawed – Apple isn’t creating iPhones, iPads, and iCloud to kill Microsoft. Apple is creating these things to make their customers’ lives better, so that those customers will buy more things from Apple.
And if Microsoft and some others die along the way, well, so be it. Nice bonus for doing a great job.
No, no Mac is not being sacrificed. Didn’t Cringely hear Steve? We will still have a need for some trucks, but those trucks will all be desktop Macs!
Of course, the media hypes everything up. Apple has simply solved a problem: keeping all our devices in sync.
Period.
Only the business community can “kill” Windows.
Poor MDN take.
You obviously have been Mac OS 8 “Tempo” sufferers while I enjoyed using NeXTSTEP from 1992 until March 2001.
Seriously, when I added the original iMac to my NeXTstation back in 1998? I was shocked about the poor OS, GUI and user experience. NeXTSTEP was lightyears ahead. And you should give credit to that.
Serously, really? We weren’t suffering with Mac OS any more than you were suffering with NeXTStep.
Mac computing doesn’t begin and end with the computer’s desktop.
Big deal, so you had a superior interface and a workstation-class computer, but you weren’t any happier than the rest of us.
Who cares if the Mac came to a grinding halt with each click of the mouse or that it took a moment for a screen refresh, or that we’d be caught up in the floppy-disk shuffle, we still made deadline, and vanquished foes, and our garage sale signs were works of art.
One thing is certain, my latest Mac is much more powereful than your workstation and OS X kicks the shit out of NeXTStep.
😉
All I know is that if the final version of iCloud works as well as the betas for iTunes Cloud is currently, the competition will have a serious problem. Just as a goof, I bought an app on my iPad (the excellent ThumbJam), and the app was automatically pushed to iTunes on my iMac and showed up in the “Purchased” section of the App store on my iPhone, without me having to do anything. Seamless.
App-le is straight out trying to turbo-boost a trend to kill Windows by devaluing the operating system as the most important thing to the user.
Google Chrome’s OS arrival hammers this home. An OS is a portal to cloud apps. $29.99 for Lion will see you able to buy the latest apps and that is where the revenue will come from. An expensive upgrade to Win8 will need to bundle so much or not be worth it. The OS must be much more an ecosystem and MS must be very worried that tentative steps with the Windows Phone have failed.
The operating system is beginning to evaporate into the cloud.