[opendtv] Re: I'm starting to feel sorry for, and worry about, Apple

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2010 08:05:10 -0400

At 9:22 AM -0700 8/3/10, dan.grimes@xxxxxxxx wrote:
I don't know if my view of it is accurate, but I thought both Apple and Microsoft had software development kits for their respective operating systems and both SDKs had very rigorous and tight requirements. The difference between the two was that Microsoft didn't confirm that the third-party software followed their specifications while Apple had to bless any software for the Mac.

This was not the case when the OS wars took place in the '80s and '90s. Both companies had open development environments that were supported by a variety of third party developer tools. MS was more involved in the tools business with Basic and Visual Basic.

To my knowledge there was never and still is no approval process for apps for Windows AND OSX.

The big difference in the '80s, and to a lesser extent in the '90s was related to the discipline required of developers to create applications.

Microsoft left the entire user experience to the developer, while with the Mac developers had to use the GUI developed by Apple. The advantage for Microsoft was that developers could cut corners to get their apps to run faster and could create UIs that were exclusive to their apps; the disadvantage was that every app had different UIs - no consistency. Apple forced consistency and many developers chaffed at the need to make their apps work with the Macs GUI. But when Windows came along developers for the PC had to do exactly the same things that were required of Mac developers.

The approval process for iOS Apps is what has stirred so much discussion about Apple's business practices. But it now looks like Google is gearing up to do the same thing for Android.

In my opinion, this doesn't constitute a walled garden but it sure helped reliability, especially when the operating systems were upgraded or patched. Windows based, non-Microsoft software did not always follow the specifications in the SDK and would often break when patching Windows. Third-party software for Macintosh usually faired better...until the upgrade to OS-X.

In my experience things improved dramatically on the Mac after the introduction of OSX, especially with the ability to Force Quit an app that crashed, rther than having to reboot the machine.


In my opinion, a big part that helped the PC foothold was the relatively lower cost of the Intel/PC versus the Motorola/Apple . Again, from my experience, it was not performance because, in the mid '80s to early '90s, the Apple Mac far outshined the MS-DOS PC both in terms of what widely used productivity software was available and the ease of use.

Yes, there has always been the perception that Macs are more expensive than PCs. In some cases this is been true, however, much of the differenced has been related to the features that were/are standard on a Mac, which were either nonexistent on PCs, only available on more expensive models, or add on options. This was also true to a limited extent for software, as Apple includes many apps with the basic system - and this has been especially true sine Apple introduced the iLife family of apps in the late '90s.

There have been many studies that document that the cost of ownership for a Mac is well below an equivalent PC. A good part of this is the salaries of the IT staff required to keep a fleet of PCs running in the enterprise.


During the mid '80s to mid '90s at my places of employment, we had Amiga, Sun/UNIX, Apple/Mac and PC/MS-DOS (Windows later) computers. While they may have been able to run various applications, they were almost always purchased for the one thing they could do well: Amiga for video, Sun/UNIX for AutoCAD, Apple/MAC for office "automation" (now referred to "office productivity"), PC/MSDOS for databases/office automation.

But I have always worked in unique and specialized settings that revolved around research, imaging and graphics, so I could be quite off in terms of the general office environment.

Yup.

The reality is that in most cases professionals buy the best tool for the job. Apple won on the creative side while Microsoft won in the enterprise, and initially with home PCs for games and to run Office for all of the "unpaid" hours that people spend working at home.

But now the consumer market is growing faster than enterprise, and the conventional PC form factor is giving way to mobile platforms.

One of the things that is driving iOS devices into the enterprise is the security of these devices and the ability to control (and kill) them remotely. The perception that Apple's iOS platforms are "closed" is misplaced. It would be more accurate to say that these platforms are controlled to help prevent the sorry mess we have today with malware.

And this reality is starting to affect competitors, who are now putting into place many of the control feature that Apple has created for the iOS platform.

Anybody notice that Saudi Arabia just banned the Blackberry because of security concerns?

Regards
Craig


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