Reliable Systems

Everyone likes to be on the winning team.  We love to root for our favorite sports team, we like the car we own and the brand behind it.  So it’s no surprise that when Apple ran their I’m a Mac ads that Windows fans were in an uproar.  Now with the Laptop Hunter series the shoe’s on the other foot.   Microsoft is making a big show that Apple computers are overly expensive just for the Apple brand.  Apple fans claim that  to match a Mac, a PC has to be equipped with tons of antivirus software, a full time tech support guy, and a Witchdoctor on standby to keep it working.

Seriously people

First, Apple makes some of the finest hardware you can possibly buy.  If you compare it nose to nose with hardware that’s actually built to the same standards then it really doesn’t represent a significant price premium.  Compare a Macintosh Pro with an equivalent Dell workstation – the cost is within 5%.  It’s amazing that Apple can afford the extra engineering of an OS with that little premium.  

Second, Vista works great.   It’s running on many more systems than Mac OS is, and with volume comes a range of new problems.  The total amount of money I’ve spent on desktop antivirus software in 10 years of administering PCs?  $0.  The total number of virus problems I’ve had? 0.  My parents managed to get into trouble with one virus and Windows XP – but installing the (free) Microsoft Defender cleared it right up never to return.

As with nearly all marketing, this is a battle of perception:  Apple has done a great job of defending their brand at every turn.  This is part of their corporate ethos.  Along with a few other tenants it ensures they are a much loved but niche player:

• Only do something you can do uniquely well.
• Don’t extend into markets that might ask you to compromise your values.
• Cultivate the mystique:  Don’t show what’s behind the curtains.

Microsoft on the other hand has tenants that ensure they’ll be a volume player, but an unloved one:

• Play to win the most market share in any market you can.
• Build your ecosystem by making it easy for others to add value to it.
• Cultivate the engineers:  Provide overwhelming amounts of documentation and approaches.

The fact is, many people don’t need a top end piece of hardware like a Mac.  On the other hand, many people want a computer that’s just a tool, not a piece of art.  To them, the nearly infinite diversity and low cost of entry are essential.

I’m a People person.  I’m Good with People!

The computing needs of the average corporation and the average individual are very far apart.  To companies, computers are tools – like the desk, phone, and copier.  Very important, very powerful – tools.  They aren’t there to make you feel great or enable you to create a cool video of your vacation in France.  My partner really summed it up one day when he commented that the Mac was a really personal computer - it worked hard to create a personal connection.  

Corporations on the other hand want slow paced evolution, massive support for legacy applications and hardware (these guys are still running dot matrix printers off parallel ports) and to control costs.  They also philosophically want to have all the keys to the computers – just like they do for the buildings and offices they own.  PC’s are just end points on the large mesh that is the corporate IT network.  It’s very impersonal.

Microsoft makes a great deal of money providing businesses with the tools they need to have the computers work for them, and Apple makes a great deal of money creating computers that people love.  Either of these goals would be compromised by trying to do both.

Vista Goggles

Folks that have been in the Windows ecosystem a long time probably recognize that you could take the first year of press about Vista and substitute “Windows 2000″ and find the same article written 8 years earlier.  Vista is a surprisingly large and tricky step forwards on a number of fronts, whereas Windows XP was a visual redress of Windows 2000.  

Almost like an SAT test:

Windows 7 is to Windows Vista as

Windows XP is to Windows 2000.  

Like Windows XP, the story on Windows 7 is making virtually no architecture changes and instead just tuning for the long haul.  That’s a great thing, because there’s a lot that works very well with Vista, and now it’ll work even better with Windows 7.

The humorous thing is to read now about how people are thinking about moving to Vista once 7 ships because, well, they don’t want to move to an OS that was just released.  It’s as if Vista has been aging like a fine cheese on the shelf so the very same binary code that once was toxic is now just what the doctor ordered.  To a slight degree this is true:  Vista SP1 did address some issues that affected some people, and more importantly hardware now is dramatically faster than it was two years ago (as it will be two years from now…) so what once was aggressive is now commonplace.  The same was true of Windows 2000 when it shipped.  Requiring 64MB of RAM?  That’s just crazy talk!  Only certain video cards worked reasonably with it, and video drivers to a while to stabilize.  That sounds very familiar…

In the end, it really comes back to Perception.  Probably the biggest mistake Microsoft did was not push the OEM’s that make the computers to build machines that could responsibly run the new operating system, and be clear that meant hardware 3D video cards and plenty of memory.  And oh yeah, stop putting aftermarket firewalls, antivirus, Google Desktop, and all kinds of other things on them that are ill optimized.  At my last company we got in the habit of routinely wiping each new Dell that came in and reinstalling the OS from the Dell restore CD – because that got rid of all the noise.  It was surprising how much better that worked.  Is that Microsoft’s fault?  Not directly, but they certainly could have found a way to encourage the ecosystem to forgo some profit for usability.  But that’s just not in their corporate DNA.

With any luck, the big story for Windows 7 will be that Microsoft pushes back against their channel, even being willing to risk it by leaving Windows XP out there for folks that don’t want to play by the Windows 7 rules.  It’s hard to put up barriers when you’re a legal monopoly, so find ways to use incentives to do it right instead of punishment for doing it wrong.  And keep up the ads, because perception does matter in the long run.

Who knows, it may push Apple to get better too.  Just once when my iPod updates itself to enhance stability and performance I’d love to know what exactly was unstable or slow…