Apple is making a very large play on the service end of things as of late.
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Its cool being able to look back on what the site used to look like. Kinda neat that it is essentially the same thing as its core.
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Bill Gates Regrets Microsoft Losing to Android as Dominant Platform Beyond iPhone
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Funny how one can describe iPhone, the greatest business success story in the history of (at least) electronics, as „niche“.
There is also semi-auto with DSG type gearboxes. Something new can cause disruption. Microsoft were late to the smartphone market, so had to be a disruptor, but never managed it.
Ballmer and Gates are aggressive thieves. They succeeded by plundering the work of others. MS DOS was basically IP theft, and so Office was a rip off of other products that already existed. Windows was a rip off of Macintosh. Gates used aggressive attorneys to get his way repeatedly in the early days. The guys at Microsoft were never visionaries. They succeeded by means other than innovation. So it should come as no surprise that they totally missed the boat with mobile.
We must have a slightly different interpretation of "niche." Apple having a ~24% share of the global smart phone market and ~47% share of the US market is hardly "niche."
Wellll...isn't that Apple's approach? We never cared about thin, thin, thin...we wanted ports, ports, ports. There's no excuse for my 13" MB pro (no power bar) to only have 2 USB-C ports when the power bar model gets 4. No excuse they make such a crappy "extender" which has - not more USB-C ports, hell no, just a single USB-C, and single USB-3, and an HDMI. Maybe they've put out a new extender dongle since I last looked. There's also no excuse that external drives surreptitiously eject and have since at least Sierra and require a 3rd party app like Amphetamine which still flakes out if you try to plug in an iPhone. I've gotten used to ejecting my drives before I plug the iPhone in.
Oh - forgot. I'm supposed to be using iCloud, not external drives. Microsoft has always treated reported bugs as customer service issues and addressed them. 17 MacOS versions later, Apple still treats MacOS like it's a beta product and reported bugs like political issues which might affect shareholder value.
In my opinion, Jobs called it a long time ago when he said something like 'Bill/Microsoft just isn't creative". I'm sure Bill is brilliant but he just doesn't have the kind of wild, foolish, or maybe just the balls to try to really think big picture like Steve/Apple did.
When you're CEO, it's your job to not only steer the ship but set a course for the future too. The Android team saw the writing on the wall the day Apple announced iPhone so they went back to the drawing board. Balmer succeeded in raking in profits from current MS technology but he had no skill in skating to where the puck was heading.
I think the point is that Apple showed you the iPad and you still want a laptop. Most consumers don't care about laptops anymore which is why Apple stopped caring. Or maybe Apple stopped caring first but does it really matter when everyone knows what the future of computing is?
Laptop complaints just sound like someone complaining about an iPod today. It's over, move on to the next technology platform.
Thankfully there isn't anything to apologize for. I'm glad it's around. And now that they got their rear ends kicked by Playstation, they've made the entire gaming industry better with services like Game Pass. Sony would have us all be idiots and use their crappy Playstation Now service if it weren't for Xbox lol.
The Ballmer video was from early 2007 before the first iPhone was ever sold.
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I watch that Ballmer video every now and then and laugh at it to this day. While his analysis may have been correct at that moment in time, he lacked the visionary skills to see that it was the future. That's the hallmark of a good CEO.
That's like saying electric scooters have made trucks obsolete.
Most people who just consume content don't need a laptop anymore, that part is true. But content creators still need a decent laptop or a desktop computer. I'd hate to write a novel or a dissertation on an iPad.
I would say the slip-up did happen under Gates watch, and not Balmer’s. These devices get started years before the mainstream knows about them. Bill Gates left Microsoft in 2006. The time to push for the smartphone was really around 2005.
Microsoft had dominance in the at the time primary computing platform. If they had leveraged their relationship with developers and made it convenient for Windows users to access their desktop’s assets, then they could have transitioned into the dominant mobile platform.
Apple is doing this right now but in reverse, leveraging their dominant position in mobile to give their iPhone users convenient access to their mobile assets on Mac. They’re using their relationship with mobile developers to populate the Mac App Store with that dominant position in apps.
Apple clearly wants to keep the Mac around despite what critics here say. They’ve solidified iOS’ position and now they’re going to take on a weakened Windows by making it convenient for users to have a desktop/laptop in the same ecosystem as their phone. Microsoft can’t fight back because they don’t have a mobile platform. Meanwhile, Google is beating them up from the other side with Chromebooks in education.
Microsoft recognizes this and is becoming a third party developer for the operating system giants Apple/Google. Microsoft is SEGA. Once the platform leader, now making games for Nintendo.
Microsoft's approach to domination, by jumping onto a trend after it's gained momentum and slowly strangling the competition through dirty tricks and money, simply didn't work anymore in the accelerated technology market of the '00s. It also didn't help that Google had a new business model of "free", while Microsoft relied on the old business model of paid licences.
Right?! And remember how Apple users used to all be Kool-Aid-drinkers who were taken in by the Reality Distortion Field? It's hard for them to say that now, considering many of them probably carry an iPhone.
He understands no one competes with Apple, which is why he said there is room for 1 NON Apple OS. Apple is doing their own thing.
FYI, Android is also losing to Apple on every financial metric.
Just wanted to say that Microsoft had some of it’s best years under balmer, before he tanked it with his idiocy.
Tim Cook isn’t as much as an imbecile, but I think some of his decisions have hurt Apple in the long term.
The thing that pisses me off the most is how much balmer was paid. It’s the greatest example of the golden parachute for executives, even if they are horrible, they still make more money than most of their workers in a life time.
Tim Cook isn’t as much as an imbecile, but I think some of his decisions have hurt Apple in the long term.
The thing that pisses me off the most is how much balmer was paid. It’s the greatest example of the golden parachute for executives, even if they are horrible, they still make more money than most of their workers in a life time.
In 2015, a few months after I finally threw in the towel on Windows Phone realizing that it wasn't going to survive much longer and that Windows 10 was utter crap, I looked back and in hindsight will concur that they were always about a 1-1.5 years behind from the start and that's probably the single biggest factor in Windows Phone's ultimate demise.
Even the limited app selection was largely overcome by 2015 through third-party apps and Microsoft's in-house efforts to bridge the gaps. The whole time, Windows Phone users kept holding out hope that the next version, the next update, the next phone hardware, or that one missing app would change everything. But it never did, and the goal posts moved every time, whether it was WP7.5, WP8, WP8.1, cheap phones, flagship phones, Nokia becoming an OEM, Nokia being purchased, Instagram, Snapchat, or whatever other end goals we thought would finally convince mainstream consumers that Windows Phone was at least a viable option over iPhone or Android.
Meanwhile, it got harder and harder for core enthusiasts as they saw other innovation happening on iOS and Android that Microsoft just took way too long to bring over. Notification pane and copy/paste were basic ones, but we never got a real mobile wallet (other than that janky Amex prepaid card thing that barely worked), voice over LTE, HD voice codec support, or Wi-Fi calling; even on AT&T, who was labeled the "premier" carrier for Windows Phone in the US. I know AMR-WB and VoLTE code was in some of the late WP8.1 releases, but Microsoft never worked with any carrier that I'd seen to get it functional. To this day, if I put a SIM in a WP8.1 phone VoLTE nor HD voice work.
On top of that, Microsoft shot themselves in the foot a couple times by letting Nokia release flagship WP7 handsets, then drop WP8 a few months later with no upgrade path. Then they kept rebooting the SDKs (sort of the same way Apple has been with watchOS), so every time an ISV would spend months or years building their Windows Phone app; Microsoft uprooted everything and basically made it so that if you wanted to take advantage of any of the new hardware functionality or features of the newer OS versions (better multitasking, background tasks, etc.) you had to almost rewrite/rebuild from scratch. And they did that 3 times in 5 years!
I don't blame ISVs for giving up and just pulling their apps. Otherwise you end up with a support nightmare of rabid WP fans constantly emailing you and giving bad app reviews because your app is slow and doesn't support "X" feature that's been out for over a year, or you dump a fortune into app dev for a platform with <10% market share. What scares me is that I think it foreshadowed what's happening on Apple Watch, where eBay, Target, Twitter, and a host of other major apps dropped their Watch support over the past 2 years. Apple Watch isn't ubiquitous enough for dedicating development to the platform at a loss and Apple keeps upending the Watch SDK so that old apps that were slow, reliant on the phone connection, etc. had to be updated or dropped from the App Store. That reliance on the phone should've never been there from the start.
Those three years they took from the iPhone launch in 2007 through the Windows Phone announcement in February 2010 was just too long. If they'd been able to get WP7 out the door in late 2008 or 2009, I think they could've been where Android is today or at least split that portion of the market. Or if they had pulled an Apple and came out of the gate announcing Windows Phone 7 with devices available within a week or two...that would've changed everything. They lost too much momentum in 2010 and competitors had time to start preparing and catching up.
To the credit of the people running Google the minute they saw the iPhone they obviously understood what it was worth and its true potential instead of getting them stuck in irrelevant stuff such as copy paste or removable batteries.
A lot of regular people also saw that but for whatever reason CEOs followed that usual mantra of not being able to understand something if you paycheck depended on not understanding it.
Android kind of feels like the same Windows Mobile (pre-Metro) and Symbian used to be, pretty messy. I think the only reason Android is so popular is because it's free for the manufacturers. If the Windows was free, I think we'd had seen a pretty widespread adoption. It had a ton of useful features and innovations like tiles and overall very smooth user experience. It's downfall was lack of apps.
Microsoft did make a lot of people idiots by paying for something that was always free (online gaming) because it is based mainly on pooling costs from customers (paid) bandwidth.
Sony called that on the PS3. On the PS4 they just decided to have the same Microsoft was having.
Fortunately there is still the PC.