How Apple “Lost” the PC Wars

[SKA]

How Apple “Lost” the PC Wars
http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3934

Interesting take on Apple

Ska

[Eóin]

So a fanboi is annoyed that the plebs of this world were more interested in games, which the pc was batter at, than word processing, which his Mac was better at. So us plebs bought PCs while unfortunately the enlightened few weren't buying enough “computers for creative people” to sustain Apple.

Oh how unfair the world has been to him and his favorite company.

[Carol Haynes]

Never read such a biased bunch of tosh in my life.

Apple’s computers are simply ridiculously good compared to its rivals

Says it all really!

Original machines from Apple (including Apple II which was recognised as a good machine) were all "also-rans" in the market place at the time. All the machines produced around that time were pretty mediocre - esp. with the benefit of hindsight!

[nudone]

"Apple won the war of ideas, which was what really matters."

Marvellous. Yet again, Apple is all about mind control. That quote sounds like a piece of propoganda from 1984.

[Stoic Joker]

"Apple won the war of ideas, which was what really matters."

Marvellous. Yet again, Apple is all about mind control. That quote sounds like a piece of propoganda from 1984.

It's all part of that Different Thinking they seem to want people to do. Take yesterday for example:

I'm on site trying to troubleshoot yet another Snow Leopard vs. a printer issue. All I wanted to do was open a pdf file, send it to the printer, and see how long it took...Along with what if any errors it thew.

This exercise took about 10 minutes. Windows or Linux, I could have done it in 7 seconds. But snApple ... Is Different...

The "Print" dialog, which seemed to only give layout bangles info ... Had a secondary dialog popup that actually required a tertiary popup to explain the fact that clicking on the 2nd dialogs Print button didn't actually print anything... Okay, then WTF did they call it a Print button for?!? Save Miscellaneous Print Related Settings Didn't quite fit on the button perhaps?

The best part was that the "explanation" dialog stated that "If you want to print or save the document you must go back to the first dialog and click print button". ...Now if I really wanted to save a document WHY for the love of doyc would I have selected PRINT? ...Is that just to help the completely stupid "save" things to paper?

[nudone]

Ah ,yes, save to paper. So simple when you understand.

[Renegade]

Video cards are entirely driven by games. It's gamers that have made video cards so powerful and cheap.

But what drove games? Microsoft. They were a game manufacturer, then a platform developer. They made their platform friendly for developers to make games.

Microsoft is still very developer-centric. They go to extreme lengths to encourage developers. They have the best IDE in the world, and you can get it for free!

Sure, Apple has Xcode, but if you've used it, it sure as guns isn't anywhere near as nice to use as Visual Studio.

The article is very much through Apple-colored glasses. But he does make some good points. Apple computers were better than DOS. That's a given.

Meh... The new battle is in the smartphone and tablet space. Look like Apple is poised to lose that battle as well.

[Deozaan]

What I got from that article was that Apple didn't lose because it didn't compete. Apple's "competitors" killed themselves off and then Apple did nothing to gain market share. So Apple didn't lose the war because of anything Apple did. They lost because they twiddled their thumbs while everyone else did stuff.

Then the author goes into crazy territory calling Apple the most respected company in so many categories. Huh? I'd like to see the statistics and source(s) behind those claims.

Well before the time I got to the end of the article, I couldn't follow the "logic" any more.