As Apple has recently passed Microsoft as the highest-market-cap technology firm, AOLNews posted this about the comparisons that can be made.
Most of you probably know by now that I'm an Apple-phile. It was not always thus...
Back in the Win 3.10 days I hated the closed system that Apple represented. I was in the industry, and I wanted to be able to see a command line; we NEEDED to be able to open the box and throw in some cards or a new video subsystem. Nevermind that tweaking our AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files was a daily chore. Anyone else remember QEMM386? Wow, those were the days.
Well, along came Win95, and everything was broken for a few years there. A friend gave me a PowerBook 100 (yes, a 100) and a box full of apps. The rest is history. I bought my first new Mac when the toilet seat iBook premiered in 1999, and then a Strawberry iMac, a Pismo, an iceBook and now I'm working [in Windows XP] on a MacBook.
When Office gets back to being compatible between Windows and OS X, I'll go back to OS X as my desktop, but that's not Apple's fault now, is it?
I've had my share of disputes with Apple over the years, but as the last blog post mentioned, it's obvious that they have their heads on straight over in Cupertino. In particular, it seems that Apple has managed, over the last 30 years, to keep focused on WHY they are in business and not just HOW to stay in business or WHAT to make.
Another Apple reference to keep an eye on, from the old old days: Guy Kawasaki. Genius. Anything he touches turns to gold. And I think he never looks any older; maybe he has a pact with Satan for that.
His stuff from the early days of Apple is nothing short of brilliant. He "invented" the evangelist in modern marketing -- making sure that everyone ELSE knows "why" you're doing what you're doing. He was talking about guerrilla marketing before Faith Popcorn. Hundreds of years from now folks are going to know his name.
God Almighty, why can't everyone else "get it" the way Apple does? Is it that hard to understand? Can't anyone else put their culture into action this way? Does it take a Steve Jobs to get this kind of thing done? Are there other companies out there hiring and feeding people like Jef Raskin and Guy Kawasaki? Man, the difference is striking.
*Jef Raskin, for those of you who may not have heard of him before, invented the information appliance. He described the "computer for the rest of us" almost completely. But I don't think he anticipated the effect that Solitaire and MySpace would have on productivity -- seems that he was thinking computers would make people MORE productive.
Most of you probably know by now that I'm an Apple-phile. It was not always thus...
Back in the Win 3.10 days I hated the closed system that Apple represented. I was in the industry, and I wanted to be able to see a command line; we NEEDED to be able to open the box and throw in some cards or a new video subsystem. Nevermind that tweaking our AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files was a daily chore. Anyone else remember QEMM386? Wow, those were the days.
Well, along came Win95, and everything was broken for a few years there. A friend gave me a PowerBook 100 (yes, a 100) and a box full of apps. The rest is history. I bought my first new Mac when the toilet seat iBook premiered in 1999, and then a Strawberry iMac, a Pismo, an iceBook and now I'm working [in Windows XP] on a MacBook.
When Office gets back to being compatible between Windows and OS X, I'll go back to OS X as my desktop, but that's not Apple's fault now, is it?
I've had my share of disputes with Apple over the years, but as the last blog post mentioned, it's obvious that they have their heads on straight over in Cupertino. In particular, it seems that Apple has managed, over the last 30 years, to keep focused on WHY they are in business and not just HOW to stay in business or WHAT to make.
Another Apple reference to keep an eye on, from the old old days: Guy Kawasaki. Genius. Anything he touches turns to gold. And I think he never looks any older; maybe he has a pact with Satan for that.
His stuff from the early days of Apple is nothing short of brilliant. He "invented" the evangelist in modern marketing -- making sure that everyone ELSE knows "why" you're doing what you're doing. He was talking about guerrilla marketing before Faith Popcorn. Hundreds of years from now folks are going to know his name.
God Almighty, why can't everyone else "get it" the way Apple does? Is it that hard to understand? Can't anyone else put their culture into action this way? Does it take a Steve Jobs to get this kind of thing done? Are there other companies out there hiring and feeding people like Jef Raskin and Guy Kawasaki? Man, the difference is striking.
*Jef Raskin, for those of you who may not have heard of him before, invented the information appliance. He described the "computer for the rest of us" almost completely. But I don't think he anticipated the effect that Solitaire and MySpace would have on productivity -- seems that he was thinking computers would make people MORE productive.
No comments:
Post a Comment