Apple is repeating Microsoft’s Mistakes

This guy is completely wrong. Why is he being upvoted? First he claims Microsoft spread itself too thin. Then he claims it's important for Apple to be cross-platform with its apps.

Microsoft's desktop market share was around 95% in the late 90s. It about 90% today. The owned the business app suite with Office then and they own it today. They did get arrogant with IE and stopped innovating once they destroyed the competition but, depending on whose numbers you use, they still have half the market.

The consumer world changed with mobile and Microsoft didn't innovate quickly enough. Google is the one who took their place with 80% global market share.

Apple still has relatively few products for being the world's biggest company. They do need a few more products.

Microsoft's "mistakes" are part of what made it the unstoppable juggernaut it was through the 90s and into the 2000s. They are the same "mistakes" that have helped Apple to acquire the largest single stockpile of cash since Crassus.

People keep writing obituaries for Microsoft. Would that I could die in such a fashion. I would love to be the kind of failure that's netted tens of billions of dollars of profits per year for decades.

I'm pretty offended that my 2 year-old IPad Air is gradually being effectively bricked by Apple. I'm staying with IOS 7.0.3 on the thing because first I heard that IOS 8.x.x more or less bricked performance, and now one can't even install 8.x.x. As a result, no more app updates, and both Safari and Chrome crash left and right when confronted with the latest script kiddy HTML because no more app updates without an OS update.

In contrast, one of my PCs from 2011 still runs Windows 7 just fine modulo the occasional kvetching to embrace the wonders of Windows 10. By all means be like Microsoft here.

Ditto for my other PCs running Ubuntu 12.x

And I'd be less risk averse if I could go back to 7.0.3 if indeed the thing got bricked, much like installing a late build of Android 4.x cyanogenmod rescued my Nexus 5 phone from bricking, but there's no way back if I go forward so the real answer for me is to extract all the data and switch to a Cyanogenmod friendly tablet minus the mostly useless Google services (increasingly by design i.e. since when did Google Maps need social push notifications? Yesterday, apparently when I got one).

Apple? Never again. The IPad Air is the first and last IOS device I ever own.

Apple music is on Android FWIW.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

At extreme risk of getting modded, how is this cute analysis (with a click bait headline) front page material?

You're missing the point that people primarily buy Apple's products because their great looks, performance, and the status they bring them. Even if Apple's apps are all crap, people are not going to switch to Samsung or Nexus.

>You won’t find Apple Music on Windows.

Must be dreaming then, just last week I was using my Apple Music subscription on iTunes for Windows!

This doesn't work.

If all apps (except Apple apps that no one likes apparently) are available everywhere then why switch ever?

Also learning new apps is part of the switching cost. Rebuying paid apps and in app purchases is another.

This is an argument people have made since the T-Mobile droid and it hasn't worked so far.

> The problem was that each attack was fought on the Microsoft playing field. Each product kept users within the Microsoft hardware ecosystem. The competition didn’t have that limitation. Firefox, Facebook, Chrome and the iPod emerged as dominant solutions because they served users across devices: Mac’s, PC’s, and sometimes Linux systems.

That's just not true. Firefox stole IE users because it was actually innovative. (IE never had tabs, Firefox 2 brought that to us.) Then Chrome stole Firefox 3 and IE users, because it had all the same innovations, but it wasn't bloated, it felt faster and smoother. It had practically nothing to do with Linux or Mac.

When I saw the title, I think it was going to be about how they deal with security.

Says someone who clearly doesn't have much money invested in iOS apps