Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

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I don't agree that this is about "getting" marketing. You may not mean it this way, but when people describe Apple as being a marketing company, the implication is that given the exact same product, Apple would succeed where Microsoft would fail. The truth is, Apple doesn't build the exact same products as Microsoft. What Apple does is what Dropbox did: They take a product and build what people actually want. People want A, B, and C, so Apple builds that. People don't care about technology X, Y or Z, so Apple doesn't build that or hides it under the covers.

http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...

People want their stuff to just be there. People actually don't care about the cloud or whatever, they just want their documents and their presentations and their calendar and their music to just be there for them on every device they use.

So Apple built that. I don't think this is about presenting the idea differently, I think it's about actually doing the idea differently.

I go back to Joel Spolsky: When talking about Architects, he said: Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

Remember that? Apple does, because with the iTunes Music Store, people could type the name of a song and listen to it right away, and Apple has made billions of dollars making that work simply and easily.

I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.

Agreed. An obvious example from the real world is the tablet.

Prior to the introduction of the iPad, Microsoft and its partners had shipped lots of models of tablets for over a decade and they were all failures.

Then came the iPad. The iPad didn't succeed because Apple presented it well. It succeeded because unlike all of its predecessors it didn't suck.

Sometimes the market is just not there, and it's more about the timing.

So you're saying that one of the spectacularly failed Windows powered tablets from yesteryear would succeed today, because the "timing is right"?

No. Those products were terrible, horrible, awful products, that's why they failed.

The timing for tablets is evidently perfect now, and yet not all tablets are succeeding in the market. Because they suck.

Exactly right. They weren't even true tablets, they were laptops with swivel screens and a stylus.

There is more than just market/customer timing. It comes down to available components. Li-poly battery tech + cheap lightweight capacitive display + available 3G radios and networks also heavily contributed to the success of iPad.

Of course, but again, that doesn't explain why other tablets are failing today. Motorola's Xoom contains those same parts, yet its sales are terrible. Because it sucks.

The Steve Jobs WWDC 1997 speech that was linked on here the other day - he was talking about his dream for the future, and mentioned that he doesn't want a hand writing computer with local storage like the Newton, he wants a screen and a keyboard which syncs to the network data stores where his data is.

iPad pretty much does that, at least for email and buying audio and video and apps from iTMS. Windows tablets didn't - they were local data, handwriting based, windowed Apps, like a movable desktop.

They didn't just fail because their spec was poor and their tech was early, they failed because they weren't a compelling thing to use, they were like an ordinary computer but worse.

No. The windows tablets that have been available since the 1990's were simply shit. They were simply a flat screen running windows with a pen. and that idea hasn't changed a bit since windows for pen computing in 1991. Same old windows+a pen interface, and it's absolutely horrible.

It wasn't timing, it was simply that Microsoft didn't get that a tablet was something different.

The problem is that a "flat screen running windows with a pen" was the pinacle of what could be brought to market at that time by anyone. Microsoft tried.

> The problem is that a "flat screen running windows with a pen" was the pinacle of what could be brought to market at that time by anyone. Microsoft tried.

The problem is that, if a "flat screen running windows with a pen" is a shitty experience that nobody in their right mind would buy, you're better off not bringing it to market.

Microsoft didn't earn a gold star for "trying"; they wrecked their brand by associating it with ten years of shitty tablet products nobody wanted.

Sometimes it's better to realize that if the tech doesn't exist to let you execute your product well, you're better off not harming your brand by executing it poorly.

Newton and Palm proved you could have a acerem-and-pen computer that didn't suck. It's just that Microsoft will never lauch anything that competes with Windows: they'll just graft the current fad on to of it

I agree that Microsoft execs probably think they already do product X or Y or Z that Apple is doing, but I don't think they do X or Y or Z the way Apple does them: I think Apple does them right much more often than Microsoft does.

Actually I don't think most MS execs think they build the same cloud product. I think they believe they have the feature set, but they realize, probably better than most, that they're not as well integrated. This is largely due to antitrust concerns.

MS has been hamstrung on doing deep integration for a lot of features. Live Mesh is a killer feature if built into Win7. As an optional download, no one ever even knows it exists.

With the rise of tablets and mobile phones as computers, they may finally begin to be able to start adding functionality typically seen in standalone apps to the OS (as they can argue they no longer have a monopoly in the personal computing space). Until they feel comfortable doing that they're going to continue to just have silo'ed apps that never get traction. And I think their execs know it.

How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through? People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows. That had to have changed how they felt about bundling new things into the OS. Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?

How much of Microsoft's difficulty integrating things into Windows is a result of the anti-trust lawsuit they went through?...Or do people think it was long enough ago that the culture has moved on?

There are some things where this is almost certainly the case, like antivirus. For some other things, some of it has to do with selling an OS and not the whole package.

But I do think the cloud is one area where they'd love to have tighter integration -- but will DropBox, Amazon, and Google protest if they do? That's something that Apple doesn't have to worry about at all -- they can tell these other companies to shove it -- we don't have a monopoly.

Update: And we see the next step of their integration with XBox Live built into Windows -- http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-reveals-xbox-live-will-be...

> People seem to forget that Microsoft went through 3 years of worrying that the government would break them up because they bundled a browser with Windows.

I think that's a pretty large oversimplification.

Microsoft didn't get in trouble just for bundling a browser; they got in trouble for bundling a browser and then using their position of market dominance to lock out competition, e.g., they used Windows licensing agreements to forbade OEMs from preinstalling competing browsers on systems. Microsoft's behavior went well beyond just bundling a browser.

Yes, MS didn't want preinstalled 3rd party apps that replicated functionality. :-)

Although the browser bundling is what people remember there was much more to it than that - just ask Be and Hitachi. At the time the consensus was that Microsoft got off lightly after being found guilty of abuse (although the EU was much stricter).

But yes - it takes generations to change a corporate culture, so it may only just starting to change.

I think the point was about non-obvious features. Lets take the Aero snap feature in Windows 7. How many would know that it is possible to drag a window to the sides and the top etc. and have it snap into place for split screen view or to maximize? Most of the people who know would be either geeks, or someone who saw someone else do it or discovered it by accident.

Contrast that to Apple's features, which are demoed in keynotes by Jobs and watched by a BIG percentage of Apple users. This is the reason that Apple is an ultra secret company with very high penalties for leaking things out. The hype that precedes every conference, with all the guessing etc. keeps Apple in the headlines and in people's minds. That's what people mean when they say Apple is a marketing company. Contrast that to Microsoft, how many people would watch them tout new features? They do make good stuff, but without their marketing, sales would be a lot slower.

Did you see the SkyDrive features at the MS event? No. Actually neither did I. In fact it wasn't in the recent MS events. In fact it was announced with with a blog entry:

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...

Why didn't MS talk about this at their special Mango VIP event? No idea. MS seems to think that getting too much attention for features is a bad thing.

I agree. It appears that turn by turn navigation (via Bing Maps) is also coming in the Mango update and if so, it would be a really big differentiator (only Android has it thus far) for their platform. Not a peep during their event.

-- John Gruber recently critiqued the Windows 8 preview video that was uploaded to youtube.

It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.

Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p92QfWOw88I

>It looked like a high school project. I doubt Apple would ever preview their OS with such a poorly produced video.

I think it's pretty good and clean. The iPad UI looks like a scaled down version of OS X in 2001 compared to that now and I've heard the same sentiment from many other people.

Metro looks like that to new people but is very functional once you start using it. Here is a good primer on it.

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

I didn't read the Gruber post, but I think he was refering to the actual production quality of the video, not the UI itself.

Whoever shot that video had no idea what they were doing. Get a lav mike or boom mike, for a start, so that your primary narration track doesn't pick up all the reverb from the room. It was definitely amateurish - not only would Apple not do such a crappy job, I doubt most startups would, either.

You can have an outsourced service make a demo video with proper voiceover for less than $1,000. That video from Microsoft is just sloppy, not frugal or homespun.

Give me a break, the only people watching these keynotes are geeks.

My wife is a nurse. She has no real interest in technology, though she loves her iPhone. When a new iPhone or new major version of iOS comes out she always asks me about because all her nursey mates on the ward chat about it.

Agreed. A fellow co-worker, who doesn't even have an iPhone, loves watching Steve Jobs present keynotes due to his presentation style and they way he/apple demo's new technology. While she may be a producer in a digital agency she is certainly not tech savvy and not trying to keep up with the latest apple news.

edit grammer

What about the media frenzy before and after the event? Don't tell me that it doesn't have a beneficial effect.

Definitely not, I know loads of people who are happy Apple users but by no definition geeks, and they watch it. Just because they want to know what way the platform is going they're using.

Anyone who presents technology to non-expert audiences can benefit from studying these presentations. They're masterful.

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