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Comment by kyllo | Hacker News Reader

I think that it's a good strategy for Microsoft to make its software run on other platforms. This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform. It's not even the early 2000's with the "I'm a Mac vs. I'm a PC" meme. Now there are multiple popular platforms (at least in the consumer market), none with clear dominance, and meanwhile Microsoft's software only works on their own platform.

They have to compete now, and their software should sell on its own merits, not because of platform lock-in network effects. This will make Microsoft a better company with a higher quality product.

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<i>This isn't the 1990s anymore where Windows is the dominant platform.</i>

It's always easy to see who's in the bubble.

it speaks to the amazing power of marketing. People are always blown away when they find out that apple has less than a 10% market share and that their market share has actually gone down over the last 10 years.

I'm not sure it's marketing but being in the bubble like was previously mentioned.

Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work.

Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)

Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners.

So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.

Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?

I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for.

When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...

No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.

That's because market share is a meaningless measure.

Nope its actually a totally real and meaningful measure. it measures how much of the market

market -> all the people

encompasses your share

share -> using your stuff

Apple has shown time and again that it isn't a good measure of Profitability, but your statement seemed to imply a more general connotation that I can't help with disagree with.

It's meaningless because the 'market' of which share is measured is an arbitrary classification.

How so ? What market do you propose to measure then ?

How so? Because these so called 'markets' of which share is measured are not markets at all. They are simply groups of products that analysts have decided to add together.

Except that it doesn't measure the actual using at all; I seem to recall there being rather more interesting stats than just vanilla "market share" in the iOS vs Android comparison that show that while more people have Android devices, more people with iOS are spending more on, and using more Apps.

So again we see that apple has been good at getting the platform profitable here is a great article that breaks this down. It ends up being less about the fact that iphone apps are better per say (which I think they often are) but more about the fact that significantly more apps for android start out free.

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/03/11/the-surprising-number...

but your statement about usage is wrong see the following article on app use:

http://www.cnet.com/news/most-iphone-applications-gathering-...

That cnet piece doesn't in any way contradict the parent's comment.

Market share != Usage share

If more people are buying product A, but product B has a longer useful life, then it conceivable for product B to have a higher usage share.

The problem is that usage share is a lot harder to measure than market share. But ultimately it's the more important number when it comes to things like network effect and developer and consumer mindshare.

This is definitely conceivably true but definitely not true in the current context.

80 million OSX (any version) users world wide in 2012 http://www.cultofmac.com/172693/mac-os-x-by-the-numbers-60-m...

110 million windows 8(just windows 8 not windows in general) users in 2013 http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/there-are-now-over-110-mil...

believe it or not their are 500 million windows xp users still http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-to-cut-windows-xp-2...

Market share actually does in some respect account for a sum of existing products in use, how that is calculated will depend on the reporting entity.

Usage share turns out to be super easy to capture these days, we do it by looking at the browser string of a request to a web server. Most big sites are putting out this type of data so a relatively clear picture emerges.

For a company like microsoft or apple market share is a more useful measure because it helps them plan/predict their supply chain so that they have the right amount of inventory in the right place at the right time.

But from a developer perspective usage share is more interesting for obvious reasons.

In this case the numbers are still basically the same.

It's not just marketing, people always say that about Apple because they have good marketing, but they have good numbers too. The fact that they have less than 10% marketshare in PCs is not all that significant when you consider the massive numbers of PCs that are sold for all kinds of tasks where a Mac wouldn't even qualify. If you were to look at marketshare of home computer purchases it would be drastically higher. And that is not even considering the effect of smart phones and tables on peoples usage patterns. My in-laws who are small town folk from the midwest, as far as you can possibly imagine from an urban hipster, had been using Dells for years and switched to an iPad last year and are getting much more out of it than they ever did their last aircraft carrier of a Win 7 Dell that was ostensibly much more powerful.

There isn't really any useful information in your reply here. Apples "Consumer only" market share is still less than 20% and if you include Ipads..... as a PC replacement their market share is still only around 15% (though that data is a year old apple only had about 25% growth last year which makes it a wash in the over all market so those numbers are still pretty truthy-ish)

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/14/2706292/apple-ipad-compute...

Part of the point of my post was to show how people assume statistics in their head without doing something as simple as a Google search. Saying that market share isn't a significant measure is silly because, well its a measure of how much of the market actually uses apple.

Which leads us back to the original point, the fact that you feel that the numbers must be significantly higher is only a representation of how apple has captured the minds and hearts of people around the world... Marketing

I would suspect that the overwhelming majority of the ~80% of home users on Windows are just using it for web-surfing and nothing else. Basically most home windows machines are probably roughly comparable to a Chromebook insofar as actual day-to-day usage is concerned. Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. All the apps most people I know on windows use are web-based. This is anecdotal based on my observations, though I'd love to see hard data in this department.

My 80 year old grandmother actively uses VMware on her windows 8 machine, for real not making this up.

And that's the problem with anecdotes they tend to be way more interesting than the real data.

What does she use VMware for?

she has been an avid user of

PC Gourmet (Big Blue Disk 39)

since the eighties. I have never been able to extract the recipes easily and she has been using it pretty much constantly for 20+ years so there are too many to do by hand. It worked ok in xp but won't run since windows 7/8 so ... vmware

Is there any way you can get a copy of the disk to me? I'm interested in old file formats.

Connections like these are why HN is amazeballs. You can make a simple comment and someone here will have a technical interest in helping you out.

For the sake of everyone in your family, please back up everything in multiple places. That's awesome to have a snapshot of the culinary history of your family in digital format. When the time is right, share all the recipes!

Runs pretty well on DOSBox - found Big Blue Disk 93 on cd.textfiles.com.

I could get it to run in DOSBox but couldn't get things to print right the way she wanted it to.

edit: i now see that you found a version of DOSBox that I didn't find that has good printer support.

Sorry for the multiple posts on this. You sent me on a bit of an adventure:

* Downloaded a modified DOSBox build with printer support from http://ykhwong.x-y.net/ (linked from DOSBox wiki so not too worried)

* Mapped LPT1 in DOSBox to LPT1 in Windows

* installed CUPS-PDF [1] on a CUPS server in a VM

* shared virtual PDF printer via Samba to Windows

* ran net use lpt1: \\vm.local\pdf /persistent:yes

* printed from DOSBox and got [2]

1: http://www.cups-pdf.de/ (or apt-get install cups-pdf)

2: https://mega.co.nz/#!ehpxha4b!U2q9lhH2RoniPKucW862Y2qRxCgMJ6...

I will have to try this out.... the problem with extracting all the recipes... of which there are a ton. is that you are still in a go in print them one by one then parse the pdf. What I really wanted to do was figure out how to read the data files then pull everything into a db or something where I could do more with it.

The file format looks whacky but not impossible to parse.

Get in contact with me if you're interested in pursuing this further.

That's mostly all good and fair. I don't have any data to contribute. But the I think my fundamental point is good:

PC market share as defined by analysts is reflective of the market that Microsoft is pursuing, but it is a large superset of the market Apple is pursuing.

You say this is silly to point out, but you're leaning on circular logic. You take "the market" as a given a priori, but the truth is that the market is defined a certain way, and that way is very unfavorable to Apple (and that's without even getting into the whole profit share vs market share question).

Their marketing is funded by their dominant profit margin; before, people think market share equates to higher earnings, but apple shows that even with a small market share you can have a dominant profit margin and earnings, which is what really matter.

A most truthful argument. However I think that in relation to the OP its important to ask Cui Bono. This is most definitely to the benefit of apple and its shareholder, and so reflects less value to the overall population of technology users.

Assuming you don't want to get into the hocus pocus circular math of trying to figure out the value of how Apples profitability is driving competitive innovations in the greater share of the market(i.e. there would be no Microsoft surface tablet today without the ipad)

Your post speaks to the amazing power of something, not sure what. Apple's market share of what? Is below what? Where? Among whom? Has dropped since when?

It still dominates overwhelmingly in enterprise, but at homes? People might have a windows box, but lots of older adults (people over 40) just use an iPad in front of the TV instead.

My mum hasn't touched her PC in several months.

And anyone over 60 is still using an XP laptop from 2002.

Most people have a computer in their home. If they graduated to mobile devices, they didn't just chuck the thing in the trash, they kept it around. They still probably get photos off their camera or print coupons on it, because AirPrint and whatever Androids 4.4 printing thing is are barely known about, crummy, and only supported on a fraction of devices

I can't use an ipad for real work. I can't program on anything smaller than a BFM and I need a real keyboard to do more than a few characters.

rodgerd, this comment really annoys me. It comes across so smug and, IMO, so wrong.

Windows is not the dominant computing platform, because PCs are not the dominant computing platform. Smartphones have been outselling PCs since 2011 – not even considering tablets. Windows is obviously still the dominant PC OS, but unlike the 1990's, that doesn't make it the dominant platform.

This is an article about Microsoft releasing Office for smartphone and tablet OSes. To ignore them from your evaluation of the "dominant platform" seems foolish.

Windows is the dominant computing platform. Smartphone sales are irrelevant. Most of the top selling apps on either app stores are entertainment apps and other tiny apps that are mildly relevant. The majority of non-web businesses in the world could survive a temporary internet shutdown but not if windows went away tomorrow. There is nothing dominant (yet) about iOS or Android in the way that Windows was and is.

In the world, outside the bubble, there are still more people using PCs to do stuff than pretty much any other device. That looks like it's in the process of changing. But the only people who think it already has are folks living in a very particular slice of reality.

Hasn't Office always been available for the Mac?

I believe that is more because of Apple than because of Microsoft. Apple has a history of being pretty convincing towards these crucial applications. I believe Microsoft got out of a anti-trust suit from Apple if they agreed to release Office for Mac. And Apple has a love/hate relationship with Adobe too, in a similar way.

It's kind of funny, though. Jobs was pragmatic enough to realize that it was better to get Microsoft to "open up" than to win the lawsuit. It's hard to say, but I definitely think it paid off.

In a limited way. Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Communicator (i/o Lync) are available for Mac, but they are not even close to the Windows versions in terms of feature parity. VBA support has been on-and-off. Access, Infopath, and Publisher are not available at all. They're written in Cocoa and on a different release cycle. There is no Office for Mac 2013, current version is 2011.

OneNote for Mac just came out, and it's really good. So they're obviously doing something in the MacBU.

With One Note for Mac and now this, I'm actually excited for the next release of Office for Mac, it's looking like it's going to be really good!

I'm sick of Outlook on OSX (it's the only Office app I use), I can add rules, but I can't add notifications so I miss all of my emails. Now I've turned it off I have to manually order things.

On top of that I'm stuck with Calibri as the default font. The default can't be changed.

Mac Office has often surpassed Win Office in many ways; in usability for example. It is at least a different product, not better or worse.

"It is at least a different product, not better or worse."

The very fact that it's different makes it worse for me. I can use Excel 2010 for Windows without thinking about the tool. Small differences like startup behaviour, position of things on the ribbon, and keyboard shortcut force me to think about how to use Excel for Mac, rather than focusing on the task at hand.

Some, but not all, of this is down to differences in the platform and platform-specific design conventions.

You should really look into a version of Word called 6.0 for Windows and Mac. Thankfully, Excel 6.0 was skipped for the Mac.

For 95%+ of their user base, Word, Powerpoint and Excel have feature parity on the Mac/Windows. Outlook and Lync are significantly superior on the Windows Platform.

Excel had a pretty nasty regression on the Macintosh in Office 2004/2008 (to the point at which I no longer used it on the Mac in 2008, it was pretty horrid) - but they returned it to (mostly) feature parity as of Office 2011.

Sharepoint, on the other hand, is complete crap on a Macintosh. It's almost like it's been designed to be bad.

For 95% of their user base Outlook for Mac is also at feature parity.

I've been using it in enterprise for years and never found a missing feature.

It has. And it was pretty good. Ironically at the time it was made available it was part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back (See we are supporting another platform! wink wink) My how times have changed.

Microsoft made Office for the mac long before that deal was made, and it was only done as a show of confidence for the Mac platform; Apple didn't really need the money (they had more than few billion in the bank, were still profitable, and far from death). To paraphrase Mark Twain, "news of Apple's impending death had been greatly exaggerated."

>> part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back

Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime.

I googled this:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...

"At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in Apple." - People forget back then that if MSFT dropped Office support for Apple it would have been a significant blow.

- Then Steve Jobs himself. I think these specifics support my initial comment.

"If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again."

You really quote a marketing spin presentation as truth?! From Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs?!

Again, this is an old subject. Google "video for windows" "source code" apple quicktime

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows#Overview

"In 1995, Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[3][4][5][6] This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock."

Hey BugBrother. MSFT could have a) Settled and written a check for $500 mil and b) stopped supporting Office on the Mac the next day and it's likely Apple would be a business school case study about how you fall into the ashes.Back at that time the only people using Macs in the corporate environment were talented people buried away in the marketing department doing unique design work. They were the only people who were tolerated by corporate IT (and then often begrudgingly so) And the only reason they could even keep using their Macs in this Windows XP world was because they could at least exchange Word/PowerPoint and Excel docs from the 98% of the employees using Windows. Add to that all the independent and small consulting shops who had to accept Office Docs from their corporate clients. MSFT's support for Office on the Mac was lukewarm at best leading up to this. Mac users lived in real fear that at any point MSFT would simply drop support for the Mac. It would have been a deathblow. A few hundred million for some code infringement (and it would only have been that based on the dynamics you list) would have simply forestalled the inevitable.

You're changing the subject after your wild claims are shown to be trivially wrong?

But ok, I can comment:

As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.

Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.

I could also note, re your claims about Office and corporate environments, that there were virtual machines that ran Windows and Office.

An anecdote:

One infamous Word/Excel version (6 iirc?) ran faster on emulated Windows using a different processor architecture than as an application. (I have never trusted a Microsoft product since then -- you never know when paying the strategy tax will rape functionality you depend on.)

But you almost certainly knew this.

Yes, in fact, before Windows even existed, the 1.0 version of Word for Mac was released the same year the Mac debuted (1984).

I can't think of any companies who sell software for other platforms that are making anywhere in the same neighborhood as companies that own the platform. Microsoft doesn't want to become another Adobe.

Microsoft Office is broadly used throughout the business world.

Adobe sells to an industry niche of creative professionals. That's a substantially different situation. A lot more computers have Word installed than Photoshop.

Well, capturing profit in tech is all about commoditizing your proprietary product's complements, without allowing others to commoditize your product.

Apple made their money selling proprietary hardware, first computers, then mobile devices.

Microsoft made their money selling proprietary operating systems while commoditizing hardware (PCs).

Google made their money selling proprietary advertising on commodity software on commodity devices. Browsers were already a commodity, they're commoditizing operating systems by doing everything through the web browser, and they're commoditizing mobile devices with Android.

Now Microsoft is trying to get into the mobile device market, after Google already commoditized it, a strategy that's doomed to failure.

They're also trying to get into the data center and IaaS/PaaS market, but that's already been somewhat commoditized by Amazon, Google, Heroku, DigitalOcean, etc.

The companies that are still making money off a proprietary platform, are doing it because they haven't allowed it to be commoditized yet. MS still makes most of their money from platform lock-in in the corporate market, but as soon as that product gets commoditized, their goose is cooked.

So sure, Microsoft doesn't want to become just a software shop like Adobe, but then, it doesn't look like they really have much of a choice in the matter.

Microsoft made products for the Apple decades ago.

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