Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rapzid | Hacker News Reader

Is interesting but now Microsoft is the more open company and Apple is IBM from the 1984 commercial. Maybe I'm just older, but now at 30 I'm much more of into Microsoft than when I was a teenager(I never really got on the hate M$ bandwagon though). What they have been doing with Azure and .NET ecosystems is great. They have top engineering and research chops; just look at the new goggles and a lot of their labs projects. MSDN is a wealth of free knowledge. Etc.

Apple is on top of the world right now, but so was Sony 2000. Somehow MS just feels more substantial to me than Apple in 2015.

I realize this is entirely subjective.

View on HN

>They have top engineering and research chops; just look at the new goggles and a lot of their labs projects. MSDN is a wealth of free knowledge.

A common comparison between MS and Apple is that MS pours a lot of money into R&D and makes a lot of forward-looking videos. Meanwhile Apple is laser-focused, spends way less on R&D, and ships.

Microsoft lost a decade, and you feel that MS is more substantial in computing? Are you sure they're not just tugging at your geeky heartstrings?

I feel like we're comparing a consumer electronics business to an enterprise software company though, so there are bound to be some stylistic differences.

And Microsoft ships more products than Apple does. I don't want to turn this into one of "those" posts because I'm sure you can find a list of products (and versions) that Microsoft has shipped over the past decade including the Surface line, which positively out-classes Apple's iPad.

How can you say that they "lost a decade"? Where you see "laser focus" I see lack of options. Where Microsoft has 3 products that cover a broad range of use cases that people actually need, I see Apple with 1 product that covers only the most common use cases. It's really nice for Apple's bottom line, but it's also the same reason that most businesses don't use Apple computers.

> "Microsoft lost a decade "

Did it though? MS has been pretty strong in the enterprise. Also is the same decade of Xbox and Kinect.

Blackberry is pretty strong in the enterprise too. :)

The 1984 commercial wasn't about "openness", it was about the looming x86 monoculture in personal computing and the market dominance of IBM. Before showing the commerical at the 1983 keynote, Steve Jobs said: "Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right about 1984?"

Can I build my own device with an access to AppStore? Now that's a monoculture.

MS must be open to survive. It is being crushed by opensource. And they still put DRM where it maters (EFI).

Secure Boot isn't really DRM.

I think Microsoft was being squeezed out of new markets by Google and Apple. I'm not sure how accurate it is to say Microsoft "is being crushed by opensource (sic)". Also, despite being overshadowed by other tech companies, Microsoft's business lines are healthy and growing.

Stacking up Microsoft versus Apple, their businesses are fundamentally different - see exhibit: https://visualign.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/applemicrosoft...

Interestingly Apple (Hardware), Google (Ads), and Microsoft (Software) are quite dominant in different business areas. While Microsoft needs to keep a close watch on Google and Apple encroaching, I think AWS is a bigger rival in terms of growth opportunity.

> Stacking up Microsoft versus Apple, their businesses are fundamentally different - see exhibit: https://visualign.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/applemicrosoft....

It is very interesting how MS is the only one that have different basket of eggs. If Google ever lose relevance in the online Ads market then it's done. The same can be say of Apple (in a lesser degree) if the iphone becomes irrelevant.

My view has been they were losing hearts and minds in the dev community and that using dual licensed or open products as leverage in price negotiations was becoming more common. It felt like much more of a slow bleed.

I'm just under thirty and feel the same way. Microsoft has garnered a lot of good will from young devs through programs like MSDN and DreamSpark. I remember being in school and hearing everyone talk about their MSDN accounts and being able play around with dev tools like VS and SQL Server. I also love working with C# on .NET.

Funny, I can't seem to find Microsoft's file formats for Excel and Word published anywhere. Microsoft is open source where it doesn't really matter, as far as the market is concerned.

Btw, Apple has never been open source. And they only have 5% desktop market share worldwide. Pretend that mobile doesn't exist. The "PC" world hasn't changed much in 20 years. Mac is more accepted but they're just a rounding error compared to Windows.

Finally, iPhone is Apple's big money maker. However, they have less than 20% market share in the global market. They're doing pretty well in some markets, but Android is the dominant mobile OS.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

Yes, you're missing something.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

True, these are very open standards. Microsoft even provides a pretty good xml editing tool to inspect a docx of xlsx or whatever once it is made to see how it is made https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb448854(v=o...

Pretty much my thinking.

I think Apple offers a big walled garden for computing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com