The philosopher and poet George Santayana once say that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”, and he was totally right: you need to understand history to understand the present. But there’s an inverse problem, too: those who only see the present through the lens of history are never going to be able to understand the future.
Case in point: the endless, repetitive and now frankly tedious number of commentators who look at the battle between Android and iOS and say “Aha! It’s just like PC versus Mac!” The latest to make this mistake is Joseph Fieber at (where else?) PC World.
It all feels very familiar, harking back to the Mac vs. PC battle–and analyst Jack Brown suggests the outcome will be the same, with Android dominating by 2014. What can you learn from the past when choosing, using, and managing mobile platforms in the workplace?
Here’s where the alarm bells start ringing. It may all feel familiar to you Joseph, but that’s mainly because you’re not looking beyond the surface. You’re seeing “open” (Windows/Android) and “closed” (Mac/iOS) and going “Aha!”
Sorry, but that’s the kind of reasoning that I would have graded you as a C- for when I taught philosophy classes. Let’s have some facts, shall we?
In the early days of personal computers in the 1980s, Apple developed the Mac, which allowed the average person to use a computer. It was easy to use, and much better for graphics work than anything else available, so software companies wrote for it, and publishers and graphic artists used it exclusively. Microsoft released Windows not long after Apple’s introduction of the Mac, and as it improved, more software became available for the PC.
Yay! Facts! Except we’re missing a few. IBM introduced the IBM PC, running DOS, in 1981. By 1984, it had 34% of the market, and that’s a market which included glorified calculators like the Commodore 64 – hardly in the same market as either PC or Mac. Windows 1.0 was announced in 1983, and no one with an IBM PC in 1984 was going to switch to Mac, knowing that Windows – which would be “just like a Mac” – was just round the corner.
To put it simply: The analogy between Windows/Mac and Android/iOS breaks down immediately because Microsoft already had a committed set of customers bought into their eco-system, who could expect to upgrade to something much like a Mac “real soon now”. Why would they switch? They wouldn’t.
With iPhone, on the other hand, there wasn’t the same kind of commitment. The apps market was undeveloped, so there wasn’t the resistance to switching from one platform to another that a more developed market has (noone chose not to get an iPhone because of the cool apps they’d got on their Nokia 6100).
Big, big difference.
And there’s more. At no point was Apple taking 60% of the entire profits of the computer market with the Mac. Apple made nothing like the profits on the Mac that it makes on iPhone. Neither did Apple have huge amounts of cash behind it, allowing it to tie up supply chains as it can now. And, perhaps most important of all, the buying patterns were different: no one got a free subsidised Mac. People didn’t know they’d be upgrading, regular as clockwork, every two years. And more:
Many consider Apple’s iPhone, released in 2007, to be the first real smartphone
Only if they’re idiots who know nothing about smartphones, but we’ll ignore that.
The Android Market matured and is on pace to overtake Apple’s App Store within months.
And the majority of them are free. Again, this is a massive difference to the Windows/Mac world. For developers, “free” = “no cash”. How many professional app developers are prepared to rely on free? Unless they already have a method of monetising elsewhere, “free = amateur hour”.
The innovative, single-vendor system sets the tone and gets early adopters, but the mainstream player with multiple vendors wins in the end due to lower costs and greater variety of options.
Define “win” here: does it mean market share, or does it mean profits? Another difference between Mac/Windows and Android/iOS is that Microsoft always directly made money from Windows, in fact a lot more money than Apple did from the Mac. Google, on the other hand, makes peanuts directly from Android, and none of its licensees makes anything like the money Apple makes. When it comes to money, only Apple is a winner.
In the past, many businesses started with Macs, supported a mixed environment of Macs and PCs for a while, and eventually went all-PC. The extra costs involved in managing two platforms on top of compatibility issues and software availability made the migration inevitable.
Leaving aside the issue of whether “many businesses started with Macs”… actually, no, I’m not going to leave that aside, because it’s utter baloney. Most businesses around in 1984-5 had already bought into the Microsoft eco-system: for most corporates, the IBM PC was their first PC. The notion that Mac ever had a significant presence in the enterprise is rewriting history.
Look, Joseph: I worked at Apple in 1989. I know how few corporate accounts they had. The idea that they somehow were dominant in business and let is slip is utter nonsense.
Anyway… the idea of standardised single platforms is also something that’s changed. The big trend in corporate IT now is “bring your own device“: As long as it can access corporate systems safely (which of course iOS devices can – no malware here, unlike Android), you can use what you want. And it’s not like iOS devices require much in the way of support.
This has been a long post, but I think it’s worth it, because this utterly stupid argument is being peddled relentlessly. The peddlers are usually PC journalists who have spent so long staring at DOS prompts and installing anti-virus software that they can’t, even for one second, contemplate that the world might have changed. Perhaps they’re just afraid that the understanding they have of the desktop computer world is no longer really where the cutting edge of technology is, that they’re now old tech guys, like experts in propellor engines at the start of the jet age.
Like the entire notion of a Windows vs Mac debate, they’re no longer relevant. And it scares the hell out of them.