KEY POINTS:
The company was in disarray. Competitors had beaten its percentage of the market down and the trend looked set to continue. The product line was exasperatingly diverse, so much so it was hard to differentiate one model from another, and rival platforms were starting to look attractively cheap and cohesive by comparison. It was haemorrhaging money (according to CNN Money) and struggling to right its flagship brand.
That was Apple Computer in the mid 1990s. When Steve Jobs came back, one of the first things he did was run a razor over the product lines, to make them easy to differentiate and easy to choose between.
Of course, the radical design of the all-in-one new iMac helped turn heads (and open wallets) too, and then the iPod defined a whole new market sector which turned into a real strength for the company. Since then, Apple has been rising inexorably, although it still holds a small market share compared to all those machines just running Windows.
When you consider an Apple Mac can also run Windows, pundits increasingly rate Apple (now called Apple Inc) as a computer maker, up against Dell, HP etc, rather than as a direct competitor to operating system maker Microsoft per se.
Now, though, Microsoft is looking increasingly like Apple did in the mid '90s. Which version of Vista would you like? Have fun choosing. Hewlett Packard has become so tired of complaints about Vista on its computers, Businessweek says the US computer giant is exploring the possibility of building its own mass-market operating system. According to Businessweek's sources, HP is basing the simpler OS on Linux (as Apple Mac OS is built upon Unix). The article says "The goal may be to make HP less dependent on Windows and to strengthen HP's hand against Apple, which has gained market share in recent years by offering easy-to-use computers with its own operating system."
Indeed.
Another factor may be security. Despite the half-decade struggle by Microsoft to protect Windows against malicious software, it's spreading faster than ever. The New York Times says "As more business and social life has moved onto the Web, criminals thriving on an underground economy of credit card thefts, bank fraud and other scams rob computer users of an estimated $100 billion a year ..." The article claims that recently, Microsoft anti-malware researchers disassembled an infecting program and discovered, to their chagrin, that it was programmed to turn on the Windows Update feature after it took over the user's computer. This to protect their own malware from the attacks of rival criminals!
There has been a 43 percent jump in malware removed from Windows computers just in the last half year. This is according to Microsoft's own monitoring.
Then there's the portable device category. Joe Wilcox on eWeek's Microsoft Watch dug into the numbers on iPhone OS market share. He found that "By even the most conservative of analyst estimates about third-quarter iPhone shipments, Apple's OS almost certainly will push aside Windows Mobile in smart phone operating system market share. The smart phone is Windows Mobile's core market."
Wilcox reckons iPhone OS could easily pass Windows Mobile, if Microsoft ships about the same number of copies in each of the previous two quarters. He thinks Windows Mobile shipments will decline to as few as three million. While most PC savants lambast Apple for building the hardware and writing the software, yet you have to admit it's another factor in the iPhone's success. Perhaps that should be 'PC idiot savants'.
In the tech world, you can either pilot the market by introducing new device categories or do a better job of existing device categories. So what was Microsoft thinking when it introduced the Zune up against the iPod?
Microsoft's latest ad campaigns were supposed to seize the initiative from Apple but they don't look to have succeeded. Despite hiring maverick ad firm Crispin Porter & Bogusky (whose principles are Mac users, by the way) to run the campaign, it doesn't seem to have made much impact. The agency's latest idea is ... 'softwear' (pictured above). It's T-shirts, geddit? Microsoft T-shirts. 'Soft wear'. To me, that smacks of desperation. Where's that razor when you need it?
CP&B conceived of the collection, the branding and many of the designs, as well as all the marketing materials, according to an agency representative. The line features retro MS-DOS fonts and a Bill Gates mugshot tee. The line was launched last week in New York and will hit stores in the US on the 15th December.
Who would you pick as the recipient of a Microsoft T-shirt this Christmas? Oversize blue screen of death Tee, anyone?
My advice to Microsoft is this: it's time to tell CP&B to bog-offski. And hire Steve Jobs. Mr Ballmer, you can easily afford it, just pay him double what Apple paid him to fix the firm.
That will be US$2 a year, thanks.
- Mark Webster mac.nz
Pictured above: From the new range of Microsoft "soft wear" T-shirts designed by US advertising company Crispin Porter & Bogusky.
