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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Friday, January 23, 2004

Macworld's Jobs interview raises questions

But wait, there's more.

In MacWorld's exclusive interview (which is painfully short) with Steve Jobs, His Royal Reality Field passes out a few whoppers. Let's take a look at the art of lying.

Steve: All I can say is, I think the Mac reinvented the personal-computer industries in the eighties, and Microsoft copied it in the nineties--and that's been a big success for them too.

Response: The "Microsoft copied Apple" thing is so well-accepted in the industry that it's taken on the air of truth. But I will take the time to pass on a barely-understood truth that is so often glossed over by Mac advocates, but clearly described in the first issue of Macworld from 1984, which the magazine was nice enough to include on the bundled CD in the 20th anniversary issue: Microsoft actually did much of the design work on the first Mac. In fact, both Apple and Microsoft described Microsoft's participation in the Mac's development over the two years leading up to its introduction as "an extension" of the Mac team in Cupertino.

Bill Gates, interviewed in that first issue, and long before he was perceived as Enemy Number One by the Mac community, had this to say: "We've had very in-depth involvement [with the development of the Mac]. Whenever you get involved with prototype machines that early on, you're essentially part of the engineering team; you're help to find bugs and making suggestions for design changes. Microsoft has been an extension of the internal Mac software team for the last few years. We've had a close working relationship with the Mac team that has been beneficial for both sides. We've learned a great deal about doing graphics applications, and we've made sure that their subsystem, dialog boxes, and memory manager fit in properly. If you compared the Mac to what it was two years ago, you probably wouldn't recognize it. Steve's vision of where the machine should go ... has been preserved. But the disk, the memory, the code in ROM, the number of bits onscreen, they're all different. We didn't realize that we needed to do so much work with the memory manager, menus, and dialog boxes. Nor did we know how we were going to make the Finder work or how the desktop tools would work. All of these things eventually got built into the software that Apple includes with the system.

So there you go. Microsoft at least partially designed the Mac's Finder, memory manager, menus, dialog boxes, and other subsystems. Gates was upfront that they learned about creating graphical systems during the process. And yet Microsoft "stole" stuff from Apple. It's funny when you think about it.

And the line, "[personal computers have] been a big success for [Microsoft] too" is rich. Microsoft's earnings over the past twenty years outrank Apple's by about 100-to-1. The company just had its first $10 billion quarter ($1.48 billion in profit), a quarter during which Apple made just $63 million on sales of $2 billion. The two companies basically don't even compete.

Steve: We finally got out ahead again with OS X, and I think you'll see Microsoft copying that in the future.

Response: I've already documented the number of ways in which OS X steals concepts, technologies, and interfaces from Windows. That's a ludicrous statement. Windows XP has sold over 150 million copies worldwide, compared to less than 10 million for OS X; again, these two companies technically don't even compete.

Steve: The Power Mac G5 [is] the most powerful personal computer out there.

Response: This has been refuted a number of times, in a number of places, since Jobs first made this claim. But I'll point to a Mac-friendly source for this refutation, which is also the most recent comparison I've seen. In the 20th anniversary collector's issue of MacAddict, an article titled "Mac vs. PC Smackdown" concludes that "the [Pentium 4] handled the G5" in all of the application tests they performed. After laying down some caveats, the magazine notes that "there is no irrefutable answer to the [G5 vs. PC] question--it depends on which tests you're running and how you define personal computer. However, there's no arguing the fact that the G5 is one damn fast chip and that the Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 is one damn fast personal computer." Indeed. It's funny that it's so clear-cut to Jobs though.

Steve: We declared that we thought that the next big thing for the personal computer was the digital hub three years ago, right?
Macworld: And now you see Microsoft, HP, and the rest--
Steve: Oh, everybody's copying us now. And we're quite a ways ahead of everybody.

Response: I love this bit of history rewriting. Three years ago, and three days before Jobs announced his company's digital hub strategy, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced Microsoft's "digital lifestyle" strategy. Go ahead, look it up. Gates announced the strategy on January 6, 2001. Jobs announced his company's strategy on January 9, 2001. And since then, Microsoft has kicked butt with a free new MovieMaker 2.0 application that requires no effects, titling, or transition rendering at all (compared to iMovie's slow rendering) and a Photo Story tool, which also shipped before it's Apple counterpart, the Ken Burns effect, in 2003) that blows away Apple's tools. Don't get me wrong: Both Apple and Microsoft have done a great job with digital media technologies. The notion that Apple is leading the way or being copied, however, is ludicrous.

Steve: [PCs and computers] want to link sometimes ... But most of these [integrated PC/TV products] ... have failed. All of them have failed."

Response: Curious. The TiVo, which popularized digital video recording (DVR), is actually a Linux box that you can telnet to if you want, and the Media Center PCs, based on Windows XP, are selling quite well. I use my Media Center PC to record TV shows in glorious 720 x 480 high resolution video, transcode them to WMV format, and then watch them on a laptop while I'm traveling. Too bad you can't do that with a Mac, eh?

Of course, Apple can only do so much, so it behooves Steve to downplay a product category he didn't invent and can't compete in. It will be curious to see how Apple fans react to the amazing Portable Media Center devices that various companies will ship this year.

Steve: Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes' or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

Response: Nothing. But BMW doesn't compete against a single competitor that controls over 95 percent of the market. BMW competes against a slew of other brands, offered by dozens of companies, in different markets all around the world. Apple cannot be fairly compared to BMW at all. But hey, I love that he compares Apple to luxury car brands and not, say, Kia, with which they have a lot more in common.

[ Posted at 5:19 PM | Permalink ]