Shelley Powers wrote a thoughtful post yesterday in response to Kathy Sierra’s comparison of Microsoft and Apple and the differing expecations each company’s users have.
Here’s the passage that really got me thinking:
All in all, Apple promises what it can deliver. Apple promises to be easy, and it is; Apple promises to be sexy, and it is. What Apple doesn’t promise is what it can’t deliver: to be a cheap, reliable work horse.Microsoft, on the other hand, is a company that makes claims based on its weaknesses, rather than its strengths. It makes grand promises about security, and thus virtually guarantees being a target; releasing, on average, one new security bulletin a week. It brags about reliability, when the operating system has to work on devices that range from the powerhouse to the puny. It seeks to win over business based on the stability of its products, and just when developers had created a wealth of applications in one environment (COM, DCOM, and COM+), it abandons it and the developers in favor of something completely new (.NET).
To be blunt: Microsoft has a corporate death wish, but will never be allowed to die and will, instead, thrive. This rather astonishing contradiction is based on the fact that the Windows operating system is about as ubiquitous as the common cold; the kicker is the reason it’s so ubiquitous is that Microsoft makes promises it can’t keep. Soooo, Microsoft gets slapped, true; but it gets slapped all the way to the bank.
Saying there’s a double-standard, then, when people complain about having to re-boot a Windows laptop, as compared to having to re-boot an Apple powerbook implies that both systems are focused on the same audience, and based on the same promises. It ain’t no such thing.
She’s absolutely right.
Definite food for thought as Microsoft goes through its latest attempt to reinvent itself.
Plenty of promises left to keep…
I’m packing today for a short trip to Boston, where I’ll be participating in the Corante/Berkman “Symposium on Social Architecture.” I’m looking forward to meeting some of the other participants in the symposium—folks I know of but haven’t met, like Kaliya Hamlin, Zephyr Teachout, Andrew Rasiej, JD Lasica.
Taking the redeye out tonight, and a night flight home, so there won’t be any great aerial photos. But I realized this morning that Boston is one of the few big cities in the US that I haven’t visited as an adult, so I’m going to be sure to do a little sightseeing on either side of the symposium itself. So there will be photos, oh yes. Just not from the airplane.
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