| Tuesday, June 11, 2002 |
21:31 - MBU != Microsoft
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/06/GoingLimp.shtml
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Egad. Looks like I have some explaining to do.
Brian Tiemann, ever the Mac optimist, greets the new Apple advertising campaign with undisguised glee. It is directly targeted at trying to convince current users of Windows to switch to the Mac.
First of all, "undisguised glee" wasn't the intended attitude. I thought, in fact, that I'd spent most of the article being worried about potential pitfalls and potential accusations that could be leveled at Apple over it. I have my worries, and I'd hoped I'd made them clear. Apple is playing chicken with Microsoft here, and I have no delusions that it is anything but a guy on a Schwinn hurtling toward a big rig down the bed of the Los Angeles River.
Granted, I've been very optimistic about Apple lately. But I like to think that that's because I have reason to do so. They moved back into Mariani One. They have a larger and more diversified product lineup than they've had in years. Every week someone else in my company shows up with an iPod.
But that doesn't mean I think the current ad campaign can't backfire. I did say as much.
Thus Brian assumes that Microsoft will continue to support Office for Mac fully, leaving the way clear for Apple to move into Microsoft's living room and then head for the dining room to eat Microsoft's lunch.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Microsoft has a third alternative: go limp. It can deemphasize Office for Mac without any formal announcement. Keep working on it, but not as hard. Put less effort into "Macifying" it, make it feel less organic and less like a Mac application. Put less effort into usability. Put much less effort into trying to make it run rapidly on underpowered PPCs under OSX. Use no Altivec instructions at all. Worry less about deadlines; less about bug fixes. Worry less about trying to maintain feature parity on future releases. Leave out a couple of critical features "because there just wasn't time to get them in". Make file-format compatibility a bit less reliable. Cease making an attempt to use OSX threading to improve performance.
True. But that's always been true, and there's a reason why we haven't worried about this prospect as much as we otherwise would have:
The Mac Business Unit.
Office and IE for the Mac aren't written by Microsoft proper. They're written and maintained by an insane bunch of shrieking zealots within the bowels of Redmond known as the Mac Business Unit. These guys are nuts. There are no bigger Macophiles outside of One Infinite Loop-- in fact, they give Apple itself a run for its money when it comes to championing the cause and pushing the envelope. It's because of the MacBU that IE on the Mac has a number of features that it doesn't have on Windows (sidebars, cookie management, etc.), and that Office v.X has features that Office XP doesn't (transparent and antialiased charts, QuickTime export).
For Microsoft to "go limp" and stop pushing their products to be substandard on the Mac would be a bigger and longer slide than if their Mac products right now merely had parity with the Windows versions, and were produced by the same people. They're not. The MacBU people would fight any such edict from the top with the ferocity of cornered tigers; they've had to do it before, and they've won their little niche which they guard fiercely.
I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm not even ruling it out as a consequence of this latest attack by Apple; if we see the MacBU get disbanded, we know that it can be interpreted to be a lot more than a threat-- it would amount to finding not just the horse's head on the pillow, but two or three of those assassination-centipedes from Episode II curled up inside it. But I am saying that when it comes to the MacBU, this isn't a question of Microsoft "going limp". It's a question of their having to pulverize their own bones before they'll start to droop.
Sometimes it seems like Mac users are blinded by their optimism. They just don't understand how vicious real competition can be. Do they really think that Microsoft is just going to roll over and let Steve Jobs steal their market share?
No, and that's why I remain quite worried, as I had hoped to convey.
I think that we have very good cause to be optimistic these days. I can't help but comment happily on all the positive news I see being announced and all the uplifting indicators I see around me every day, and sometimes I genuinely have a hard time finding a gray lining.
But when I see one, I do point it out. Or at least I try.
Without Office, the Mac is dead in the water. That's so true as to be a given. But I'm unwilling to accept that Steve Jobs has undertaken this attack without thoroughly thinking it through. Hell, he's been through scuffles with Gates over and over in the past. He knows exactly what Microsoft is capable of. He's many things, but he's not a stupid man; and "five times bitten, not shy anymore" isn't much of a credo for any CEO worth his one-dollar-a-year.
Yes, I'm an Engineerist too, and my idealism stems not from religious fervor and a belief that Apple can do no wrong, but from repeated experience and observation that Apple is the biggest proponent I know of the kind of technological elegance that drives the geeks I know to excel. Geeks may be pragmatic to a fault, but they will bend over backward in order to promote the technology that they consider "right".
And when we look at the history of Apple since Steve's return, yes, it may well all be astonishing coincidences and dumb luck-- but when you follow the timeline from the start of the OS X project, the colorful original iMacs which made home computers sexy and desirable pieces of art and put Apple back on the tech map, the pro-level laptops that IT guys and executives can't keep their hands off of, then a return to a motif of white plastic and stainless steel-- more conservative, but more artistic still-- and then the retail stores, and finally OS X itself and the Xserve-- these aren't random successes thrown together in a bizarrely coincidental sequence. They all fit together in a timeline that must have existed as a skeleton strategy as far back as 1997. The fact that it's worked out is astonishing in itself. By all the odds, Apple should have died years ago. But instead, they're turning a profit quarter-over-quarter.
I try not to come across as "blinded"; I really do. I confess to surrounding myself with enough Apple-related news that I have a skewed view of the technology world. But I think I can justify a fair amount of optimism regarding Apple, and if Steve does indeed know what he's doing, this ad campaign could pay off big.
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