Well, lets take a closer look at what you are saying and it may clear things up a bit for you.
prodigiousfool said:
Sure NeXT was going under...
The first thing to address is the false statement that NeXT was going under... they weren't.
Had NeXT been
going under in any way, shape or form, Sun Microsystems would have bought them in a heart beat. Sun had just spent the previous couple years working with NeXT to create a NEXTSTEP environment for Solaris which Sun was going to make the focus of their workstation/desktop push. The new environment was finished and ready, plus Sun had just bought a NeXT software development company for their office suite. All those plans (and all that money Sun spent on the transition) were wiped out when Apple bought NeXT.
It wasn't like Sun couldn't afford to buy NeXT either. At this point Sun was so flush with money that people were speculating that they were going to buy Apple.
What I said was that the operating system business wasn't worth it for NeXT and that they were planning on dropping it. The goal was to get Sun totally up and running with the NeXT environment on their hardware, get the NeXT development community to port their software over, and then NeXT could stop selling their OS and concentrate on Enterprise Objects Frameworks and WebObjects (both of which were very profitable).
Had NeXT either been failing or up for sale in 1996, Sun would have grabbed them instantly. NeXT was for sale to one company and one company
only... Apple Computer.
... but in all reality, what hardware is Microsoft selling? When was the last time you or anyone else bought a Microsoft PC? You buy Dell's or HP's with Microsoft Windows software (albeit way overpriced software [hint: think Office]), but the point is, Microsoft doesn't make hardware, and they certainly seem to be doing well. What was their last R&D budget? $7.8 billion?
Microsoft was never a hardware seller, their business model was never based on hardware sales, and they have used some of the worst monopolistic practices known to kill off any competition over the last 20 years.
But I didn't say that selling software couldn't be profitable... what I said was that
for Apple to be as profitable as they are right now selling hardware, they would need a massive serge in market share for Mac OS X. Losing half their hardware sales to other PC makers would have to be off set by a 5x increase in the number of people using Mac OS X. Losing
all their hardware sales to other PC makers would need to be off set by a 10x increase (in other words, they would need to have almost 35% market share).
And this is
only to be as profitable as they are right now. This wouldn't be to be more profitable, this would be to break even.
Lets put this another way, if you sell 10 items a month and your after cost profits make you a good amount of money, would you be willing to attempt to go to a model where you would need to find 100 buyers each month to make the same after cost profit? Would that be a smart move in your opinion?
And what would you do while attempting to drum up this extra business? You wouldn't get it overnight and switching from one model to the other would mean a massive loss in revenue for you.
Would you do something like that? Would any one give up what they have now to
hopefully work their way back up to the same level of profitability in the future? And in the mean time you make less money?
That type of logic is flawed on so many levels.
Yes Apple can more easily support their OS by selling the matching hardware, and it certainly is worth it becuase we all know the quality of OS that we get with that hardware, but saying that OS X or any OS that Apple makes couldn't carry itself demeans the very value of the OS that you are supposedly praising.
Not at all, the reality is that the best products are not the ones that make it in business.
Case in point... OS/2.
OS/2 was a much better OS than anything Microsoft had to offer (in fact, it's foundations would later become what Microsoft offers as Windows today) back in the early 1990s. Why wasn't it successful?
For one thing, IBM had problems getting it preinstalled on PCs. And Microsoft knows that whatever software comes on the average users PC is the software they are going to use.
The first time Microsoft was brought up on monopoly charges was for forcing PC hardware makers to only include MS-DOS on their new PCs. They were able to remove competition from DR-DOS, OS/2 and later the BeOS by doing this. And even though they lost court cases over both DR-DOS and the BeOS, the final effect was that those are no longer threats to Microsoft.
Microsoft knows that better products don't win in the market. That is why they changed their business model in the early 1980s from developing new and innovative software to being reactionary... basically watching what is taking off and then buying their way into (and attempting to take over) those markets.
The best products aren't the most successful. The products that have the most money behind them are. And the ones you can place in front of people are.
This was how Microsoft won the browser wars, people use what is placed in front of them rather than looking for the best product.
It is
consumer inertia. A consumer sitting at arms length from a product will use that product rather than getting up to find a better one.
And I can show examples of this within the Mac community too.
Watson was better than Sherlock, but Sherlock came with Mac OS X so people used Sherlock, were unimpressed, and then stopped using those types of apps all together.
Nisus Thesaurus is far better than Dictionary that comes with Mac OS X now, but people won't try Nisus Thesaurus because Dictionary is already there.
OmniWeb is far better than Safari, but again, Safari is bundled with Mac OS X, and people use what is already there.
The reality is that it just doesn't matter that Mac OS X is better than Windows. That is just how the world works.
And Microsoft knows this very well.
