By which we mean the hordes whose primary concern is price and convenience, not elegant design and superior performance.
The mobile has become the default computing device of the global economy. Some future derivation of the tablet may supplant the PC but the trend is clear. Smaller, useful and inexpensive will dominate.
Everything not required to power that vision is being offloaded to The Cloud. Which places both Microsoft and Apple in a strategic vise. They are attempting to fight back, as evidenced by recent moves which confounded fanboys and generated criticism which seemed at the time, far out of scale given the two companies' reputation for measured, thoughtful advancement.
Microsoft's decision to release Windows 8 - and then dump the guy who oversaw its development, on top of Apple's unleashing a flawed mapping program as well as a head-scratchingly unexciting iPad Mini (which followed the release of a similarly unexciting iPhone 5)suggests, as the following article explains, that their era of domination through devices and operating system control may be coming to an end. These moves in anticipation of that potential denouement are a reflection of end-game tactics. The Mini is sold out. Windows 8 will probably do fine. But the competitive alternatives are becoming too numerous and, frankly, too useful to dismiss.
Which is not to say that either company is going away; people have been predicting Microsoft's irrelevance and eventual demise for over a decade and Apple has been written off more than once. But at the moment, the future does look Cloud-y. JL
Holman Jenkins reports in the Wall Street Journal:
A heroic age of device and operating-system design is drawing to a close. Is Microsoft doomed if Windows 8 fails? Of course not. Steve Ballmer, who has survived Windows Vista and the Kin smartphone, probably isn't even doomed.
The question was raised again Tuesday with the defenestration of Steven Sinofsky, the executive who launched Microsoft's ambitious new operating system last month. Microsoft, keep in mind, has been an amazing company, inventing and defending its powerful desktop franchise through the sweeping changes wrought by the Web and then mobile.
The company is criticized by some for not besting Google in search engines and Apple in handhelds, as if other geniuses are not in the world. Even so, Microsoft does have one such triumph to its credit, challenging and besting Sony in game consoles.
Too many accounts claim that if Windows 8 doesn't prove a master coup, Microsoft just bought a one-way ticket to Palookahville in a world dominated by the Apple and Android ecosystems. Don't buy it. Windows 8 may be Microsoft's bid for relevance in the tablet world. But it's also one more holding action, in a long line of Microsoft holding actions, combined with a perhaps typically too-ambitious attempt to weaponize its installed base. And, by the way, all this has relevance for Apple too, as we'll see.
Consumers who want to buy a PC or laptop, it's true, will soon find it hard to avoid Windows 8, Microsoft's attempt to merge the Windows world with the touch-screen world of tablets and smartphones. The company already has been trying to carve out a place in mobile, and one readily suspects here an attempt to force consumers into familiarity with the new interface in hopes they'll gravitate to a Windows phone.
Microsoft had to know it was risking lousy reviews and possible consumer revolt with this gambit. Touch is a great way to get functionality out of a device without a keyboard and mouse. Why, though, would any home user who needs a full-function keyboard anyway want the hassle of adapting to a largely irrelevant new interface? Good question.
But Microsoft's key customers are in Corporate America and Corporate America will (as always) be allowed a choice of operating system, and will (as always) be slow to upgrade to Windows 8. Microsoft will still be raking in billions in Windows 7 license fees for years while big business scratches itself contemplatively and decides whether to take the plunge.
Hence the more interesting experiment is its new Windows RT tablet, which unlike all previous Windows versions isn't compatible with the vast existing library of Windows software.
RT will run a special version of Office designed just for RT. There will be an app store, but the RT will also come loaded with a browser, which may be about to resume its role as the universal platform that renders irrelevant all the exaggerated "ecosystem" talk that sprouted when Apple's original iPhone introduced the app revolution in 2008.
Notice, for one thing, that even now word is leaking of soon-to-be released apps letting Microsoft's vaunted business productivity software (Word, Excel, etc.) run on Apple and Android mobile devices. This probably tells you a lot more about the future than any Windows-8-or-bust scenario. Windows 8 may one day be seen as just Microsoft's way of keeping its options open while techland gets over its ecosystem illusions. The heroic age of hardware and operating-system design is coming to an end, as it did with PCs. The future will be about competitive services delivered from the cloud; devices will become commoditized, none more so than mobile devices, which tend to fall in toilets and be left on buses, after all.
Which brings us to Apple. All that was forecast has come to pass. Now that it can no longer command market share by offering far superior and even unique devices, the company is increasingly obsessed with its ecosystem strategy.
Apple foisted an inferior maps app on users for much the reason Microsoft is forcing Windows 8 on consumers—because it's convenient for Apple, not consumers. It launched the iPad Mini because it feared losing buyers to small tablets from Amazon and Google. With its vast device margins under assault in the marketplace, the company is reduced to gouging suppliers to defend its profits.
Apple, like Microsoft, isn't doomed, only doomed to become less profitable. One wonders how anyone could have believed Apple's ecosystem, or any device ecosystem, could ever again achieve the stickiness that Windows still enjoys over the PC world. An unfounded Web rumor recently had actor Bruce Willis suing Apple because it wouldn't let him leave his iTunes collection to his kids. The real question is why his kids would want his iTunes collection in a world of Pandora, Spotify and Netflix. The cloud is coming, and the cloud fairly shrieks for a universal platform rather than any collection of dead-end proprietary ecosystems. Linux phone, anyone?
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