How will Apple react to Vista?

A big week for Microsoft is winding down - the company's first new operating system in five years has made its debut without major hiccups. It was a launch as typical as it can get for Microsoft and very different than one of those Apple product announcements. Get the background launch story and how Apple's Vista reaction could look like.

You have to admit the PC guy probably does more positive for Microsoft's image than anything Microsoft has done for the PC in a long time. But Microsoft has brought out Vista, the first really new operating system since Apple launched OS X and that means things should get rather heated going forward.

As promised we'll take a look at the Vista launch and compare it to an Apple event and then we'll chat about the rumored response Apple is supposedly cooking up to spoil Microsoft's party. Oh, and yes, we'll chat a bit about Vista someplace in the middle.

I was talking to another analyst about this and he probably said it correctly. When Apple does a launch event Steve Jobs takes special interest and personally has a great deal to do with the staging, something he is incredibly good at. For Microsoft, they contract it out and you often wonder if the folks that designed the event either understood or cared about what it was they were launching. Microsoft's events tend to be parties bracketed by stunts designed to make people remember the name so surveys testing name recognition show improvement.

Apple, on the other hand, does events designed to sell products and the most recent example was their launch of the iPhone which virtually overwhelmed everything at CES and caused Apple's stock price to spike. This is a good example of doing an event that has a clear purpose and goal to sell product vs. doing one where the goal is visibility.

Now it may actually be kind of smart to do this with a Microsoft OS launch. The biggest problems with upgrades and migrations to a new OS occur in the first three months and things get vastly better after that as fixes are created for OS and application migration issues and more and more people are embraced by these fixes. If you realize that something like a billion PCs run some version of Windows, then, say even a 10% initial migration would be 100 million folks or 2.5 times Apple's estimated entire installed base of Macs. If only 1% of those folks had problems, and typically it will be much more than this, you would have 1 million people in dire need of help and there is no support organization or combination on the planet that could handle that kind of load over a short period of time.

This initial sales spike for Windows 95 nearly shut down Microsoft support and partially resulted in sales that were estimated to be only 50% of potential over the first year. This would suggest a softer launch would be better for a stronger first year sales ramp.

If Vista eases into the market, then the techies get it first and they, by nature, become part of the virtual support organization that updates to both Vista and the applications that run on it. In effect, the percentage of problems drops and the support capability of the market improves resulting in a sharp decrease of really upset people who can't get this product to work.

This could, and to be honest should, result in a more linear ramp for the product and a better overall experience for everyone involved. We'll try to revisit this at year end and discuss how it went.

Typically there are a couple of rules to moving to a new major OS release. The first is the migration gets much better, as I've noted, after the first three months because more of the third party applications have both migrated and been patched and because the drivers are more mature (both more reliable and better tuned).

The best experience will always be on new hardware and, if you bought a new PC last quarter, you probably already paid for a copy of Vista. This copy should come from the OEM designed specifically for the machine you purchased. Some will have them right away while others may take a few weeks to get it right. Trust me when I say it is better you get this right than get it early.

When you migrate, try the built-in Vista migration tool coupled with a migration cable. The Belkin Data Migration Cable for Windows Vista which costs under $50 seems to work fastest but you can also do the migration over your home network.

If you want to see just how much can be done automatically, the PCMover Application from Laplink actually moves many of the applications, you can get the download version for $50 and it should save you a lot of time. You will probably still need to upgrade these applications to their newest versions but this is arguably the simplest way to move to a new PC running Vista.

Is it worth it? That depends on you, I do identify with the PC guy in Apple's ads and it sure was worth it for me. But there is no need to rush, it isn't going anyplace. Some of us just like to get places first.

With every major upgrade, there is a significant opportunity for a competitor to come in and steal market share and this one is no exception. At the Vista launch, there were folks chatting about Apple's supposed planned response to Vista and it could actually work.

If what they said is to be believed, Apple will come out in force when the most breakage is likely to occur and will roll against Vista with a campaign that targets this breakage and promises to give more benefit than Vista does without all of the pain.

Based on some informal sampling, if Apple was able to execute on such a campaign it could increase their market share by two points this year taking them to 6% of the market or nearly half again what they currently have.

Now because this is the slowest time of year for PC purchases in general that 2% may be conservative but the overall numbers sold won't be as impressive because they will be a fraction of what could have been sold had this occurred in the fourth quarter. Still, you play the cards you are dealt.

While I was thinking that the Super Bowl ad Apple is funding might kick this off, other industry observers who are likely better connected to Apple indicate that this will be a launch of the iPod based on the iPhone design instead. While I don't like the iPhone for a lot of reasons, an iPod based on that design could, if done correctly, get even me into the store wanting one. This is because most of the things that make the iPhone a bad phone simply don't apply to a device that doesn't need to be a phone in the first place.

Of course, if Apple does this after saying nothing about PCs during Steve's MacWorld address its going to cause folks to once again wonder if Apple is exiting the PC business. The other rumor was that Apple was going to license out their OS, that's been around for awhile and I still doubt that Steve would do that, but given the iPhone is actually a kind of a newer version of the Newton and we know Steve would never do that, maybe someone has upgraded his brain while he wasn't watching.

We'll see, regardless it may make the Super Bowl required watching for those of us that are more into tech than sports. I'm guessing even the PC guy from Apple's ads will be watching this game for that very reason.

Or are you implying that MSFT stole code from Apple?

Apple code was found in Microsoft products. One in particular was Windows Media Player. They had to re-write it from ground up. That is a fact.

There wasn't anything original about what Jobs did, all his people had to do was imitate Xerox. . .

Let's hear what Bruce Horn, the designer of the Apple Finder among other parts of the original Mac, has to say about that...

"For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This "fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn't true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial.
Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.
Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable Software.
Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.
As you may be gathering, the difference between the Xerox system architectures and Macintosh architecture is huge; much bigger than the difference between the Mac and Windows. It's not surprising, since Microsoft saw quite a bit of the Macintosh design (API's, sample code, etc.) during the Mac's development from 1981 to 1984; the intention was to help them write applications for the Mac, and it also gave their system designers a template from which to design Windows. In contrast, the Mac and Lisa designers had to invent their own architectures. Of course, there were some ex- Xerox people in the Lisa and Mac groups, but the design point for these machines was so different that we didn't leverage our knowledge of the Xerox systems as much as some people think." - Source

And from, Jef Raskin, the original Macintosh Project Manager:

"Horn is correct that click-and-drag methods were invented at Apple and not at PARC (or elsewhere, as far as I know). I created this method for moving objects and making selections after finding the Xerox click-move-click method prone to error. Bill Atkinson extended the paradigm to pull-down menus. This all happened relatively early in the history of the Mac. The way my insight got extended by Bill was typical of how things developed then. Surprising as it may seem in retrospect, there was some resistance to my new way of using a graphic input device and I had to repeatedly explain how drag worked and why it was often easier to use than the modal click-move-click technique developed first (as far as I know) on the Sketchpad system and then used at Xerox PARC. Some of the arguments I used involved looking at number of user actions and the time they took, an approach that was then or would soon become the very useful GOMS model of Card, Moran, and Newell. Bill was a strong supporter of my ideas and at one session where I was explaining how drag worked Bill, by way of amplifying how useful it was, said something like, "And you can use it to open menus, just put the cursor on the top and drag down to the item you want."
I hired Bill for Apple, inviting him up from UCSD, where he had been a student of mine. His close friend Bud Tribble, another UCSD student I knew, joined us. Later still Bud was to lead Software development at Next.
Trying to untangle the history is sometimes hard, as in my reference to the work of Card et. al. To see what I mean, here's a bit of background: I had been, in the early 70's, a professor and computer center director at the University of California at San Diego and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) at the now-demolished D.C. Power Laboratory (named for a Mr. D. Power). When PARC was in its first few years I was often a visiting academic there, taking part in discussions and viewing with delight some of the developments going on there; I trust that people there also took pleasure in finding in me someone who was already on much the same user-interface wavelength. I didn't have to be sold on the idea that UI and graphcis were of primary importance to the future of computing. When I joined Apple in 1978 I stopped visiting PARC to avoid any possible conflicts of interest. Given these circumstances I could have learned from Stu Card, Tom Moran or others at PARC the basic ideas of GOMS style analysis, or I might not have run into that work during my visits to PARC. I don't remember, and unless I find something in my files about it someday or someone else recalls a significant event, I will never know if my primitive GOMS-style analysis that helped lead to Apple's adopting my click-and-drag methods was based on their work or not.
"I was the 31st employee at Apple (joining in January, 1978), but I had first met Jobs and Wozniak in their garage in 1976, and told them of the wonderful work being done at PARC. Working on the Apple I at the time, they weren't interested in human factors. While I was the first PARC-savvy person at Apple, Larry Tesler was the first PARC employee to join the company. At first he was strongly opposed to the Mac's easier-to-use mouse methods, and I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use. I had observed that people (including myself) at PARC often made wrong-button errors in using the mouse, which was part of my impetus for doing better." - Source

. . . just like there wasn't much original about what Gates did when he bought the original code from IBM for $50k.

Your garbled history is getting amusing. Gates did not buy DOS from IBM...

The "Microsoft Disk Operating System" or MS-DOS was based on QDOS, the "Quick and Dirty Operating System" written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, for their prototype Intel 8086 based computer.
QDOS was based on Gary Kildall's CP/M, Paterson had bought a CP/M manual and used it as the basis to write his operating system in six weeks, QDOS was different enough from CP/M to be considered legal.
Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products. - Source

Looks like VISTA must have queered that trend U were seeing cuz this is what AppleInsider says about US and International market share--

Friday, January 19, 2007

The Mac maker fell a full percentage point to 5.1 percent of the domestic market between the third and fourth quarters of the year, trading places with Toshiba, which climbed from 5.1 to 5.3 percent. Apple remained out of the top five in the world rankings, but a similar set of data released by IDC on Wednesday puts its international share at 2.4 percent.

Shipments of Macs in the U.S. also dipped significantly from 975,000 US systems to 808,000, indicating a genuine slowdown in sales for the Cupertino-based company....

Looks like the trend isn't really on the upside at this juncture.

Now that Dell has signed AMD and is ramping AMD CPU sales the 3% decline they've had may also reverse given that AMD is ramping its output with new fab lines and a 65nm process.

Don't get me wrong however, I'd jump to Apple in a minute if they had apps I couldn't get elsewhere or if they had an OS that was cheaper/superior for my purposes or if Jobs just got his liberal nose out of the air some of the time.

I'm presently dual booting Linux/XP and finding the free Ubuntu OS and the free apps almost superior to MS. Only a few apps remain that only run on MS and may never be ported, especially once the newer CPUS can run multiple OS's at the same time.

Kelly, I am not splitting hairs. This is the history of the personal computer.

Gates did not OWN QDOS when he sold it to IBM as MS-DOS. At the time, IBM thought they were dealing with a much larger company than Microsoft was. Gates had written a version of BASIC for the Altair, Apple, Commodore and several other companies, so had a track record, but he had never written an Operating System. IBM approached him as a consultant to discuss what would be appropriate for their soon to be released PC.

He suggested they talk to Gary Kildall about acquiring CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers). They did try but Kildall was apparently not available (out flying his plane, it's said) and his wife and lawyer refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Frustrated with Kildall, IBM offered Gates the contract to WRITE an OS. Bill Gates had a contract in hand and had to deliver something he did not own. He had no Operating System. With that contract in hand, Gates licensed Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products.

Basically, Q-DOS was a reverse engineered, simplified version of CP/M. Gates and company then refined and improved on Q-DOS and delivered PC-DOS 1.0. IBM found that, after testing, product contained over 300 bugs in about 6000 lines of code... it also appeared to contain unmodified code from CP/M (vehemently denied by Paterson even as late as 2004) which was a legal problem. IBM demanded a re-write. Gates bought the next version of Q-DOS, 86-DOS outright (Exclusive righs) from Paterson's company and Microsoft hired Tim Paterson to do the re-write. PC/MS-DOS was born.

Was this wrong? Nope. Just smart business.

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