Another Mac vs PC story

 Yes, just another story of Apple vs Microsoft. Blah, blah, blah ...

Just to set the background, I was reading some stories with my newly acquired, blindly shining white Macbook, then I stumbled on the recent cover story on Business week, titled The Mac is in the Gray Flannel suit. It lays out an interesting and insightful discussion of the war between Mac and PC, from a business perspective. To be more precise, the business people did not call it war, as most geeks would address the matter.  They have it right this time, since how can it be a war when there is no evidence of competition. 

 Basically, the article correctly points out the fundamental difference in the business strategies of Apple and Microsoft. When he took over Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs commits to a business model targeting the consumer market, i.e. individual buyers, who pay for the machines from their own pocket. Since then, there has been no attempt from Apple to set up a massive support, sales, accountant, PR teams for corporate customers. They rely on hundreds of Apple stores and mostly one-to-one support to customer.  There is also no sign of Apple licensing their software/hardware to other vendors.

 Microsoft and PC vendors, in general, are started with long term strategies targeting corporate customers. They are evidenced through the well-funded sale, marketing, support, PR teams. Furthermore, PC hardware are total open, making it easy for third party vendors to produce compatible products. This proves a big advantage for organization-scale deployment, because it would be easy to administrate, find hardware replacements and a large range of software.

 This difference in culture of the business model has once have Mac and PC living happily in their own niches. The recent popularity of iPod, iPhone and increase in popularity of Macbook and its siblings, thanks to the Intel infrastructure, suggested that employers are forced to make real consideration of adopting Mac in their organization. In addition, the Microsoft current best thing, i.e. Vista, seems like a big failure, and it sparks enormous resentment from employee when forced to abandon XP. 

 The article has given an interesting verdict for the future, saying that such competition between Mac and PC will be irrelevant in the next decades or two. The reason is that the computing platform will be moved to the cloud, as the software-as-a-service model proliferate. All the ordinary tasks, including entertainments will be moved to the Web, which then be accessed in form of Web applications.  Thus, the market is unified, as all support needed is for the Web browsers. 

 In summary, it is now down to Jobs to decide whether he wants to take up the challenges in the corporate market or not. Either way, let's have our finger cross that the current culture will not be deteriorated. In particular, we should still be able to get our broken Macbook repaired within hours.  Until then, this shinny Macbook is still the best laptop I've ever had.