Over at Tammy Bruce's blog, they are celebrating the IBM PC's 25th birthday. Surprisingly, as I browse the internet, they seem to be the only ones doing so. This is a pretty historical occasion.
While there were PC's prior to this (among them Apple and Commodore) the IBM machine was to dominate the market. Today there are only two viable forms of operating system, the IBM type and the Apple type. Recently Apple was forced to include the PC OS in their newest computers, or risk going the way of betamax. Apple and betamax have interesting similarities...both are arguably better systems than the ones they were dominated by. However the fact that their rivals were open source, and thus adopted by a wider range of hardware producers and content producers, ultimately meant their marginalization.
As I've written before, even though I went off to college with a manual typewriter, I cannot imagine life without a PC and the internet anymore. I now possess a machine (the one I am typing on) that is more powerful than all of the computers NASA sent to the Moon combined. It boggles the mind if you think about it. It's almost scary to think about what is coming next.
2 comments:
"Recently Apple was forced to include the PC OS in their newest computers, or risk going the way of betamax."
Um... actually, No. Apple has not included the PC OS (I assume you meant to say "Windows"). Apple has switched to Intel processors, which are the same processors that are in *some* Windows computers.
As the new Macs are thus capable of running Windows, some third party retailers (MacMall, for instance) have begun offering Macs with Windows also installed.
This is a far cry from Apple being "forced" to install Windows on their computers, and despite the hype, I daresay that most Mac users will continue using the Mac OS.
Beyond that, with the rise of platform-agnostic web apps and the like, I think Microsoft has a real challenge ahead of them.
I think Microsoft has a real challenge ahead of them.
Then you are kidding yourself.
Look everyone agrees that in many ways the Mac is the superior computer. Everyone also agrees that The Mac has fewer bugs in it's systems. The PC is much more likely to get a virus.
Yet despite all of this, the PC still dominmates the market. The only thing that has kept Apple's head above water so far was its masterful stroke in co-opting the schools market. But that is now dead. My District (and hundreds around the country) now refuses to buy anymore Apples, even when the computer teachers and tech guys beg for them.
Apple's big mistake (which was the whole point of my article) was the same one Sony made, they tried to keep the tech proprietary. The world has gone way too far now to go back...the PC won the war, and the inclusion of Intel chips (which allows OS to be run) was the white flag of surrender.
Now the question is, can Apple retain enough of the niche markets in desktop publishing and graphic arts to survive? I think the answer is probably yes, but I certainly wouldn't go running out and buy any Apple stock.
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