[LINK] Fanatacism [WAS: iPads]

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Tue, 1 Jun 2010, Ivan Trundle wrote:

> On a head-count alone, there are probably more of the Microsoft fanatics in the world than Apple fanatics. One of them does a much more thorough job of winning hearts and minds, and part of these might be due to market share, but a more significant part is that one does it better.


It's the games.  And the piracy.   They go hand in hand. 
Microsoft survived because it held the mindshare of gamers, especially in the 
early days of the PC.   I do not know how many times I've seen PC's 
bought in the dark dim past, that were ostensibly for "business" that 
ended up being gaming platforms.  Now we have a couple of generations of 
gamers and the culture of cracks and warez followed from the bulletin 
boards and onto the Internet.   The piracy of games feeds the OS. MS wears 
a few hits by casual PC owners for pirated versions of their OS and Office 
and so on - they live with this because the BSAA can go after the 
non-compliant businesses.    Then these gamers grew up and joined the 
workforce.   What OS will they use?   The one they can take home 
and pirate, of course.

MS has lived by this and have garnered much mindshare with it.   The games 
lead the now IT advisors and consultants to have vast familiarity with 
MS products, in an effort to get more out of their systems.

MS have not had to work so hard since this next generation of gamers 
has grown up.   And their products have suffered as a result.

Apple always seemed to have trouble getting acceptance as a "serious" 
platform, in spite of not pushing their games angle much at all. 
But Apple has indeed captured a market that is smaller, but more 
prestigious - the Creatives.    I believe it is the adoption of 
Creatives that gives Apple its mojo.  Many more musicians, designers, 
artists, writers, journos use a Mac over a PC.  There are no hard facts 
on this, but if an engineer is going to use a Linux box or a Sun 
workstation and a project manager a PC with MSW, then it is the 
advertising designer, or working musician that will have a Mac.

This is where the association with prestige comes from - the 
"black collar worker" is the one who sets the trends.  He or she is 
the one with the talent that everyone wants.  They are trend setters 
and market makers - and they're the ones with the iPods.   They're 
the ones everyone aspires to be like.   And Apple has this market 
by default.   The "I'm a Mac" ads are so blatant about this it 
is strange I have never seen social commentary regarding it.

It is this prestige association that gamers have with MS.
It is this same prestige association that is now making Apple the big bucks.

Apple deserves this moment in the sun - they took a risk and 
threw out their OS9, replacing it with a real OS.   Then they have taken
their hardware and recast that, even changing architectures.   Apple 
demonstrates itself as being agile at adopting new platforms and 
software methods, while MS just keeps churning out the same old.....

....now I wish we could talk about Sun and Oracle, but no one here 
seems as interested in that.   If only Sun and Apple had've merged, 
we could have had the killer platform and we would've had the iPad 
10 years ago.....


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
    "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum." - Finagle's Law