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Comment by mcantelon | Hacker News Reader

Seems like Apple is following the same plan as before: keep hardware closed, keep OS closed. Microsoft beat them because they provided a platform on which hardware manufacturers could compete.

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Everyone says this but there was so much more going on I think it's a bit silly to pretend that "open v closed" is a safe way to summarize "Microsoft v Apple" in the 80's/90's.

Open vs. closed is perhaps misleading, but at the very least it's obvious that MS targeted high-volume sales with Windows while Apple targeted low-volume sales with the Mac / Mac OS. Apple built in a huge profit margin on its end-to-end system, putting it out of reach of much of the market. MS built in a smaller per-unit profit on its OS, but since the incremental cost of software is negligible this put them in a much better position since increased volume increases their profit margin almost without limit.

Microsoft also had a first-to-market advantage with early versions of Windows, and they also gained from almost no productivity app competiton back in the 1990s.

So what you're saying is further multiplied by all the businesses who chose Win 95 over Mac OS 8, then stuck with Windows when upgrading their equipment.

How was this first-to-market advantage???

Well, they also had 3 bad CEO, they tried to sell too many computer models, were spread too thin, had terrible stock management, almost killed themselves with the cloning program, attempted a rewrite that got them stuck in an old OS for ages without a plan B, and there was no internet at the time.

On top of that add that Microsoft was making a lot of money from their OS and Google doesn't...

I don't see why you need to see the world in terms of easy patterns. I'd say that enough variables have changed since then that any prediction based on analogies is very uncertain.

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