Apple has always been a hardware company though. Software has just been for the purpose of selling their hardware.
MSFT is the opposite. So it makes sense it be much slower/harder to get going in this area.
MSFT is the opposite. So it makes sense it be much slower/harder to get going in this area.
I am always fascinated by seeing how the "core competency" of a company constrains its execution options later in its existence. Sun, for example, really was a 'sales' company first and it couldn't "sell its way" out of the wave of Linux clusters that started displacing its servers. Now as a hardware company it too was let down by Motorola and that was some of the genesis for SPARC much like Apple's move. But as a sales company Sun kept shooting anyone who used their "open" architecture CPU by ruthlessly out selling them.
I'm not sure that's the right perspective. Steve Jobs said in an interview [0] that "Apple views itself as a software company."
But at their core selling hardware is where the money comes from.