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A Short History of
the GUI and the Microsoft vs Apple Debate
William Hooper, Jan 2007, Updated December 2007 & April 2008
Xerox Star,
IBM PC, Macintosh,
Early Windows, RISC & NeXT,
Windows 3, Apple System 7,
Excel, World Perfect,
Windows 95, Capone,
Mac OS 8, iMac,
OS X, Windows XP,
Tiger, Vista,
Leopard, Conclusion,
GUI Evolution
Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer working at the Stanford Research
Institute, dreamt up the idea of a mouse driven graphical user interface
back in 1960s. Researchers working for Xerox in Palo Alto California
were inspired by Engelbart's work, and they went on to create a machine called
the 'Alto' in 1973. Eventually the Alto project led to the 'Xerox Star
8010 Document Processor' which was released commercially in 1981 for
US$17,000 (about $40,000 in today’s money). Although interesting
historically, only a handful were actually manufactured.
1981 Xerox Star. The first commercial GUI computer.
1981 also saw the release of the IBM PC. At that time the market for
personal computers was highly fragmented with dozens of manufactures
competing in both in the home and business markets. The first IBM PC was
too expensive for the home market, but it proved a huge hit with
business.
"You can't get fired for buying an IBM" said many, but the PC quickly
developed a more important attraction - open standards. Failing to
realise the importance of the operating system, IBM purchased one from Microsoft. As a result other manufacturers were then able to
copy the IBM hardware design and ship their 'Clones' with copies of MSDOS
purchased directly from Microsoft. As a result, even without IBM's approval or
participation, their PC became an open standard with virtually
unstoppable economies of scale. By 1990 IBM Compatible PCs captured an
80% market share, today it runs at greater than 95%.
One of the many IBM PC compatibles that flooded the US market
IBM PC & Clones Market Share
Although IBM PCs running MSDOS dominated the market, Apple will be
forever remembered as the innovative company behind the first mass
market GUI based computer.
Steve Jobs, co owner of Apple Computers, visited
Xerox in 1979 and left extremely impressed by the Alto. Over the next
several years he hired many Xerox engineers, and invested many millions
of dollars developing a marketable GUI based computer. In 1983 Apple
finally released the $10,000 'Lisa'. It was far too expensive and failed
completely, but a year later Apple was able to launch the
much cheaper Macintosh which eventually became very popular. Although Jobs took the
idea of mouse and graphical user interface from Xerox, there is no doubt
that his team at Apple contributed a very great deal to development of
the GUI (eg: Overlapping Windows, Dialogue Box, Trash Can).
Before GUIs, users relied on complicated key combinations and typed
commands to control computers. Steve Jobs focused on bringing computers
to the masses by making them friendly, fun and easy to use - and he
succeeded.
In 1985, before the success of the Macintosh was clear, Apple's board of
directors forced 30 year old Steve Jobs to resign. The Lisa had failed,
Apple was loosing ground in word-processing, there had been
disagreements over costs and the hyperactive Jobs had become very hard
to work with. In 1997 Apple brought Jobs back when it purchased NeXT.
1984 Apple Macintosh, first popular GUI computer:
1984 Mac GUI:
Screenshot of the included MacPaint
The development of the GUI made the Apple Mac popular for Graphical
Desktop Publishing, but the IBM PC clone was still able to maintain
market dominance. Meanwhile Microsoft worked on a GUI of it's own, and in 1985 it released an add-on to MSDOS called
'Windows 1.0'. However, this
first version of Windows came with no useful compatible applications and
its general functionality was limited by legal challenges from Apple.
After defeating the law suites (Bill Gates defended them with the claim
“hey you copied from Xerox”) it was able to release the much
improved Windows 2.0 in 1987. That same year, two important programs
written to work with Windows 2.0 were released: Microsoft Excel and Desktop
Publisher Aldus PageMaker (the latter had previously only been available
on the Apple Mac). Some computer historians date the release of
PageMaker, the first appearance of a significant and non-Microsoft
application for Windows, as the beginning of the success of Windows.
1987 Windows 2.0
It is interesting to compare the GUIs at this stage.
Windows could run applications side by side and had minimization and
maximization buttons. Although the $10k Apple Lisa supported multiple
applications, up until Operating System 7 in
1991 the Macintosh could only run one application at a time (like the
iPhone today - no multitasking).
Apple applications shared a common menu bar in a fixed location at the
top of the screen - a design which remains today. Windows, by contrast,
demanded each window maintain its own interface. The Apple approach
made sense at the time, especially on a machine that can only run one
process at a time. In future
years, however, it has suffered two major disadvantages. First, applications
running in a window on a big screen could appear a long way from their
menu bar. Second, applications had reduced interface flexibility, eg
advent of 'Skins' and the new Office 2007 Menu system. Today,
the Microsoft approach is the standard used by non Apple GUIs such as Linux etc.
Apple used the common menu bar at the top of the window to launch
applications, but Microsoft instead chose a 'Program Manger' application
that contained icon shortcuts to programs and other folders. The
Microsoft approach allowed for the hierarchical organisation of large
numbers of applications / shortcuts (which was not possible with the
simple Apple Menu), but it also contributed to clutter and complexity as the
user opened folder after folder in search of his target. In 1995
Microsoft completely replaced the Program Manger technique with the
'Start Menu'.
Apple adopted a friendly icon based approach to browsing the hard drive
but Windows employed a vertical tree based application called File
Manager. The vertical tree approach is much more effective, but novice computer users
often struggle to understand it. This difference is one
of many that reflects a divergence of design philosophy in those early
days - while
Steve Jobs of Apple concentrated on making his system friendly and
aesthetic, Bill Gates and the brilliant geeky programmers living on
caffeine at Microsoft concentrated on power and
technicalities.
To see the difference in aesthetic design compare two early text editor
applications from Apple and Microsoft.
Steve Jobs named his first computer after his daughter Lisa because it
was so easy to use. Looking at the screenshot above one wonders if Bill Gates could have used the same
name for Windows 1.0, not because it was child’s play to use, but rather because it
looked as if Steve's daughter ran his graphic design.
It should be said that although Apple and Microsoft were
among the first to market,
all the remaining vendors were also working on GUI at this time as well. The
screenshot below shows an interesting example from a British company
called Acorn. This GUI had something approaching a task bar showing
active applications, an idea that would make its way into the Windows
and Apple GUI some years later.
1991 RISC OS 3.0, A GUI with task bar
Another interesting GUI comes from NeXT. After leaving Apple Steve Jobs founded NeXT and started developing very trendy, powerful and expensive Unix
workstations. His first GUI is pictured below, it shows a 3D effect on
the windows, icons and menus. Two years later Microsoft adopted a 3D look as well.
1988 NeXT GUI with 3D looking Windows and Icons
Both IBM PC Hardware and the Microsoft Windows GUI suffered one huge
disadvantage compared to the Macintosh – they needed to retain complete
backwards compatibility with older software. As a result it wasn’t until
the advent of the powerful Intel 386 processor and the release of Windows
3.0 that Microsoft’s GUI really took off.
1990 Windows 3.0
1991 Apple’s System 7
1992 Microsoft Windows 3.11
Of course, the popularity of Windows went hand in hand with the
availability of Windows applications. Perhaps Microsoft’s most
remarkable feat was to leverage the GUI skills acquired whilst
developing Windows in the production of Spreadsheets and Word
Processors.
The screenshot below shows the first version of Excel released in 1987
for Windows 2.0 which completely outclassed the market leading Lotus123
spreadsheet both in terms of GUI and core functionality. Almost
overnight Lotus started loosing market share and within a few years it
was no more than a memory. Lotus was the largest software company in the
world and the spreadsheet was the most complex and profitable program
around. Yet Microsoft steamrolled right over it with the first release.
Remarkable.
1987 Excel 2.0 for Windows
1988 Excel 2.1. The start of the grey borders and 3D effect.
1991 Excel 3.0. The first application to use a modern toolbar
By contrast, in 1991 Word Perfect released Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS and
Word Perfect 5.1 for Windows. Word Perfect was the biggest application
of it's day, but its GUI version was both late to market and outclassed
by Word. The screen shot below shows the famous but
complicated 'Reveal
Codes' feature which was rendered essentially obsolete by WYSIWYG editing.
1991 & 1992 Word Perfect
The table below
shows the market share of Microsoft Word relative to its competitors. By
1993 WordPerfect was beaten, by 1997 Microsoft had captured a greater
than 90% market share.
The Macintosh version of Word took market share away from competitors
such as MacWrite even more quickly and more decisively. This is
interesting because it’s inconsistent with the often repeated theory that
Microsoft’s dominance stemmed only from insider knowledge of the
underlying platform operating system. Insider knowledge was no help to Apple, first their
MacWrite word processor's market share was burned by Word Perfect, then
it was vaporised by MS Word.
Although Windows 3.1 was extremely popular it’s MSDOS heritage left it
with several major flaws, not least of which was stability. For business
users, who required less compatibility with legacy applications,
especially games, Microsoft offered an alternative operating system
called 'Windows NT'.
In 1995 Microsoft released an enormous upgrade that finally gave the
home user a stable sophisticated modern mostly 32 bit operating system
with protected memory and preemptive multitasking (features that would
take another seven years to reach the Apple Mac).
1995 Windows 95
As well as huge under the hood improvements Windows 95 offered a radical
new GUI. Microsoft introduced the 'Task Bar' which accomplished three
things:
(1) The prominent 'Start Menu' at the far left of the
Task Bar simplified launching programs or accessing OS features
such as Control Panel. Instead of hunting for icons on the Desktop or in
Program Manager all features were available in one easy to find place.
Microsoft were proud of the Start Menu and it featured heavily in their
advertising campaigns for Windows 95. Although the Start Menu has been a
great success, novice users have never found it as easy to customize or
navigate as the desktop and often continue to store some programs or
documents there.
(2) Most early GUIs, including ones from Apple and Microsoft, minimized
running programs to icons on the desktop where they could be lost
amongst similar looking icons, or hidden from view by windows running on
top of them. The task bar rectified this problem by putting all running
programs into one highly visible place.
(3) The Task Bar also featured a system tray where users could see the
clock and system applications.
Today the task bar with start menu, running applications and system
tray is the standard used by both the latest Microsoft & Linux GUIs.
It’s notable that while Microsoft was prepared to completely junk its
Program Manager and replace with a Start Menu, Apple only reluctantly
and gradually added a task bar to their system over the next several
years. This fits with a generally aggressive tendency to innovate,
assimilate, copy and redesign which is a major factor behind Microsoft’s
success. Such extreme willingness to change is highly unusual, and is
surely one of the principle factors behind Microsoft's position today as
the worlds largest software company.
Windows 1995 perhaps marked the beginning of a new era at Microsoft in
which it began to dumb down functionality in order to make products
easier to use or better looking - the era of power user disillusionment.
For example, in Windows 95 Microsoft started hiding the tree inside
their file open dialogues. Novice users can be confused by the tree, and
it clutters the GUI, but
it is a very powerful feature and hiding it dramatically reduces functionality.
Windows 3.11 File Open showing tree
Windows 95 File Open - With tree removed
Shortly after Windows 95, Apple released System 7.5. This
release had the codename Capone, which was a reference to the gangster
who put fear in Chicago – Chicago being Microsoft’s codename for Windows
95.
1996 Mac System 7.5.3. Notice the bottom 'control strip', the beginning
of the Apple task bar
Apple may have nicknamed their operating system Capone, but in truth
their market share had peaked at 12% in 1992 and had been in decline
ever since. The advent of Windows 95 only heralded an acceleration of
that process. See the pink line on the chart below – notice the
increased rate of decline after 1995.
By 1997 Apple were is crisis and Steve Jobs, who had left years earlier
to found NeXT, was brought back to rescue the company. Shortly after his
arrival a new operating system was released.
1997, Mac OS 8
A year later in 1998 Microsoft released 'Windows 98'. It offered improved stability and
hardware support but had few GUI changes. No screenshot is shown here.
Also in 1998 Steve Jobs of Apple Mac introduced the iMac. Although
technically unimpressive both in terms of hardware and operating system
it featured a new translucent plastic exterior, originally in Bondi
Blue, but later many other colours. The iMac proved phenomenally
successful, selling close to 800,000 units in its first five months and
significantly boosting the company's revenue and profitability. Thanks
to the iMac, fiscal 1998 was Apple's first profitable year since
1993. The iMac is now considered an industrial design icon of the late
90s. In 2001 the launch of the iPod further contributed to the
popularity of the Apple brand and it’s PCs.
1998 The Stylish iMac Drove Sales
2001 Mac OS X
In 2001 Apple Mac released a brand new fully 32 bit modern operating
system with a Unix-like core. This new version did not offer backward
compatibility with older software but it has still proven a great
success. To me, Windows 95/98, with it's angular 3D grey borders and
controls, feels very bleak and dated compared to this new Apple GUI. Most
people would say that aesthetically this OS put Apple well ahead and it
took several years until the release of Vista for Microsoft to
even begin catching up.
In terms of GUI functionality, however, many power user were much less
impressed. Microsoft had long dominated OS and Application GUI design,
but the near dead Apple still resisted too obviously copying. Perhaps
Steve Jobs felt he could not be seen to be copying Microsoft; but BMW
would never balk at fitting innovations such as anti-lock braking
systems to their cars just because Mercedes got there first. For
example: Microsoft had three buttons on the right of each windows for
maximization, minimization and close. Apple added three buttons to the
left but bizarrely altered their behaviour (Mac users generally have to
close applications with
Apple-Q). The bottom Dock came with huge icons and greatly
reduced functionality compared to the Windows 95/98 task bar. Apple also passed up a
chance to abandon its unorthodox common top menu bar, single button
mouse, lack of a delete key, treeless path browsing, underpowered
application install/uninstall etc.
Apple is accused by many of emphasising form over function. Given that
Apple's primary market is the home user or SoHo Designer this is natural
- but some accuse them of taking the process much too far. Microsoft
called OS X a "toy". However, it became an increasingly popular toy.
2001 Windows XP
A significant upgrade to the Windows system also came in 2001 with the
release of Windows XP. This version offered a fully 32 bit core, many
new security features and a convergence of home and business versions (no
more Windows NT).
The GUI changed as well - an attempt was made to make the product
generally warmer and more friendly. For example, colourful icons and
descriptions appeared in inside folders ('Web Folders'). Interestingly, almost all large
corporate users and home ‘power users’ disabled this new feature.
Although Windows XP felt somewhat smarter and more modern than it’s
predecessors, looking at the screen shot above, some will wonder why
Microsoft didn’t try and make it a little less colourful and a little
more stylish.
Here is my desktop (I still run XP on most of my
machines):
The
image above shows the typical power user setup. There are no icons on
the desktop, the start menu is set to classic mode and has been
extensively customized, the system tray has no superfluous icons, IE7
has been setup to show menus and the search box has been replaced with
the google toolbar, windows explorer is running instead of my computer.
2005 OS X Tiger
Notice the 'system tray' or 'menu extra' icons running at the far right of the
top menu bar.
2007 Windows Vista
As I write this in December 2007 Vista has just celebrated its first
anniversary. It is thought to be the worlds largest software project to
date - estimated at 10,000 employees working for five years - perhaps a
$10billion spend.
Apple Mac’s share of the home market has increased substantially in 2007.
It’s clear that the Apple brand is going from strength to strength with
increasing awareness and trust in its stylish products. Many people now
believe: (a) Apple is better looking (b) Apple is
easier to use (c) Apples crash less and don't get viruses (d) PC’s are for geeks who don’t mind tearing their hair out for days on
end fighting with config files and driver patches etc.
Look at the average home user’s Windows PC and you usually find a mass
of icons running in the system tray and programs such as Norton
Anti-Virus crippling the machine. Personally I often find friends of
mine have a PC problem they
need help with – for example, a few weeks ago a friend couldn’t
play CDs. It took me half an hour to figure out the problem - put one in
the machine and three programs were trying to play the CD simultaneously
resulting in strange clicking noises. The mass of poor quality software
available and installed on PCs often makes them very unreliable and
frustrating devices.
Vista did not solve these problems – in fact it made them worse.
Vista turned out to be nightmare of software and hardware compatibility
issues. Even famous application such as Windows Live Messenger, iTunes,
Visual Studio 2005 and Outlook 2003 failed to run fully or at all under
Vista and had to be patched. Although users were encouraged to upgrade
an existing install of XP to Vista, doing so was fraught with problems
and should probably never have even been allowed. Even brand new laptops
running Vista and shipped by Sony turned out to be unstable. These
enormous problems hugely fuelled the perception that Windows is
unreliable and Apple Mac is a better choice. Apple even capitalized on
the Vista problems by running advertising campaigns deriding Vista (eg
"Apple - It just works").
The new Aero interface won some fans but it was no Mac OS X killer. Only
Windows Media Centre really demonstrated the power of the fast GUI
technology introduced into Vista. But Media Centre typifies the Vista
experience. Every set top box I have ever seen shows as many channels as
possible when one is browsing, but Microsoft decided to show only seven.
Not only does Media Centre stupidly show only seven channels at a time,
no matter how sexy the interface may be, it is undeniably hard to
navigate. So here Microsoft is sacrificing both power and simplicity in
order to jazz up the product.
Some users actually complained Vista was ugly. Consider the Windows
Photo Gallery screenshot below.
Steve Jobs famously took a calligraphy class which inspired the
beautiful Mac typography. Surely Microsoft can afford to employ some one
good typographical taste? Look at the words "Go To Gallery", it's
tasteless. Notice the
valuable vertical screen space sacrificed to over sized top and bottom control bars,
and the big chunky buttons. Steve
Jobs and the stylish crowd at Apple always laugh at the ugly special
buttons and stickers PC Laptop manufactures insist on adding to their
machines. Is Windows now Walmart GUI?
Notice also the lack of conventional menu
bar in Windows Photo Gallery. Microsoft is probably removing the menu bars because it looks sexier
(Apple Mac Style), but many argue it simply makes the product harder /
slower to use.
Here is a quote from
www.zabkat.com where a
replacement for Microsoft's Windows Explorer called Xplorer2 is sold:
For a long time leading to the release of Vista, I was afraid that it
would be the end of xplorer². As it turned out, quite the opposite has
happened. All of a sudden the most popular search keyword is "vista
explorer replacement" driving early adopters to my website... Where the
hell is the menu bar in Vista's explorer? That must be the nadir of
improvement ideas... But I can't complain :)
A incredible example of Vista's failure is the Vista File Search. Not
only does it no longer appear on the windows explorer context menus
(without editing the registry), it just doesn't even work. For a company
that once prided itself on geek power, shipping your latest flagship
operating system without a working file search tool is totally and
utterly extraordinary. The screen shot below compares Vista search (not
working), with Agent Ransack, a freeware replacement.
Forcing a user to change, especially if he thinks it is for the worse,
may upset him intensely. The individual may feel as if his freedom has
been violated. In his unconscious Microsoft becomes an evil arrogant
oppressor. Change aggravates precisely your most loyal customers.
Microsoft need to remember the Coca-Cola Classic Lesson.
With Vista
Microsoft realised, rightly, that a security model to protect home users
running as administrators required an innovative new approach not found
on other operating systems. However, the many pop-ups and permission
denied messages ended up aggravating users. Instead of one pop-up per
task, several could be generated. Worse, users found even legitimate
administrator access requests blocked on some occasions. IE7 ran in a
new 'protected mode', yet many harmless controls still required prompts
leaving many users feeling no further forward. On top of that the
security model never went far enough. At the end of day an admin
permission warning is not enough, we need to know more about what is
going under the hood unless we are going to go the app store route.
Mac
OS X Leopard
Unlike Windows, which sees a major release every three to four years,
new releases of Apple's OS X are much more incremental. Each yearly
release usually carries a few headline improvements and lots of little
tinkerings. After the many problems Microsoft experienced with Vista it
is also now considering adopting a more frequent and less groundbreaking
release schedule.
Designed to compete with Vista one of the things most noticeable about
Leopard upon first glance is the amount of new eye candy. The desktop is empty of icons - the first OS to
make that move even though it's been an obvious step since Windows 95. The new
Dock
(or Task Bar)
shown exploding on the right of the picture above, allows for a folder of
documents / programs, thereby addressing some of the shortcoming of not having
a start menu (Power Users can remove all the application shortcuts from
the Dock and add the Application folder to the Dock). The new 'Finder', which is the Apple equivalent of Windows
Explorer, is also shown in the picture above. It has a new iTunes style
cover flow mode which takes the user about as
far from the old fashioned tree as one can imagine.
Apple did not have time to rethink the security model, as Vista did, in
this release. Other major omissions compared to Vista in this release
include Media Centre and HD DVD support.
Windows 7 - Update August 2010
I have had a couple of emails asking me about a Windows 7
review. The truth is I don't use it and all I can offer is one small
anecdote. A friend of mine brought round his horribly ugly HP laptop and
I noticed he had Windows Updates turned off. I told him that was
dangerous and turned them back on. After the updates installed the sound
card didn't work. The driver was there but no sound. I searched around
but all they had was XP drivers on the HP web site which I couldn't get
to install. Despite being a power user who can knock up c++ applications
I couldn't fix the problem. In fact, much to my embarrassment someone
else figured out how to fix it, click on the driver and roll back.
Nevertheless, it's nonsense, at the end of day Windows has become a
total nightmare.
Conclusion - Designers vs Geeks
1. Steve Jobs has demonstrated the crucial role aesthetics and design
play in public appeal. Just as huge PC Manufacturers such as IBM and
DELL have failed to entice the public with designs as attractive as the
iMac, Microsoft has not succeeded in making Windows as trendy and
stylish as it is technically effective. Steve Job's top down management
style delivers a clarity of vision and aesthetic standard few technology
companies can match. First the iMac, then the iPod, then the iPhone - how can competing tech giants fumble so often and so
obviously? Microsoft, Google, Motorola and many other technology firms
desperately need to shed their geeky cultures - think Ferrari vs Star
Trek. The 21st Century tech industry will belong to the designers not
the geeks.
2. Steve Jobs benefits dramatically from a more closed eco-system.
The enormous number of software applications / hardware devices that run on Windows
was once its greatest strength, but is increasingly becoming its greatest flaw. Much of the software installed on Windows PCs is badly written
and hard to use. An even greater proportion of it is deliberately annoying or
malicious. These days Windows users are rightly terrified of downloading apps on
the internet whereas the closed eco system of the iPhone ensures safety.
The Windows experience is akin early capitalism, an era which predates
regulation, it starts with dynamism but ends in chaos. For example,
eventually consumers stop eating out because without government
health and safety inspections restaurants too often poison their
customers.
3. Unlike Apple who were able to create a brand new GUI based operating
system, Microsoft have maintained backward compatibility which makes their
products more complex. In fact many people think fixing the windows experience
is an impossible task and we need a brand new OS. The integration of the GUI
with the OS and the COM technology are security nightmares embedded in the heart
of Windows. Right now Microsoft are very lucky that OS X is too limited, and
Linux is still too chaotic, because the world is increasingly itching to rid
itself of Windows.
4. Compared to Microsoft, Apple have simplified products to enhance
their appeal to the home user. What makes a good software designer? Someone who can
see what the user really needs, someone who is prepared to cut out the clutter.
For example, when the iPhone was released Steve Jobs didn't bother with cut and
paste, because usability mattered more to him than functionality. Every single
user complained about the lack of cut and paste, but Jobs knew what he was
doing, he is the visionary who dares to be different. Apple's path most
obviously now lies in the consumer products space. For example,
Digital Cameras have dreadful user interfaces, the world at Apple's feet goes
way beyond computers, portable media players and phones. Dyson tries to revolutionize
functionality, but revolutionizing appearance and interface is enough.
5. Increasingly
Microsoft is sacrificing both power and ease of use in order to jazz up
their products. Yet this effort is
failing because: (a) the PC is that much more intricate, its like trying
to simplify the cockpit of a Boeing 747, if anything goes wrong you die.
(b) PCs are business machines, business users want powerful and
consistent user interfaces. (c) Microsoft are geeks who have no idea what design is, their glory
days revolved around functionality, once they gave up the pragmatic
search for power they lost themselves in nerd space. Notice how many of
Microsoft's attempts to simplify have failed (Web Folders, File
Extension Hiding, Treeless Start Menus, Office Assistants, Adaptive
Office Menus, even Microsoft Bob) - yet Microsoft refuse to give up. Windows Vista is the
most shocking example of how unsuccessful 'jazzing up' and 'dumbing
down' has been. Once the most enviable company in America, these
days almost everything Microsoft writes is unusable junk.
6. There is a widespread feeling
that Microsoft has lost its way. The lack of vision is
palpable, it is not so much that the company is running on auto-pilot,
rather the marking department have been put in charge. Because these guys have no heart, they can loose touch with
their users, and deliver massive failures such as Windows Vista and
Office Ribbon. Microsoft's latest GUI designs are an anathema to both
the intellectual and the aesthetician. The marketing team do
not understand that you can't make policy by feedback surveys alone.
Greed killed Microsoft, Bill Gates stopped building software for love, he
started building it to make money, slowly the marketing team took over,
and the goodness disappeared. For
those of us who still use Microsoft Products, the decline is tragic. Are
we to spend the rest of our lives running Windows XP and Office 2003?
Yet there is something darker in there too.
Once we loved the geeky humility of Bill Gates, but as the company grew
we began to hate Microsoft's "full of itself" attitude. Americans are known for their achiever mentality, for the
shallow positivity which comes out of the need for success not truth.
That shallowness comes in two forms, saccharin falseness and gung-ho
arrogance. Yet now that the world hangs on Apple's every word,
Microsoft's self confidence is breaking down. What happens to the
achiever under stress? He becomes the fighting zealot, the stressed
religious maniac. Yet the zealot, like the achiever, also lacks the
capacity for self analysis, so his breakdown intensifies his essential
faults. Steve Ballmer is a marvellous example of archetypal American personality. He is is
the antithesis of the cautious questioning intellectual, he is the gun
slinging cowboy who shot down the iPhone as soon as he saw it and
declared Windows Mobile 6 winner. Perhaps
Microsoft's decline is a microcosm of America's decline.
Conclusion - Political Reflections
One fascinating aspect of the Windows vs
Apple debate is the way it reflects some of the issues in the economic
debate between free markets vs state
capitalism. The following three points illustrate this:
1. The chaos of laissez-faire. Apple is famous for its closed hardware
system, the PC is famous for open standards and competition. You would
have thought we would all prefer an open system, but it can become
chaotic. For example, Apple was able to build such an amazing iPhone
because it owned both the software and hardware. This is another example
of the famous Railway Privatisation Problem in the UK which was designed
to introduce competition but ended in chaos. A closed system is often
associated with higher prices, but economies of scale can actually work
to the advantage of a more monopolised market. Apple now has economies
of scale no iPhone or iPad competitor can touch, it could undercut
competitors if it wanted, but of course it makes more money by
maintaining a premium price. In fact, the biggest danger of a
monopolised market is excessive prices. Apple now makes vast profits as
a result of being able to set their prices according to what consumers
are willing to pay - in a competitive market prices instead converge on
what it costs to make the product. Lenin argued that free markets
degenerate into monopolies earning excessive profits, but his collective
ownership solution failed miserably. The trendy new theory on the block
is Chinese State Capitalism which prevents companies from making
excessive profits and abusing the market either by heavy handed
regulation or state ownership.
2. The evils of laissez-faire. A key element of the Apple concept is the
App Store, of protecting the consumer from bad software. One of the
problems with commercial software is that it tends to become, to some
extent, mal ware. Look at Norton Anti Virus - my personal favourite
example of a god awful product driven by commercial pressures. Norton
pay lap top manufactures to include it on on the machine. They make it
as hard as they can to uninstall. They fill it with lots of junk
features you don't actually need, but because you are not an expert, you
can be tricked into thinking you do need. They love messages that pop up
so you retain brand awareness. They report harmless things as malicious
to trick you into thinking they are doing a great job. Office Ribbon is
another example of the problem of commercial pressures. Disappointed
that users were not bothering to upgrade Microsoft set up to create
something totally different. The change was not driven by virtue, but by
profit. The idea of capitalism is that it is efficient because the end
user buys what maximizes his personal contentment. The complaint against
capitalism is that the limited expertise and irrationality of consumers,
combined with the selfish motives of producers, creates anomalies which
destroy the utility maximizing process. Instead you end up with products
that damage personal contentment.
3. The need for authority. Apple is famous for its top down management
style. A "top down" approach is one in which decision making is
concentrated at the top of an organisation. Steve Jobs is the classic
example of the visionary genius who rules like a god over his minions. A
"flat management" approach, by contrast, places greater emphasis on the
collective intelligence of the organisation. Most technology companies
have evolved toward a more flat structure because the technical skills
of the engineers are so vital to the process. One problem with a flat
management structure is that consensual visions can lack originality.
Incidentally there is another structure, more associated with political
parties, called "bottom-up" which draws on the intelligence of the
grassroots. What has all this to do with economics and politics? If
human beings have vastly different levels of skill in a certain areas,
it calls into question the efficiency of allowing individuals to make
decisions about these areas. Why have a free market in mobile handsets
if the ability of Steve Jobs to judge the relative worth of competing
handsets is infinitely higher than the average mans? Free will in this
choice becomes worthless, it just hurts people by letting them make the
mistake of purchasing Windows Mobile. Of course Apple only make one
handset and people may have different needs, so this argument is over
extended. Yet you see the point that once human beings are no longer
equal anomalies open up in the democratic and capitalist model.
These three arguments taken from the Apple-Microsoft example are
insights into the wider debate swirling around the world today between
the American and the Chinese economic models. Yet I am not suggesting
authoritarian Apple should be boycotted in favour of democratic
Windows/Linux. Pragmatism, not ideology, should guide our purchasing. I
don't mean by that scientific thinking instead of artistic feeling. Just
as the sight of a beautiful picture generates positive feelings, for
many people computers are aesthetic objects that bring joy to their
lives, these aesthetic feelings are not what I mean by ideological. For
example, I love my iPhone so much I can cheer myself up just by looking
at it or playing with the cool interface. Before the iPhone I had a
Nokia with a black & white display which, unlike modern mobiles, had no
timeout. The long battery life, the functional display, and humble
design were features I loved. Ideology is when we refuse to open our
mind to the choices before us and honestly compare relative merits with
detachment. Plato argued that irrationality is inhibited love, this is
why he described Socrates and Diptoma as living in a state of bliss,
because they never allowed impurities to obscure the flow of
understanding and lived in state of total love toward the good they
perceived around them. Anyway, the Apple Microsoft debate is a
fascinating one because it stirs up particularly passionate clouds of
irrationality, much to delight of Apple's marketing team!
------------------------------
As a final though I leave you with some interesting screenshots showing
the evolution of an Apple and Windows application over the years. It’s exciting to watch the aesthetic progression of our GUIs and to
wonder what future years will hold. My only fear, as a power user, is
that Microsoft will put Apple style ease of use and aesthetics ahead of
functionality - I hope they can always remain at least on a level
pegging.
1991 Mac
1997 Mac
2002 Mac
1985 Windows 1.0
1987 Windows 2.0
1990 Windows 3.0
1995 Windows 95
2001 Windows XP
2007 Windows Vista
Links:
Many thanks for ideas and images from these
sources amongst others:
Lisa GUI Prototypes:
http://home.san.rr.com/deans/prototypes.html
History of Windows, Apple, Apple OS etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org
History of the GUI:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/gui.ars
GUI Gallery: http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html
GUI Gallery: http://www.guidebookgallery.org
Personal Computer Market Share:
http://www.pegasus3d.com/total_share.html
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