There's an intriguing little thought put forward by John Naughton in The Observer today. That the Microsoft Surface is the company's admission that Steve Jobs was right. That the Apple way is the only way to be able to create consumer electronics. Worth quoting at some length:
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, Microsoft was launching the first computer it has ever made in the form of its Surface tablet. This was intriguing in several ways. For one thing, it suggests that the software giant has finally concluded that Steve Jobs was right all along: that in order to make consumer-friendly computers one must control both the hardware and the software. The odd thing, though, is that the bit of the package it seems to have got right is the hardware. "Sleek Tablet but Clumsy Software" is how David Pogue, the New York Times technology columnist, summed it up, echoing early industry reactions to the device. "You have to be fairly cold-blooded," Pogue writes, "to keep your pulse down the first time you see the Surface: its beauty, its potential, its instant transformation from tablet to PC. How incredible that this bold, envelope-pushing design came from Microsoft, a company that for years produced only feeble imitations of other companies' fresh ideas. And how ironic that what lets the Surface down is supposedly Microsoft's speciality: software."
Well, yes, Microsoft's specialty has always been software but that's not to say that it's always produced great software. And I don't mean just in a design sense. The company has been famous over the years for writing bloatware riddled with bugs and security holes you could drive an entire Wikileaks through. But let's leave my decades of frustration from using their products to one side.
The important part of this idea I rate as being this: "in order to make consumer-friendly computers". The PC wasn't, wasn't ever intended to be and wasn't, seen as something that should just work perfectly right out of the box. Apple's did do that, anything running Microsoft Windows not so much. A PC most certainly was (and I've been around the industry since before Windows 1.0 came out even if I wasn't around for the introduction of DOC itself) thought of as an expensive tool. Something that would need a bit of care and attention to get running properly, that would need maintenance.
Consumer electronics doesn't work this way and never has done. Your first generation Atari games machine couldn't do all that much but you took it out of the box, plugged it in, it worked. Your VCR needed to be told which channel it was on but again it worked right out of the box. Your feature phone....well, you get the idea. In order to sell consumer electronics it has to be something that you just open up and start using. Sure PCs have become more like this over the years with the OS preloaded and things like that. But can you imagine anyone these days accepting a phone that you had to load the OS onto?
And as Naughton says, there's a good argument that in order to get that marriage of OS and hardware then the same company needs to be manufacturing both. I wouldn't say it's a clinching argument but I can see at least some truth in it.
The Apple method therefore may well be right. But this would be for consumer electronics: it wasn't true when Apple was doing it for computers. Otherwise the Mac, which did indeed work right out of the packing box, would have swept all before it. So if the idea is right it's observably not been true for computers but might well be for consumer electronics.
