From: mike 


http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/7BFF778B-0B61-4E58-A310-3645B9D
FEDCB.html


===
Schadenfreude runs wide and deep against Apple, Inc. The company's
phoenix-like cycle of rebirth from ashes has left the tech world's analysts
and columnists looking foolish on so many occasions that many seem to hope
the company would just vanish and leave the industry without any surprises
or difficult mysteries to decipher.

After all, it’s much easier to predict the innovation Microsoft will
deliver: every new PC will have Windows on it, end of story. It's both easy
and safe to congratulate Bill Gates for always eventually delivering upon
his promises to at some point match the existing products of rivals.

It might take ten years for Microsoft to catch up, but with its
mega-billions in the bank and its tenacious grip of market control, it has
long seemed foolish to suggest that any competitor could unseat the Redmond
Empire on any playing field.

[Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop?] [Innovation:
Apple at Macworld vs Microsoft at CES] [The Secret Failures of Microsoft]


Apple’s Problematic Disruption.
That makes Apple a painful thorn in the side of the professional adorers of
Microsoft. If Apple can take back the bully's lunch money, then presumably
so can others. That upsets the established order of the blandly predictable
tech world, forcing columnists to give more thought to the ideas they
publish.

These writers clearly do not want to expend much thought; they want to
publish sensationalist, formulaic fluff that attracts the zombie hordes of
Digg, at least a few of whom will trigger their ad-supported links and keep
them in business. Witness the PC World brouhaha over the “Why we hate”
fluff pieces commissioned for Digg.

For the few beneficiaries of the comfortable business model of writing what
people want to hear--rather than what they need to hear--change is a
threat. Once Microsoft's rivals become established strongly enough, no
amount of FUD will help to overturn progress back into the favor of
Microsoft.

That means they have to hit hard and fast with their opinionalysis to kill
off any threats to Microsoft's hegemony before any take root. Unfortunately
for them, they have not managed to stop Apple's recent ascent to a position
of direct competition against Microsoft in consumer electronics,
particularly with the iPod family.

This has only prompted them to try attacking harder. Ignoring the
well-known details of history, analysts are quick to compare today's Apple
with the company as it existed in the mid 80s or mid 90s, and suggest that
the new Apple is about to stumble into a black hole.

Is it? Consider the historical facts analysts are avoiding in their attack
on Apple's latest ventures.


[Harry McCracken and the Apple Censorship Myth] [Analysts fail to predict
Apple's success with iPod] [Paul Thurrott's Merciless Attack on Artie
MacStrawman]



Apple's Rags to Riches to Rags...

Apple's darling rise in the late 70s and early 80s with the success of the
Apple II fell precipitously after a series of desperate product
introductions missed their market. The Apple III, the Lisa, and the
original Mac all failed as competitive products.

The Apple III was a poorly constructed, stopgap product that couldn't run
much existing Apple II software and didn't really offer a significant
technology jump of its own. The Lisa was prohibitively expensive for even
professional and business users, and the original Mac was too resource
limited and lacked obvious practical applications for its brilliant new
interface.

It appeared that Apple--the company that introduced personal computing to
the masses--had hoist itself on its own petard while trying to blow up the
conventional DOS world with its fully graphical computing environment.

Surely, the analysts liked to claim, Apple couldn't deliver the Mac as a
useful platform; even if it did, plenty of other companies would similarly
introduce a CPU with a mouse and windows and leave Apple in a crowded
market with an undistinguished product.

No hope!

[1985-1990: 16-bit Graphical Computing] [1980-1985: 8-bit Platforms]


to Riches...

So many of Apple's peers were either struggling in the market or already
dead--from Atari to Commodore to Osborne--that it seemed safe to dismiss
Apple and its graphical new toy Mac.

Just as analysts began mocking the company however, Apple turned things
around and was able to deliver the Mac platform as clearly superior to
other DOS alternatives, particularly for creative professional users who
demanded a higher quality computing environment than DOS or Windows would
provide for another decade.

[1990-1995: The Race to Deliver The Next New Platform] [1990-1995: Hitting the Wall]
[1990-1995: NeXT, Be, and the Mac PC] [1990-1995: The Rise of Windows NT
& Fall of OS/2]


to Rags...

The tune changed back to adoring praise of the leadership of John Sculley
in the late 80s, only to be met again with a series of early 90s failures
that included the Newton, the Mac Performa consumer line, and Apple's
failure to ship Pink, Taligent, or Copland.

Sculley had set Apple aimlessly adrift, and CEOs Michael Spindler and later
Gil Amelio did little to correct the profoundly ingrained institutional
problems that built up a reputation for Apple as being a hopelessly
beleaguered company. Meanwhile, the Windows PC was becoming entrenched as
the standard in computing, and Microsoft had appropriated much of Apple's
Mac innovations into Windows.

Clearly, there was no reason to cheerlead for such a loser of a company. It
became an unwritten rule that any mention of Apple Computer required
attaching the word beleaguered. The hatchets came out in full force.

[Newton Lessons for Apple's New Platform] [Platform Crisis: The Lazy
Dinosaur] [Platform Crisis: The Tentacles of Legacy] [The Secrets of Pink,
Taligent and Copland]


to Riches.

In 1997, under the new leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple began rapidly
cleaning up its messy past and putting its house back in order, but
columnists continued to feel safe in deriding the company's fortunes as
hopeless.

The success of the iMac, a new expansion into new creative markets with
Final Cut Pro and Logic, a consumer friendly portfolio of software paired
with new Macs, and the delivery of Mac OS X as an embarrassment to
Microsoft's Windows all helped to make Apple-trashing columnists again look
foolish.

Since 2001, Apple has:

•delivered regular, significant new software updates to Mac OS X; •turned a
forgotten project within Macromedia into an industry leader in film and
video post production;
•reclaimed its role in delivering the state of the art in digital media
creation and playback with QuickTime; •launched a major new successful
business in retail; •become the world's leader in online music and video
distribution.

[Why Apple Bounced Back]
[How CPR Saved Apple]
[Microsoft's Plot to Kill QuickTime] [How Microsoft Pushed QuickTime's Final Cut]

Finding a New Attack Vector.
Windows flacks moved on to attack the company using other
manufacture-facts: ridiculing the company's Switcher campaign as a failure
because it didn’t immediately unseat Microsoft's desktop monopoly, and
holding up Apple's share of the entire world's PC production as proof that
the Mac was not something anyone should talk about.

Surely a platform with 2% of the entire PC market couldn't survive for even
a few more years. Of course they were wrong again, in part because Apple's
tiny share of the entire PC market worldwide was also a significant portion
of the domestic installed base, particularly in key markets such as
education, creative workers, scitech, and home consumers.

In the last three years, Apple has more than doubled its production and
sales of Mac computers, and simply swallowed up the music player market
whole with the iPod.

[Market Share Myth 2007: iPod vs Zune and Mac vs PC] [Market Share vs
Installed Base: iPod vs Zune, Mac vs PC] [Readers Write About Market Share,
Installed Base]


There is One More Thing...
After seamlessly migrating the Mac platform to mainstream Intel processors
last year, the company is now branching out into two major new initiatives:
mobiles with the iPhone and the living room with Apple TV.

Many analysts have been hell-bent to discredit Apple's attempts to expand
into these new areas, particularly since they directly take aim at
initiatives from Microsoft that haven't done much: WinCE / Windows Mobile
and Windows Media Center. Pretending not to know better, they liken Apple,
Inc. to its former self from decades ago.

The next two articles will look at Apple TV and the iPhone in comparison to
what analysts are saying about them, and point out why both will do more to
change the tech landscape than anything from anyone else. Have a favorite
article bemoaning the imminent failure of Apple TV or the iPhone? Send it
in!
===


[lots of links in the article]

  /m

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