For some weeks now, I have been promising an offering on the Mac vs. Windows debate. And I still plan to deliver it, but probably not in the way that most of you are expecting. I will give you all a bit of a hint of the tone of that essay when I say that a lot of the people on both sides, myself included, put entirely too much importance into a question that is, I feel, on the level of whether one's favorite color is red or blue.
That said, I do have a dog in that particular race, as they say. And for that reason, I cannot let a small bit of tech business news from today's New York Times website pass without comment.
According to the Times, Apple has just passed Microsoft as the world's most valuable technology company. Let me put that another way; as far as Wall Street is concerned, Apple is now officially bigger than Microsoft.
When I first read the news at work, I hunted down a fellow Apple fan boy and co-worker to share the news. We exchanged a quick high five, then got back to what we were doing.
But now that I've had a chance to ponder this little tidbit, the ramifications are starting to hit me, and my sense of stunned disbelief is starting to rise. And I hope you will bear with me when I say that for me, this feels a lot like the way the end of the Cold War felt.
Not that I'm even remotely elevating the fall of Communism to the level of one brand of grown up toys selling more stock than another. The latter happens all the time, as businesses wax and wane. But what makes this news so epic is the context of history; for all of my life, Microsoft was the big boy on the block when it came to computers. As I think about it, 7 of the 11 computers I've owned in my life have had Microsoft operating systems (the other four, and the most recent, were, of course, various flavors of Mac's OS X).
Back when I bought my first computer (running MS-DOS 4.01), Microsoft seemed relatively benign, and even vaguely likable. And mean, what can you say about a company whose idea of a game is a flight simulator accurate enough to do low-level flight training on?
But the more software they sold, the bigger they became on the big electronic playground, and the more of a bully they became. No one seriously challenged their operating system, and any rivals that were foolish enough to go up against them in other areas were smashed; the Netscape web browser, Lotus's 1-2-3 spreadsheet, and my own beloved WordPerfect word processor; all were ground beneath the boot of Redmond. They did this with tactics like loading free versions of programs like Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word onto every computer sold, and arranging for some computer manufacturers to sell machines with pre-loaded copies of Microsoft Office which customers couldn't not buy (and yes, I speak from personal experience on that last one. I wound up choosing another PC maker rather than buy $150 worth of software I didn't want).
So even before I made the switch to Apple, Microsoft was the 800-pound gorilla in the room, and everyone's symbol of technological tyranny — you danced to their tune, or you didn't dance at all.
At the same point in time, MacIntosh computers simply weren't a viable alternative for me until 2005. They were too expensive, impossible to get software for, and incompatible with every piece of software I had ever bought in my life. As a result, I wasn't one of the old guard Mac users; people for whom today must seem even more surreal.
For me, though, it is plenty surreal enough. In the 1990s, the idea that Apple would ever be bigger than Microsoft was strictly the province of rabid Apple fan boys (known among us Apple geeks as Kool-Aid drinkers — a tactless allegory to the Jonestown Massacre, with Steve Jobs in the role of Jim Jones). But times change, and apparently, Microsoft didn't; at least, not fast enough. Apple still only accounts for about 10 percent of computers, but computers are moving off the desk and into pockets — an arena where Apple has been giving Microsoft a beating since the iPod. Microsoft isn't dead yet, but its influence is dwindling; the new tech powerhouses are Apple and Google, and the new battlefields are smart phones and search.
It's starting to feel like a bit of a hollow victory, though. As Apple grows in power, the new Apple is starting to seem a lot like the old Microsoft. The last few weeks, we've been hearing about Apple demanding apologies for ad parodies, shutting out apps for the iPod Touch and iPhone for no reason, firing an employee who violated company security by showing an iPad before it's release to the (now retired) co-founder of the company, among other things. In other words, it's not all puppies and rainbows in Cupertino.
So I'm happy for my favorite toy maker today. But I hope they remember that the people that kept them alive in the lean years supported them precisely because they weren't Microsoft. I hope they take a page from their new rival's playbook — namely, "Don't Be Evil." And to paraphrase one of my favorite composers, I really, really hope that the new boss doesn't turn out to be the same as the old boss.
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