iPads flew off the shelves over the weekend, at least for a while, but most stores reportedly still had a few of the devices left after the initial buying panic subsided on Sunday. Although there’s been plenty of speculation that the device will be a paradigm-changer for users, the question of which paradigm it will change remained murky at press time. Just about any new device in the computer family is going to shift the game away from Microsoft in some small way, at least, since the Redmond-based software monolith hasn’t brought anything exciting to the marketplace since it introduced the Office suite in 1989. Apple hasn’t exactly been standing still in the meantime, and the company looks like a good bet to surpass Microsoft in market capitalization sometime this year or early next. Actually, there’s no reason why this couldn’t happen in mere days if investors were to suddenly grasp how Steve Jobs & Company has already eaten Microsoft’s lunch going out to 2015 and beyond.
Remember when Microsoft was planning to dominate our living rooms with a “smart” home entertainment center that would have made going out on Saturday night unnecessary? There were predictions that all of us would eventually pay the company a royalty for just about anything that made us feel good. Instead, they produced Windows 7 – a pretty decent operating system by most accounts, but not something you’d find at the top of the hedonist’s shopping list.
Microsoft’s Last Chance
Microsoft has been marking time for so long, accumulating cash it has no idea how to use, that it has forgotten how to innovate. Our suggestion would be to team up with Sony, another company that has lost its way, to deliver the ultimate killer software that we all know is coming anyway. We are talking about 3-D pornography, of course, but with A-list “talent” and the kind of interactivity that would stop men’s hearts, titillating all five senses. Digital Viagra. More than merely broadening the appeal of video games beyond teen-aged male sociopaths and twenty-somethings, this videogame would be so enthralling that men of all ages would not be able to leave their desks. So powerful would be their addiction that they would eventually stop going to work. We can’t think of anything to prevent such a game from reaching the marketplace once the technology has been perfected. Which Hollywood starlet will become the first to earn a billion dollars in royalties for providing the content?
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I’m no fan of Microsoft, but Win95, WinNT and finally Win2000 were all “exciting” introductions after MS Office in 1989. I agree that there’s been nothing exciting since then. Before Win95 and WinNT, MS Office had promise, but was more a bundle of disparate programs than a real suite.
When Apple started, they were building computers for people who were going to write their own software, since there wasn’t any available. With the Mac, they grabbed the desktop publishing market, which would later be considered part of “content creation”. If the iPad represents a significant shift, it is the shift away from content creation to content consumption. The iPad does a great job of letting you view/read/consume content. It’s lousy at producing content. As computers have become a part of daily life, the ratio of content consumers to producers has grown dramatically, so they’re aiming at the “sweet spot” of the market. In my mind, this is what the sub-notebook computer was trying to be, only it forgoes the restrictions of the keyboard and folding screen layout.
This expands on Apple’s success with iPods (and all their variations), which were entirely content consumption oriented.
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With the omission of Flash, and the absence of wide-screen viewing capability, I’d say Apple has done only a so-so job of letting you view/read/consume content. RA