Chapter 36 Section 3 People's War

A Japanese national Go player said that the way for a master to win is to catch the opponent's mistakes.Although Jobs' mistakes at the Shuangxiong meeting were serious, they were not fatal, because it took Microsoft nine years to make the operating system window with a graphical interface and a mouse, that is, Windows. The fatal defeat made it ruin the original good game.Jobs, like Gates, is a monopoly who does not allow others to sleep peacefully, but Jobs and his successors are too eager for utilitarianism.In the big game of the microcomputer industry, Apple is grabbing the ground, while Microsoft is building momentum first and then breaking the ground.The result is that Apple benefits quickly, and Microsoft's overall layout is good.

Apple seized the opportunity at the beginning. It itself has control over the hardware and software of the Apple series of microcomputers, and the cooperation between Microsoft and IBM on the PC is seemingly incompatible.Even on the software side, Apple is a generation ahead of Microsoft on the operating system.However, Apple, which was leading, made a fatal mistake - taking a closed road and a purely technical route.When IBM, due to anti-monopoly restrictions, had to tolerate compatible machine manufacturers cloning their own products and stealing more and more markets, Apple was glad that it did not encounter the same trouble.Before Microsoft, software could not make money directly, because it was all given to users when selling hardware.In this way, the value of software must be reflected through hardware sales. Perhaps because of this consideration, Apple has always insisted on selling software and hardware together.The result of Apple's refusal to develop its own Macintosh computer technology objectively pushed all compatible machine manufacturers who wanted to get a share of the microcomputer market to IBM and Microsoft.Since the mid-1980s, the pattern of the world's hardware market has changed from Apple to IBM to Apple to IBM plus all compatible machines.In the beginning, this disadvantage of Apple was not obvious, because its series market share was still very high.However, due to the openness of IBM PC and the effect of globalization of the information industry, IBM compatible machines are getting cheaper and cheaper, and their market share is getting higher and higher. DOS is ahead of Apple in terms of operating system share.If Apple opened up the compatible machine market 20 years ago, it is hard to say whether Microsoft can win in the operating system, because the latter is nearly a decade behind the former.

If Apple has grabbed the sky, then Microsoft has regained the ground through openness, compatibility and low cost.On the one hand, Microsoft provides the operating system to PC manufacturers at a near-free price.Although Gates has always hated piracy and wrote an "Open Letter to Players" as early as 1975 accusing those who use pirated software, Gates turned a blind eye to piracy before he became the overlord of the operating system field. Eye.On the other side, before Microsoft built its software empire, it mainly supported and cooperated with application software manufacturers.The success of an operating system ultimately depends on how many useful and cheap applications are on it.For a long time, Microsoft relied on third parties to develop application software.Therefore, for a time there appeared large microcomputer application software companies such as Lotus, WordPerfect for word processing, and Borland for programming tools.Apple, on the other hand, has to do everything on its own. Although Lotus also tried to help Apple develop a word processing and tabulation software Jazz on the Macintosh, this software was difficult to use due to Macintosh compatibility issues.Lotus even said with self-mockery that in the first month, we sold millions of copies of Jazz, but in the second month, users returned more copies than they sold, because it was very disturbing. So disappointed that the user returned the pirated copy as well.Another blunder that Apple can't ignore is compatibility.Needless to say, Apple's products are not compatible with other microcomputers, even Apple itself is not compatible internally.Apple's Macintosh is not compatible with the early Apple in terms of hardware and operating system. Of course, it can be considered that the early Macintosh is far behind the Macintosh and the latter does not need to consider compatibility issues.But the later Power PC and Macintosh are still not compatible in hardware.This not only makes software developers helpless, but also makes users spend money to buy new software over and over again. (So ​​far, the software of the Macintosh is much more expensive than the software of the IBM series of PCs.) The card that Microsoft can play for a long time is DOS compatibility, but it can win the hearts of users.In this way, with the support of compatible machine manufacturers and application software developers, and more importantly, the support of users, Microsoft is fighting a people's war with Apple. The user base of .

A deeper reason for Apple's lost ground is that it somehow violated Moore's and Andy Beer's theorems of information.The scale of the entire computer industry is trillions of dollars, which is definitely not something that one company can afford.It is true that different links of the ecological chain in this field need monopoly, but each link needs mutual support.Especially after the 1990s, the entire computer industry formed such a tacit agreement that software updates drive hardware updates.When it comes to updating software, software companies get ahead first, but old hardware quickly becomes inadequate.At this time, the user is not complaining about the poor software, but to update the hardware.This has enabled many hardware companies to develop rapidly, and the flames of everyone can be high.Apple makes both hardware and software, and it is difficult to balance the speed of the two.If the software is made too fast, the hardware cannot keep up. If the hardware is made too fast, there is no suitable software available.Historically, Apple has had several computers that were lagging behind when they were introduced; others, such as the early PowerPC, were launched with incredible speed but few applications to use.In addition, the price of the computer should not be too expensive for users to update it every few years. The price of an Apple computer is usually more than twice that of an IBM PC compatible computer, and ordinary individual users cannot afford it.In a nutshell, no matter how strong a company is, it cannot beat objective laws.

Microsoft has won the geographical advantage, which offsets the advantage of Apple's time, and then the two sides will depend on the harmony between the two parties.When we introduced Apple earlier, we mentioned that within Apple in the mid-1980s, the founder Jobs and CEO Scully were in a mess, and the managers of various departments worked on their own to create thousands of large and small projects.In contrast, Microsoft, since Gates invited Ballmer, he has given the latter full power to deal with daily affairs.Although Ballmer has a grumpy temper, he cooperated well with Gates, allowing Gates to think about strategic issues.From the end of the 1980s to the 2000s, Microsoft basically had a net influx of talent, while Apple was unstable from top to bottom.Although everyone knows the importance of talents, at least on the surface, Gates is more respectful and corporal, while Apple is more arrogant.

By 1990, after the failure of Windows 1.0 and 2.0, Microsoft finally ushered in the success of Windows 3.0 and then Windows 3.1 (the version number in China is Window 3.2 Chinese version), which has been in use for a long time. In just a few months , it outsold all of IBM's OS/2 over the years. Windows 3.1 was a fatal blow to Apple.At that time, Apple was in the most chaotic period in history, and it couldn't organize an effective counterattack and collapsed thousands of miles.Microsoft finally won the dominance of the microcomputer operating system by relying on the ten-year people's war.