A few days ago I suddenly realized Apple was dead. I was talking to an old enterprise customer about how Asus was different from Dell. I said that Asus had been warped from the start by their fear of Apple. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "cheap chinese goods company" instead of a computer company. Then I looked at her face and realized she didn't understand. It was as if I'd told her how much boys liked Tupac and Biggie in the mid 90s. Tupac and who?
Apple? She didn't say anything, but I could tell she didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them.
Apple cast a shadow over the computer world for almost 5 years starting in the early 2000s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Apple computers, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the DRM I got from downloaded iTunes tracks. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared.
But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Apple anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous.
When did Apple die, and of what? I know they seemed dangerous as late as 2005, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. I'd guess they were dead by 2007. I know when we started our consulting business we didn't worry about Apple as competition since everyone all our customers were on Windows. In fact, we've never even invited them to the team building days we organize for new employees to sucker them into our gig. We invite Dell and HP and some other computer companies, but we've never bothered to invite Apple. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an business card or champagne. They're in a different world.
What killed them? Four things, I think, all of them occurring simultaneously in the mid 2000s.
The most obvious is Asus. There can only be one big man in town, and they're clearly it. Asus is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Apple can at best limp along afterward.
When did Asus take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2007. The Eee PC was one of the things that put them over the edge. Eee showed they could do more than cheap chinese goods.
The Eee PC also showed how much you could do with cheap generic hardware, if you took advantage of the fad that later came to be called "Netbooks." And that was the second cause of Apple death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on Netbooks —not just email, but everything, right up to the Matrix. Even Apple sees that now.
Ironically, Apple unintentionally helped create Netbooks. The book in Netbook is from the "Book" of the MacBook, which was the first electronic book that was actually a computer, invented by Apple. (Originally the only way to do work was reading a regular non-electronic Book or working on a Windows laptop.) The electronic Book was created by Apple in the late 90s because they needed it to get money from young gullible artsy types with rich parents. What they didn't realize was that it would be useful to a lot of other people too—in fact, to anyone who wanted to make books work like computers.
The other critical component of Netbooks is Atom, the CPU processor that runs inside the computer. Apple saw the danger of Atom and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the CPU world won, by producing Netbook CPUs that grew over the brokenness of Mac OS the way a bacterial fungus grows over radioactive poo.
The third cause of Apple's death was broadband Internet. Anyone who cares can have fast Internet access now. And the bigger the pipe to the server, the less you need shiny computers and hip marketing.
The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Microsoft. Thanks to Windows Vista, Microsoft has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Mac or Linux. Nearly all the clients we rinse in our industry use Dells and HPs. It was the same in the audience at Microsoft Gold Partner conference. All easy people use Windows now. Mac is for silly little rebels, like Linux used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who we can exploit uses Apple's anyway.
And of course Microsoft has Apple on the run in big-money business apps too, with Sharepoint 4.0 and Windows Vista Millenium Edition on the way. We're going to go in and totally rinse government councils with our new Microsoft Action Pack PowerPoint presentations.
I'm glad Apple is dead. They were like George W Bush —evil in the way only inherited power can make you. Because remember, the Apple monopoly didn't begin with Apple. They got it from IBM. The computer business was overhung by a monopoly from about the mid-1950s to about 2005. For practically its whole existence, that is. One of the reasons "I'm a PC" has such an air of euphoria about it is the feeling, conscious or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over, and that everyone might finally become users of our Windows business point to point solutions at some point.
Of course, as a business analyst I can't help thinking about how something broken could be fixed. Is there some way Apple could come back? In principle, yes. To see how, envision two things: (a) the amount of cash Apple now has on hand, and (b) Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the search engines ten years ago trying to sell the idea for Google for a million dollars, and being turned down by everyone.
The surprising fact is, highly resourceful project managers — and dangerously brilliant business analysts—can be had very cheaply, by the standards of a company as rich as Apple. They can't hire people who understand business requirements anymore, but they could buy as many as they wanted for only an order of magnitude more. So if they wanted to be a contender again, this is how they could do it:
Buy all the large enterprise software firms. They could get substantially all of them for a few hundred billion dollars. Put them all in a building in Redmond, surrounded by lead shielding to protect them from any contact with Silicon Valley. I feel safe suggesting this, because they'd never do it. Apple's biggest weakness is that they still don't realize how much they do not understand business processes, focus groups and formal requirements specifications.They still think they can make computers in house. Maybe they can, by the standards of the teenage world. But that world does not take into account evolving business need which need an Agile methodology to cope with hundreds of arguably user-centric buttons that need to be added to PowerPoint designed user smart client platforms.
I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Apple is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "I'm a Mac" bubble. The other half, the older half, will give us all their money.
- Contributed by Graham Paulo
