Future Perfect
Back in the day, I used to be a regular viewer of “A Current Affair” (when there was such a thing — I hear it’s still going strong in Australia, but here in the USA it got beat out by Inside Edition and other tabloid news shows).
After a while, I noticed a curious pattern. Every day, at the end of the show, it presented previews of what was going to be on tomorrow’s show. And they always looked much more provocative and fascinating that what I just saw on today’s show. It took me many weeks before I one day realized — duh! — that it’s impossible for every show to be much better than the one before it. Obviously, the previews had to be seriously misleading.
David Letterman had a gag where, for many consecutive shows, he would tell the studio audience that they were great, but last night’s audience was horrible. It was, of course, the same principle at work.
Which brings us to Microsoft.
Microsoft (and before it, IBM in the 1960s, if the stories I’ve heard over the years are true), has developed a pattern of releasing mediocre products, but insisting that vastly better, blow-the-competition-away products are coming up in the next year or two. After many years of this, you’d think people would start realizing that that “great” product that Microsoft will be releasing twelve months from now may not be so great. And it may not be ready twelve months from now, either. Maybe people are starting to realize this; Apple’s seen some remarkable gains lately.
This is just another fundamental difference between Apple’s and Microsoft’s whole approach to business. While Microsoft is perpetually hyping next year’s “great” product, while hawking today’s let-down, welcome-to-reality product, Apple is perpetually releasing really great products, hyping those very same released products, and keeping as silent as possible about what’s coming out next year.
Apple: “We’ll sell you a great product today.”
Microsoft: “Our current products aren’t so great, but you should buy them anyway, because we’ll be releasing fantastic products a year or two from now, and then you’ll be really sorry if you bought Apple.”
Update 2008.07.30 — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in an all-employees memo:
In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. We’ll do the same with phones — providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.
Translation: Attention consumers. Microsoft is committed to “choice” and Apple isn’t. But please don’t choose Apple; I didn’t mean that! Oh, and by the way, in the not-too-distant future (wink, wink) we will provide something as good as what Apple is providing now. So don’t jump ship. You’ll be sorry.
Update 2008.08.14 — As quoted on RoughlyDrafted:
Windows Vista is an investment in the long term. When you make the investment into Windows Vista, it’s going to pay it forward into the operating system we call Windows 7. —Brad Brooks of Microsoft
Wow. It doesn’t get much more blatant than that.
Update 2008.11.12 — Ballmer now promises that Microsoft will have its own app store, like the iPhone’s.
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