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.”
© 2008 Darel Rex Finley | design by