Kudos to Apple
(Originally posted at Conservative Donnybrook)
Apple just posted another quarter of stellar results and Macintosh sales continue to accelerate.
Macs, of course, lately enjoy a reputation (along with the iPod and iPhone) as the hot accessory of choice for young, self-satisfied urban hipsters–this is typified by Apple’s “I’m a PC”–”and I’m a Mac” ads, which are probably more honest advertising than Apple intends: the Mac guy is so smug you want to punch him in the mouth, just like in real life. (Counterexample: Me. I confess to owning a Mac, but am decidedly un-hip and, hopefully, un-smug.) The PC guy, meanwhile, is played by the likeable everyman-humorist John Hodgman, who is awesome.
Where was I? Oh yes, Macs selling like hotcakes. But it wasn’t long ago, you’ll remember, that everyone had given up on the Mac, Apple was posting massive losses, and application developers were abandoning the platform in droves. Also-ran operating systems like IBM’s OS/2 were fading into obscurity and it was universally conceded that the OS wars were over, with Microsoft firmly ensconced as the industry’s hegemon. In 1994, Apple tried to sell itself to its old nemesis IBM, and a couple of years afterwards, BusinessWeek lamented “The Fall of an American Icon.” Industry watchers looked to supposedly paradigm-changing technologies like Sun’s Java programming language for challenges to Microsoft’s dominance.
When the days were darkest, incredibly, the bumbling Apple CEO Gil Amelio even considered adopting Microsoft’s Windows NT as the core of a next-generation Mac OS. Soon thereafter, Apple acquired Steve Jobs’s NeXT Software, its NEXTSTEP operating system which now forms the basis of Mac OS X, and, most importantly, Steve Jobs. Brought aboard the company he co-founded (and that had fired him 12 years previously) to act as an advisor to Amelio, Jobs ended up ejecting Amelio and his cronies, installing NeXT executives in key positions, and regaining control of Apple in a stunning boardroom coup.
Right away, Jobs jettisoned misguided initiatives based on widely-held conventional wisdom. For example, it was universally believed that the only way Apple could effectively compete with Microsoft was by licensing the Mac OS to third-party hardware vendors, thus introducing the price competition and endless variety that exists in the Windows world. However, Jobs did a 180-degree turn with Apple’s cloning strategy, effectively giving the death sentence to the well regarded Mac cloner Power Computing, and moved to integrate Apple’s OS more tightly with its hardware offerings. (He also quickly killed off the technically impressive yet ridiculed Newton PDA.) Of course, Apple could never beat Microsoft by attempting to ape its business model. Instead, Jobs leveraged Apple’s hardware-software integration by introducing such elegant machines as the iMac. Although the iMac had its pooh-poohers, the fact remains that it was the first step towards Apple re-emerging as one of America’s most dynamic and admired companies, just several short years after it was written off for dead.
Of course, the Mac’s resurgence owes much to the Web emerging as something of a cross-platform computing environment, thus unshackling many computing tasks from particular operating systems like Windows. But the fact remains that Apple slugged it out reclaim a nice little slice of the pie the old-fashioned way, by competing with Microsoft head-to-head. I know that Apple is run by a bunch of lefties, and that the Mac isn’t nearly as great as the more deranged Apple partisans say it is, and that Steve Jobs is sort of a nutball vegan, etc. But as conservatives, we can surely tip our caps to an amazing business success story.
