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A knockout blow for Borland?
MicroFocus has upped its offer for Borland Software to $1.50, hoping to chase off a mystery suitor also pursuing the ALM vendor.
07/06/2009 12:26 PM EST

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Apple drinks Microsoft's milkshake


By Larry O'Brien
August 15, 2008 — 

“Sir, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and my straw reaches across the room, I'll end up drinking your milkshake,” said Senator Albert Fall in his explanation of oil drainage during the Teapot Dome scandal. The same sentiment is expressed in There Will Be Blood shortly before the movie ensures that no one goes away dissatisfied with the promise implied in the title.

In its first three days of business more than ten million downloads were made from Apple’s App Store for the iPhone. Many of these were free downloads and many more were impulse purchases made by those curious to see the capabilities of their newly purchased or upgraded phones, but even allowing for all that, Apple has definitely put a straw in Microsoft’s milkshake.

It is commonly held that Microsoft’s success in operating systems is due in no small part to its unparalleled support of independent software developers. While Unix shells were more powerful than MS-DOS, products like Borland’s Turbo Pascal, Barrington Systems’ Clarion and Zortech C++ meant that MS-DOS could be used as a development and delivery platform for the broadest variety of software markets (individual, departmental, retail) and with the broadest variety of developer sophistication.

While the Macintosh had a graphical edge and a reputation for ease of use at the end-user level, Apple had a notorious barrier to entry when shifting from interpreted, p-code or VM-based development to native. Apple’s developer relations group was dismissive of newcomers, the hardware cost premium was significant, and in the retail channel, shelf-space was at a premium.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was releasing products like Visual C++ and Visual Basic, giving out MSDN subscriptions, and economically supporting a broad ecosystem of conferences, books and magazines. To be sure, to this day the volume of support issuing from Redmond absolutely swamps that from Cupertino. Yet one need only glance at the laptop covers at any development conference to see Apple’s new advantage: lots of very good programmers are doing their development work on Apple hardware. They may very well be using that hardware to run Vista (it’s widely said that the Macbook Pro is the best Vista laptop available).

But programmers are a curious lot, and every developer who buys a Mac will, sooner rather than later, install XCode and create a “Hello, World” application, or open a terminal window and discover that not only do they have Ruby and Python and Apache and gcc and all sorts of other cool tools but, gee, they can cut-and-paste without selecting “Edit/Mark” from a dropdown menu. At some point they might find it difficult to ignore that installing an application on an Apple is as easy as dragging and dropping an icon, and they might find it difficult to avoid thinking “Gee, that could be my app.”

Meanwhile, Apple’s developer program for OS X and the iPhone is now available to anyone willing to fill out a Web form. Order Hillegass’s “Cocoa Programming for Mac” from Amazon, and by the time it arrives at your door, you can have your development stack set up.

Between “Hello World!” and developing your installer, Microsoft still holds a huge advantage. Visual Studio runs rings around XCode. The Unix underpinnings of OS X help a lot, but the sheer volume of libraries, sample code and information on the nooks and crannies of Win32 are a clear advantage to Windows

One can take swipes at either C++ (too complex) or Objective-C (neither fish nor fowl), but when it comes to enterprise languages, the Common Language Runtime has leapfrogged the Java Virtual Machine in functionality, particularly with Language-Integrated Query. I continue to be impressed by the Mono Project, which brings the CLR to a variety of platforms including the Mac, but it’s necessarily a step behind what’s available from Microsoft. Windows is still a compelling platform for enterprise development.

But every programmer has a vast backlog of software they intend to someday develop and use to get rich. Fifteen years ago, the natural platform on which to develop such software was Windows. A decade ago, it was the Web. Today, the Web is still attractive if you believe in ads or subscriptions, but if you want to hear a little “ka-ching” every time someone recognizes your genius, the Macintosh seems utterly logical. It has less competition, better infrastructure for free tryouts, a culture that is used to buying third-party applications other than games, and, with the iPhone and the app store, it has redefined that retail channel.

Of course, there are far fewer Macs than Windows machines. It’s only recently that Apple has begun selling more than a million new Mac laptops and desktops per quarter, while Windows machines sell more than 15 times that amount (never mind the installed base). That’s an awfully big milkshake.

Most developers will never develop and bring their own commercial software to market. But those who do pull off that dream are hugely influential. Even the richest resource is subject to drainage.

Larry O’Brien is a technology consultant, analyst and writer. Read his blog at www.knowing.net.


Related Search Term(s): software development, Apple, Microsoft


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