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Apple drinks Microsoft's milkshake

By Larry O'Brien

August 15, 2008 — (Page 1 of 3)

“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).

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

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