A decade
later, Apple
remains but Microsoft king
by Alan Zisman (c) 2002 First published
in Business in Vancouver
, Issue #664 July 16-22,2002 High Tech Office column
As I sit and write this, it’s been almost exactly ten years since my
byline
first appeared in BIV, in the issue of June 16, 1992 to be exact.
Frankly, I would have missed that momentous anniversary but it was
brought
to my attention by reader James Devon . He e-mailed me a quote from my
opinion-piece
titled How the mighty Macintosh became the Betamax of the computer
World
(not yet a column…) where I said: “My prediction-- there'll always be a
strong
and loyal base of Macintosh users. But then again, there's still a
large
base of loyal Commodore 64 users. Really! But within a year, two at the
most,
sticking to a Mac is going to seem like running the world's most
expensive
Windows clone.”
On the surface, at least, my prediction was wrong. A decade later, many
loyal
Mac customers have remained loyal Mac customers. And as Apple’s latest
wave
of TV ads are proclaiming, at least some Windows users are prepared to
tell
the world how they’ve been won over to the ease and elegance of
Macintosh
computers and operating system.
But let’s take a trip back a decade, look at where we were then, to try
to
get a bit of perspective on where we are. Back in 1992, while, like
today,
a majority of computers ran a Microsoft operating system, it wasn’t
Windows.
It was a minimalist, text-based thing called MS-DOS. Some home and
business
users ran Macs, with a graphical user interface, but after eight years,
while
Macs were the prefered for graphics and publishing, they only accounted
for
about 10% of personal computers. (BIV, at the time, was produced on a
network
of far from cutting edge Macintosh SEs).
The most-used business applications ran under DOS: Word Perfect word
processor,
Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, dBase database. Each used a totally different
set
of non-intuitive commands. Shift+F7 meant Print in Word Perfect, but
was
meaningless (I think!) in 1-2-3.
There was an Internet, but it was mandated to be non-commercial, and
was
just starting to be available outside of universities and scientific
research
labs. Some businesses communicated using e-mail, typically using
in-house,
proprietary systems. There were computer viruses, but most were spread
on
infected floppy diskettes. (There were CD-ROMs, but the drives and
discs
were expensive and hardly anyone had them).
While the hardware was faster and more commonplace, it was pretty
similar
to the first generation of PCs and Macs that penetrated the workplace
in
the early to mid 1980s. Below the surface, however, it was changing.
Microsoft (not yet the Evil Empire) had released Windows version 3.0 in
May
1990, and with sales of 10 million, it already had more users than the
Mac.
My 1992 BIV piece suggested that while it was nowhere near as nice as
the
Mac operating system, it ran on cheap and common clones and was good
enough
for most users. Sound familiar?
And after a stagnant half-decade or so, the pace of change was picking
up.
The next year saw the release of Microsoft’s Windows 3.1, which quickly
became
the PC standard. And because Word Perfect and Lotus failed to produce
Windows
versions of their applications, Microsoft’s Word and Excel, running
under
Windows became the new business standards. CD-ROMs and multimedia
became
increasingly common at home and (a bit later) at work.
1993 also saw the first release of the Mosaic web browser. By 1995,
with
the release of both Windows 95 and the Netscape browser, the opening of
the
Internet to commercial users, and my first High Tech Office column in
BIV,
things were looking a lot like today.