This year's Microsoft developer conference was bolder and brasher than Apple's—methinks; Steve Ballmer's crew is more forthcoming with information than was Steve Jobs' gang.Apple's developer conference, where the CEO unveiled the iPhone 3G, was closed to the press. Participants agreed to NDAs. By stark contrast, Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference was open to the press, and pretty much anything and everything was public. Secretive Apple tightly holds close its future product plans, while Microsoft revealed information that competitors could use before new products reach market, such as Office Web, Windows Azure and Windows 7.
Contrasting styles are just the beginning of the differences. Microsoft articulated the clearest strategy I've seen anywhere for the PC, mobile device and Web service. Apple has got nothing even close. But for all Microsoft's talk, there is no real mobile strategy. Yet. By contrast, Apple's mobile strategy is well-formed and rapidly expanding.
The issue isn't really that there's anything wrong with being open about the future of your products and services. The issue is that when you fail to deliver, you get yourself into a huge PR mess, whereby the only one coming out looking good in the end is the competition.
Apple:
"Yeah, we're going to pretend we're being optimistic about our 'goal' of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of '08. Oh yeah, did we mention we secretly know we'll sell about twice that much?"
"We're hoping to make about 5 billion in revenue next quarter." *end of quarter* "Well, we made about 6 billion. That is, if you use GAAP and don't count the iPhone's 5 billion in revenue this quarter."
Microsoft:
"We'll be selling more than 20 million Windows Mobile phones!" "Well, we sold almost 20 million, does that count?"
"The Zune is a hit! With more than 10% market share... of the hard-drive based MP3 player market... with 30 GB of storage. But that's good, right?"
While Apple is more closed, they maintain a certain level of quality and the users see that. Microsoft always is more open years before, but never maintains at least the main parts of what they announce. I'm thinking this Windows 7 will be the real "Vista 1.0" and we been using the beta all this time.
I think MS has hit the very happy medium this time!
I think MS has hit the very happy medium this time!
Longhorn was basically scrapped and restarted just like Apple's Rhapsody.
This time they're sticking to one premise and staying with it. Keep it simple and make it better. Not "let's plan on the UI of the future with spinning light orbs everywhere."
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.