Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?
Apple’s lead is largely due to key decisions that competitors failed to emulate — leveraging bsd open source tooling, removing legacy io ports, largely perpetual OS licensing model.<p>But now that Microsoft is emulating those decisions it will no longer be as crippled by its own past bad decisions.<p>And in the meantime it has sunk tons of money into cloud and xbox which are massively profitable.<p>And Apple’s refusal to cater to budget conscious consumers is starting to really hurt market share, while allowing competitors to extract a lot of undeserved profit simply by offering their goods at a relative discount compared to Apple.<p>Apple’s most consequential f-up in my opinion has been the way it has priced solid state storage across its product line. This has left the door wide open for competitors to win on the basis of consumer ignorance about subtle performance differences, while forcing marginal apple buyers to settle for a highly inferior user experience bc of not enough (and not expandable) storage.<p>Apple does a lot of things well but its weakness is that it doesn’t understand that not all of its customers work at apple.<p>Even today Amazon is setting itself up to eat Apple’s lunch in educational tablets and parental controls, a major driver of consumer purchase decisions, but hard to understand if you are a recent grad from a top school seeking status who took a job in product at apple.<p>Microsoft does a lot of things badly but seems to be willing to revert bad decisions and try hard for market share.<p>Ultimately market share is what makes developers create high quality experiences for the platform. Microsoft had this and lost it, and doesn’t plan to lose it again.