Jobs Jabs at Microsoft
Walter Mossberg of the Wall St. Journal, the personal technology powerhouse that FirstAdopter strives to become, interviewed Steve Jobs at a recent conference. Here are some of his most interesting points:
We make really only the second-highest volume operating system in the business, and we think it's the best now. We think Microsoft is following our taillights again with a copy of Mac OS X about a year ago, and that's kind of fun. If you look at the core of Apple, what Apple is great at is figuring out how to invent cool technology but making it wonderfully easy to use. That's what we've always done. That's what the Mac was; that's what a lot of things we do are. From the very beginning we looked at the iPod and said the ultimate competitive barrier is going to be software. We're pretty clever at hardware, and ultimately people will copy us and do other things, but the competitive barrier will be software. The more consumer products evolve, the more and more they look like software in boxes. A lot of traditional consumer electronics companies haven't rocked software.
Like we said before, Jobs is the master at having his finger on the pulse of what consumers want and need. They want devices that are easy to use and simple without reading a detailed manual. This is a lot more difficult to duplicate than Sony thinks it is.
Microsoft always talks about innovation, but I challenge anyone to tell me what they have truly innovated over the years ex-Expedia. Almost every OS improvement was copied from Mac and many of the core Microsoft Office applications with direct rip-off of competitors or acquired. Even the original MS-DOS was a hack that Gates bought off some poor guy at the last minute to sell to IBM.
I will admit Gates wrote a mean BASIC compiler back in the day, but his genius has always been business acumen of screwing his business counter-parties. Now we will see Microsoft's new OS in a couple of years, which I guarantee will look strikingly similar to OS X and Microsoft's upcoming music store later this year. iTunes anyone?
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