Contrasting Apple and Microsoft's Product Strategy: A Tale of Two Spills
Daring Fireball had another insightful article on the contrasting product strategies of Microsoft and Apple last week. Well worth a read in it’s entirety if you’re thinking about your own product strategy.
A few observations were particularly trenchant and relevant to me in light of my own recent experience:
Microsoft is no longer ignoring Apple’s market share gains and successful “Get a Mac” ad campaign. But the crux of these ads from Apple is that Macs are better; Microsoft’s response is a message that everyone already knows — that Windows PCs are cheaper. Their marketing and retail executives publicly espouse the opinion that, now that everyone sees Apple computers as cool, Microsoft has Apple right where they want them.
They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are either in denial of, or do not perceive, that there has emerged a consensus — not just among nerds but among a growing number of regular just-plain users — that Windows PCs are second-rate. They still dominate in terms of unit-sale market share, yes, but not because people don’t recognize Windows as second-rate, but because they don’t care, in the same way millions of people buy metric tons of second-rate products from Wal-Mart every hour of every day.
That’s the business Wal-Mart wants to be in — selling a zillion cheap low-margin items and turning a profit on volume. That’s not the business Microsoft is in.
The truth of this was particularly relevant to me because just a few hours before reading this, I had spilled a full glass of water all over the keyboard of my laptop. An occupational hazard of talking a lot with your hands, but one I’d successfully resisted for the last two years, since my last such incident. It’s a still rather painful memory.
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