[undoware]

I believe you may have misread the parent -- I believe the author is implying that it's MSFT that has nothing new to sell (IIPC[1])

Storytime! As it happens, I was working at MSFT when the first M1-based MacBooks rolled out.

I actually ran around trying to get people to look at the specs and talk about this serious emergent threat. Rank & file SWEs just shrugged, and the vibe was that I wasn't senior enough to be allowed to worry about it.

I don't know what management was thinking. But, looking back over the years since, I'd reckon that whatever they were thinking was too quiet.

(There is a sidebar I am omitting about Permission to Worry, which is the name of an upcoming newsletter article I intend to write about this phenomenon -- I've come to regard it as the singular most important privilege that an organization can assign an employee -- but it is well beyond scope for this thread.)

[1] If I Parse Correctly

[smoldesu]

What changed?

Microsoft doesn't really care about Apple in the same way that Apple doesn't really care about Microsoft. Both companies operate in their own lanes, serving their core userbases. Microsoft sells OSes, subscription services and as a footnote, hardware - how did M1 threaten that?

Apple has increased Mac sales by ~20% over the past 5 years, but it's still ~1/4th of the money they're making off selling iPhones. Even if the M3 impresses everyone again with a 40 hour battery life and increases sales by 30% (a generous stretch), Macs still wouldn't be Apple's moneymaker or priority. You want to get an idea of how small the Mac is to Apple? The App Store makes almost 3x more money annually than Mac sales. Their de-facto iPhone monopoly is more valuable than the entirety of the Mac platform.

I think "Permission to Worry" is a pretty pretentious title considering how Microsoft butters their bread, but take my opinion and numbers with a grain of salt.

[undoware]

What changed is that the M1 is causing them to lose the platform war. Performance-per-watt matters enough to users that Apple's incredible parsimony with the juice has effectively secured it both the desktop and the mobile markets.

Sure, yeah, MSFT sells an OS and a cloud -- both are actually pretty awesome these days. But they only got those things on the back of performant Intel silicon. Network effects did the rest, but those network effects were, as it were, tethered to the world by the quality (and modest cost) of the hardware it empowered.

I propose that, like a hurricane moving over land, a software-platform company that loses the first battle -- for the immediate hardware-mediated user experience -- is going to start unwinding.

We don't have to look far for examples. Facebook is currently in just such a death-spiral, in no small part because Apple --- now in a place to dictate terms --- decided its users would be better off with more privacy, and cut FB off from the flows of data it needed for targeted marketing and ML training.

The ability to simply shrug off a behemoth like FB (and leave said behemoth scrambling, vainly, to own the next hardware platform) should surely be enough to get any unbiased observer's attention.

Awareness of the Home-Hardware Advantage is, I imagine, also why my former employer foists Edge on everyone with dark patterns and nagware. They're afraid of Google creeping down the stack. (Like they did on mobile.)

Leaving Apple as gatekeeper for both the desktop and mobile is essentially to submit to Apple hegemony.

I no longer have a horse in this race, but from where I sit, it looks like Apple has outplayed everyone, and the market knows it. (Hence my original comment.)

What do you think Apple will do to Microsoft, once Microsoft products are primarily accessed over Apple devices?

What does anyone do to their competitor, once they can control where, and how, that competitor can talk to its customers?

It really feels like you're not looking at the chessboard at all.

[smoldesu]

> from where I sit, it looks like Apple has outplayed everyone

I also don't have a horse in this race (used the latest & greatest from both Apple and Microsoft/Intel/Nvidia), but I don't think you're seeing the entire picture either.

First off, Apple hasn't won. There are still markets they don't cater to (budget computing, HPC, gaming, machine learning research, CUDA programming, 3D design/rendering, native Docker development, the list goes on), and they show no interest in poaching those users. Second off, you're overestimating the impact of Apple's advances here. Performance-per-watt is a nice advantage, but it came at the cost of abandoning x86 and paying insane up-front costs for next-generation silicon that led to a disappointing M2 cycle. One thing is certain, though - Apple's performance entirely relies on their ability to out-bid competitors for competitive components, which gives them a default monopoly (as the richest company in the world).

> What do you think Apple will do to Microsoft, once Microsoft products are primarily accessed over Apple devices?

Apple will do the same thing they've always done, beg third-parties to stay on their platform with under-the-table deals that bolster support for the App Store. Microsoft makes Apple money, to remove Office365 support would be paramount to telling your business customers to pound sand. All of this is ignoring the antitrust regulation mounting against Apple for their completely unfair abuse of the App Store and software distribution. Even still, they will never have the leverage to kick Microsoft where it hurts because they'll never have competitive market share. Like I said in my previous comment, assuming the most absurd conditions (like Mac sales growing 30% YoY), it would be decades before Apple had enough control to pull that off.

I hope you're right, and Apple tries to act cute while the trade commissions are watching. We're long overdue for another nuclear platform abuses lawsuit like the one we stuck Microsoft with in the mid-2000s, all it would take is one silly move to push us there.

[undoware]

The market and I agree that you are misreading things, but we can agree to disagree.

By my lights, winners don't have to take all in order to have won -- approximately half the market is sufficient. Enough to dictate terms for most users most of the time. That's Apple in 2022, and the market is reflecting that fact. In fact, I daresay that if Apple hasn't won, it is, at the very least, mate-in-three, or thereabouts.

A more interesting question is, what psychological comfort is there in minimizing one's perception of their hegemony?

I'm thinking in terms of avoidance of discomfort. Ideologically, I've been a FOSSian my whole life -- I'm in my forties, and I was a teenager when I first installed Red Hat.

But I'm increasingly aware that, despite having won the battle with the NT kernel, we somehow lost the war. Specifically, we were co-opted by Apple, Amazon, and, yes, now Microsoft too.

It puts food on my table but it leaves me feeling a little empty. I don't know about you. <3 Maybe it's the same?

It's hard to admit you're a bird in a cage. It's even harder to admit that the next generation will be.

[smoldesu]

Apple is too smart to want #1. I'll concede to you that they dominate the market through their avoidance of monopoly, but they hardly have a monopoly on tech as a whole. Modern MacOS is truly terrible if you aren't a creative or "business" customer, and it's intuitiveness as a user-friendly OS has waned for a while now. All of their other products are glorified lifestyle devices. How does that constitute a monopoly on anything but vanity?

We can both disagree on our subjective interpretation of Apple's ecosystem, and our subjective opinions on where they're headed as a company. We both seem to agree that they're objectively molesting the market though, so we're frankly not disagreeing on much. Still, "permission to worry" is a silly albatross to wear on anyone's behalf. Sounds like an article GameInformer would write about the Xbox 360, not an article discussing the merits of modern computing.

[undoware]

shrugs

The article is as-yet unwritten -- the premiss will be that in general, the privilege of being permitted to worry about any given thing is, in an organization, the most critical plank of status. The opposite of a window seat.

Pay, equity, everything else -- not as important.

It has little to do with my former employer specifically. It's anthropology.