| 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. |
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.