A vision of fashionable Windows computers
I stumbled by accident on this collection of photos featuring a Windows computer "fashion show" at CES wherein models strutted about with unusually designed Windows computers. That was shortly followed by an article on the subject on Betanews, titled quite self-explanatorily: "The future is in fashionable PCs." Mykel Nahorniak described the shift as follows:
Typical consumers simply purchased their devices out of necessity, but the scales are beginning to tip with demand growing for hardware that performs well, but looks good at the same time. As the form factor of computers evolve to be more attractive, they are transitioning from being the eyesore in the bedroom to the centerpiece of the living room.
I couldn't agree more. In computing's earlier days, the largest purchaser of computer products were businesses who could hire technical staff to work around the fact that the art of good UI design was still a work in progress (a fact linked to technical limitations of early computing hardware, to be sure). What mattered more was platform, tools and ecosystem, and that played well to Microsoft strengths.
Today, however, consumers constitute a much larger share of the computer-buying public, a fact enhanced by the fact that computing has moved far beyond its "computer" roots into devices that we carry with us every day. Those products never had a foundation in the business world, and thus play to the strengths of companies who from day one were oriented around simplicity and design. Apple's resurgence has a lot to do with a changed consumer market that played better to Apple's core orientation.
It also has a lot to do with Steve Jobs, a man who created Apple's core orientation in the first place. His famous return to the company he co-founded soon resulted in a jazzed-up product line, first with the colorful iMacs, and later with devices targeted at new product categories that ended up becoming almost as ubiqitous as cell phones (almost...which is why the iPhone is an important addition). Combining that with great marketing and the creation of the Apple store concept (based around an understanding that fashion and style matters with consumer-oriented product categories) led inexorably to Apple stock prices bumping up against $200.00.
Vision (assuming it is good) matters, in other words, and clearly, Jobs has lots of it. How many guys can you name who have founded TWO highly successful companies (Apple and Pixar, maker of computer animated movies such as "Toy Story" and "Cars")?
Though vision matters, power to implement that vision comes a close second. Few have more power than one of the founders of a company, which is why it is incredibly important that Jobs is both a man with good "vision" and one of Apple's co-founders. That gives him moral authority to implement that vision.
The fact that Microsoft has "sectioned off a team dedicated to working with OEMs to develop fashionable hardware" (I was not aware that this had happened) is a reaction a market more oriented around consumer products, but also a recognition of a trail blazed previously by Steve Jobs. Now that Microsoft has awakened to that reality (and it is a wide-ranging realization: as noted previously, Julie Larson-Green, the designer of the innovative Office 2007 UI, now has design control over the next version of Windows), I am looking forward to seeing whether the Windows "ecosystem," a product of Gates vision of the central importance of software and platforms, can out-design Apple. Microsoft's approach leaves hardware design in the hands of third parties, leveraging the design skills of a larger pool of designers than an Apple corporation that controls all the hardware that runs its software.
Are 1000 design engineers better than 50? I think so, which is why I think Microsoft's approach to software, one that enables hardware manufacturers design freedom while maintaining links into a common ecosystem by way of software, is a better one in the long-term than Apple's.