Apple and fashion accessories

I have too many interests. I recently started learning Tae Kwon Do, which is Korean for "your body will hurt in places you didn't know it was possible to feel pain," and will soon test for my first belt (yellow). Though I had only been in class for a few weeks, I also attended my Martial Arts center's Christmas party, where I met two people who were producing a film using DV cameras (a Canon XL2) that were a generation removed from the ones I used on a film in Limerick. One thing led to another, and I was invited to serve as cameraman on a SAG-registered independent film.

It's going to be a tremendous learning opportunity. I've never used a "steadicam" harness before, among other things. It will also give me a chance to learn more about the video editing tools available on an Apple computer.

In my last film, we used Vegas, a video editing product for Windows that was originally made by Madison, Wisconsin-based Sonic Foundry but is now owned (along with the entire company) by Sony. It's a great tool, and though my knowledge of Final Cut Pro is somewhat limited, it appears to compare favorably feature-wise and use-wise with the Apple product. It's a hard cold fact, however, that Hollywood fits the carefully cultivated movie stereotype where every laptop has an Apple logo emblazoned on its back. Apple currently rules the professional-grade digital video roost through its Final Cut Pro product, and if you want assistance from your industry-savvy friends on your independent film, it behooves you to use Final Cut Pro.

Reasons for that success occurred to me as I walked around the apartment of our casting director, a well-known professional photographer with a client list containing an astounding number of highly recognizable people...as well as a cat shaved like a French poodle and a dog that bears an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill. A traditional PC would blend with the decor of her apartment about as well as a marketing brochure for a Swingline stapler would fit on a Van Gogh painting. She is, not surprisingly, an Apple computer fan.  This position gets entrenched because Apple seems very aware of the kind of people who favor their computers, building tools uniquely tailored to the interests of that artistic market segment.

The Windows ecosystem makes most of its money by catering to the business world. That makes sense, as most computing is currently done by businesses or people who have a specific work-related task to accomplish. This drives usage in other ways, as people who spend a lot of time using Windows at work are more likley to favor the same kind of system at home. Microsoft's dominance of the computing world wouldn't have happened had they not targeted first the needs of businesses.

In contrast, Apple has managed to avoid computing irrelevance by (almost) completely ignoring the business world. Granted, that was not entirely Apple's intent.  Apple certainly hoped businesses would use their groundbreaking graphical computers.  Apple does also offer servers, though that has always struck me as a bit like Gucci offering a set of screwdrivers with artistically designed handles. I'm not saying that Apple server, or its operating system, can't function as great Unix-family server products. A Gucci screwdriver would likely work great. However, the Apple brand runs counter to a strong business-oriented message, and thus Apple servers aren't likely to be high on any company's Christmas list.

That hasn't been so good historically for Apple's computer market share, as business computing casts such a long shadow over the computing world. It was a blessing in disguise, however, as it reoriented Apple towards products that appeal to people who feel a stapler or a screwdriver would conflict with the feng-shui of their home. Apple computers' best customers might be creative types and not the business users with the deepest pockets, but it has created a company whose DNA is oriented around artistically elegant technology products. That orientation served Apple well when the time came to create a music player, as its DNA was already programmed for the kinds of products which have as much to do with traditional business computing as Gucci does with screwdrivers.

This orientation grows more important as business computing takes up less a share of our total computing lives. Computing power is growing more personal, and the iPod is merely an early example of that. The success of the iPod was due to design, a design made possible by a company not aimed at corporate needs and interests. That orientation set them on the elusive path walked by fashion designers, and now they are well positioned to make many more consumer-oriented products, a positioning that will grow ever more valuable as the opportunities for personal computing proliferate.

Just to put all of this into perspective, pigs will fly before companies like Sun Microsystems or IBM design the post-iPod computing fashion accessory of the future, and the reason isn't hard to fathom. Sun and IBM lack the culture for such a thing. Even Dell found it difficult to compete with Apple, possibly because their music products had the glitz of a stapler rather than a fashionable shirt. A fashion orientation needs to be present from the engineering base all the way through to distribution and marketing, and to say Sun, IBM, or Dell lack it is an understatement.

That doesn't mean it's not possible to compete with an Apple. It just means that you can't expect the same people who design your business-oriented products to do a good job designing the next computing fashion accessory. Microsoft created the XBox team and endeavored to keep it separate from the demands of the rest of the company. Though that's not a perfect example, it's indicative of what may be required of future contenders to the media player throne.