more on Apple's Unlikely Guardian Angel

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Jeff Porten <jeff () jeffporten com>
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 13:52:29 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Apple's Unlikely Guardian Angel

As a Macintosh consultant who has been inside of literally hundreds of
Mac-based businesses and nonprofits in the last 20 years, I'd like to
argue with the accepted meme that the end of Mac Office would have been
the end of the Mac.

The problem with this formulation is that it presumes that *everyone*
who used Mac Office did so because they found it absolutely necessary
to interoperate with Windows Office files.  While there was a window
when this was probably truer -- call it the late 90s, from the start of
ubiquitous email and ending with the rise of ubiquitous Office macro
viruses [1] -- for the majority of the stretch under consideration,
most people needed a word processor and spreadsheet for the purpose of
printing to paper.  Interoperability for these firms meant the ability
to send a file down the hall to someone else using a Mac.  During this
entire time, there were always marketed alternatives to Office, some of
which were technically excellent with strong marketing budgets.  It was
just that MS had already sucked up all of the oxygen from that market.

[1] Still, to my knowledge, the only viable cross-platform method of
viral transmission.

Likewise, anyone who can remember the painful process of using
Microsoft Word 6.0.0 will be able to tell you that having the word
"Microsoft" on your software did not guarantee the ability to open
Windows documents -- or for that matter, the ability to open your own
documents in under 15 minutes.  To this day, there are features in
Windows Office that do not translate to Mac Office, and vice versa --
which is why one of the trumpeted features in Office 2004 for Mac is a
Compatibility Manager to tell you what you can and cannot do if you're
sharing files with your Windows brethren.  (And brownie points here for
the Microsoft Mac Business Unit, which has fought against internal
politics pressuring them to keep the Mac feature set limited to the
Windows feature set.)

So had MS pulled the plug on Office at some point along the line,
here's what I believe would have happened:

1) A subset of Mac users would have bolted.  But these were the twitchy
users who were thinking of bolting anyway -- who never quite understood
that Macs could work well in a Windows world -- and are the people you
meet today who say, "I used to be a Mac guy" and still believe their
1993 experience is relevant.  In other words, in our non-hypothetical
world, I think Apple lost those people anyway.

2) Another round of public press discussing and pressuring the
collapse, absorption, or failure of Apple.  Since this happened every
six months until the release of the iPod -- which has ZERO impact on
Mac usage -- this would have amounted to no change unless Apple
leadership bought the story.  (Admittedly possible, given some
iterations of Apple leadership.)

3) Some existing word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation
packages would have risen to the forefront and taken over the Mac
niche.  Within a few months, this software would be the default that
you "just bought" that Office was, interoperability would be in place
(possibly with 3rd-party translators like DataViz), and life would have
went on.  The Windows world would have watched the Mac community with
their usual air of bemused noncomprehension, while even then the Mac
users would have fired up their copies of Disinfectant and noted that
the only really dangerous viruses had been written in 1989.

One final note, and credit for this observation goes to Steve Wozniak,
who posted it on one of the lists I monitor.  All long-term Mac users
can recall that the primary benefit of switching from OS 9 to OS X is
reliability.  And this is true -- as an expert, I make a point of
keeping my systems humming at near-perfection.  My OS 9 Macs had to be
rebooted every few days after heavy use; my OS X systems can have
uptime measured in months.  Since I had never seen OS 9 systems run
longer, I counted that as near-perfection.

Woz's question: *why* do OS 9 boxes have a reputation for
unreliability?  And then he raised this bombshell: on classic Mac OS
not running ANY Microsoft software, he routinely saw uptime in months.
But install Internet Explorer (shipped with every Mac) or Office
(usually the first 3rd-party application to be added), and boom -- the
system starts regularly crashing.  These applications were so pervasive
that even Mac experts accepted this as part of the OS -- but as soon as
he raised the point, I recalled that my Mac mail, web, and database
servers routinely had multimonth uptimes.  I had just attributed that
to a lack of a user at the console.

Which then makes one wonder -- it's awfully interesting that these
crashes happened in ways that were never attributed to MS, only to the
OS.  It's equally interesting to consider that Apple may have been
building systems with the same rock-solid reliability they have today
for the better part of their history.  And that their supposed savior
may be the reason why Macs were dragged down to their level for most of
that time.

Best,
Jeff


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