Tim Worstall,
en Forbes, comenta el hecho histórico del cambio en la posición relativa de Apple frente a Microsoft: sólo el negocio de Iphone es mayor que todas las líneas de negocios de Microsoft combinadas. Y estima que este hecho marca hasta qué punto a cambiado el alcance de la informática de escritorio y del consumidor final:
But to someone like me who started paying attention to the computer
industry around 1988, 89, this is a gross affront to the established
worldview. Apple’s the plucky little upstart with a niche business and
Microsoft is the globally encompassing near monopolist of the desktop.
Not that either of those were entirely and wholly true at any point
but that has been, until just these last few years of iPods, iPhones and
iPads, the general background to any story comparing the two firms.
So the world has changed since my youth then: possibly not the most perceptive observation anyone has ever made I agree.
Lo que resalta Worstall es que el avance de Apple es producido por el desplazamiento del centro de gravedad de la tecnología, y la presencia de de un nuevo universo, fuera del alcance del competidor hegemónico. Algo que ya le pasó a IBM antes, frente a Microsoft precisamente:
Back in the very early days of personal computing it was possible to
think that this might come true: that Apple, making both hardware and
operating systems would beat the highly fragmented world of the IBM
compatible PC. Then for about 25, 30 years it wasn’t, in fact it was
near inconceivable that Apple would ever in any way “beat” the Beast of
Redmond and yet now they are.
But as I’ve remarked before, they’ve not done it by replacing Windows
or Office, the things that tie the PC to Microsoft. They’ve done an end
run around the end and edge of the whole PC technology. Which is also
as I’ve said before. Monopolies tend to fall not when they are beaten in
their own market but when their market becomes only a subset of a wider
one, when advancing technology makes the monopolist’s position almost
irrelevant.
