Newsletter Issue #824: Microsoft as an Apple Partner
September 14th, 2015While widely reported, this development pretty much went under the radar when it came to impact. It happened during the presentation at last week’s media conference, where Apple introduced the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. And, yes, a lot of what was introduced was more or less predicted by the media for quite some time.
Even the Apple Pencil came as no surprise, although some members of the media preferred to repeat what Steve Jobs said about a stylus when he said that they were signs of design failure. Why not just use your fingers? But, of course, there are times when you need precision drawing that cannot be accomplished without a precision instrument.
And the tech pundits who found something wanting in Tim Cook’s decision to do things that Jobs presumably would not have done forget something important. When Cook was named CEO of Apple, Jobs told him not to fret over what he would have done when making a decision. Cook had to go his own way. Don’t forget that asking what “Walt” would have done crippled Disney for years after their founder’s death.
Print This Post
I hope, Gene, that this means there’ll be less demonization of MS on this site. That’s living in the past. Times have changed, Apple’s relation to MS is no longer roughly like that of David to Goliath, and the days when MS seemed like a huge monopolistic juggernaut are long gone. Under Balmer’s often misguided leadership we’ve seen them fall on their face often enough with failed projects and bad versions of Windows to know that as a corporation they sometimes have serious blind spots and vulnerabilities. Sometimes anti-MS rants seem as cruel as clubbing baby seals. If we want to cast any corporation in the role of villain and vent our spleens, in the twenty-first century Google is a far more deserving target (although some harsh words ought to be reserved for Adobe too).