MS pushes the idea of the Apple Tax

CNet is running an interview with Brad Brooks, Microsoft's VP of Windows Consumer Product Marketing (yes, they do have one!)

Brad Brooks said:

As we look at the end market going forward, we are getting much more involved in it with our investments in retail, with our investments online, with our investments with PC manufacturers around quality-tested and scenario-enhanced machines. But, we're also looking at the different things that you can get with Windows, and understanding what is really involved with what we call the "Apple tax."

There really is a tax around there for people that are evaluating their choices going into this holiday season and going forward. There's a choice tax that we talked about, which is, hey, you want to buy a machine that's other than black, white, or silver, and if you want to get it in multiple different configurations or price points, you're going to be paying a tax if you go the Apple way.

There's going to be an application tax, which is if you want choice around applications, or if you want the same type of application experience on your Mac versus Windows, you're going to be purchasing a lot of software. And even at that you're not going to get the same experience. You're not going to get things like Microsoft Outlook, you're not going to get the games that you're used to playing. There's a technology tax--Apple still doesn't have HDMI, doesn't have Blu-ray offerings, doesn't have e-SATA external disk drives that work at twice the speed of FireWire. And so you've got all of these things that are truly taxes.

You've also got an upgrade tax. The only machine, as far as I know, within the Apple lineup that's actually upgradeable is the Mac Pro, the $2,800 version, which is (more expensive than) just about any PC configuration that you get from any one of our manufacturers.

It's a very good read, but in my opinion, the whole interview comes across as a little bit ... desperate. My guess is that MS got rattled over the rumours of a dirt cheap Apple laptop and went into damage control mode a little prematurely. He makes some good points, but some of them are just a little .... weird.

Brad Brooks said:

You know, that's the crazy part about it. If people want a Windows experience, then start with a machine that was built for the Windows experience. There's no question, if you look at it, and go to Apple's Web site today, their No. 1 selling feature that they're telling students as to why buy a Mac is because it does run Windows, and that you can get Office when you're running it in Boot Camp or Parallels. But, then you're just paying that tax again. You're paying for an upgrade to Windows, you're paying for the full version of Office, where you could get all of that at one price, at a price point that with a Blu-ray disk drive you can get with an $800 range from an HP or Sony.

Well, the point Brad seems to have missed here, is that people don't want the Windows experience. They want the Mac experience, but still want to run Windows apps if they need to. I think there is a subtle difference here that some of Microsoft's management still don't get. And there's more

Brad Brooks said:

I think the question is, though, do customers really know what they're getting into? I don't personally believe that customers really know that a copy of Parallels is going to cost them $80, or that when they really look at what they're going to have to pay in terms of another $200 for a (full boxed copy of Windows), that they're going to pay for another $149 for MobileMe to put on there, Internet services, which they can basically get all the same functionality when they have Windows and Windows Live working together.

Well, the price that you charge for Windows is not really anything Apple can do much about to be honest. They sell an OS for half that price so ...

I'm also not sure where he gets the idea that you have to pay $149 for MobileMe; it's listed at $63 at Amazon. Anyway, even at the price, MobileMe is still junk, but that's not the point. You don't need MobileMe to get onto the internet with a Mac.

I hate macs.

They make a decent gadget but macs are basically door-stops.

That "mac attitude" the company tries so hard to convey, the hipster/fashionista come-on... and using the term "experience" for firing up one of those bloated, over-designed, over-priced relics to update your Word document is exactly what I'm talking about. The marketing to the hipster wannabe, the avant garde-a-clue crowd, the guys who's writing "a novel" on his laptop but never quite gets around to actually writing anything, the dude who's bored - like, totally - by all that un-cool, tie-wearing business stuff and can't be bothered...

Well, the other 99% of the world could definitely be bothered and cares very much about business and getting things done - fast and accurately. And that's what the PC and the Windows OS - first the client, and now more and more the server - are built for. So news flash:  A vast majority prefer the Windows "experience."

And until mac releases their "Super Wowie Thought Control" UI, that's the only "experience" that matters:  performance, apps that just work without gunked out expensive emulation or lousy (lack of) web features.

But the image machine kept going for these guys. All the "We're cool!" "We're all about fun!"

Let's take the "Fun!" part.  In 1993, the "We're cool!" people put out the worst computer game of all time - "Myst." That same year, the Windows/PC crowd put out "Doom" and games were never the same again.  That's true creativity, not mac hype. PC's are the common, ramshackle computer of the people.  You can start from scratch and build your own, limited only by your imagination. That's creativity. A mac is a shiny locked box oozing pretension.

Mac hype IS the mac "experience."

This "experience" this guy on top is panting about basically comes down to this.  It's a marketing strategy designed to convince people that you somehow "define yourself" by the technology brands you choose. If you seriously believe you need to pick a cell phone that "says something about your personality", relax.

You don't have a personality. 

It's always cracked me up the way the mac people, from day one, did nothing but rave about their user interface... so innovative, so artistic, etc., as compared to the ugly, plodding Windows interface. It was always that UI they would never shut-up about.

Because it sure couldn't be talk about their development tools or their (what is a) server products. I've been a developer for seven years, about equally distributed between Windows and Solaris, and the true innovation from Microsoft's Dev Tools and Server divisions during that time has put both Sun and Apple to shame.

The only thing deader than Java is King Tut. Or mac server gigs... no, that's not right. "Death" implies "Life" at a certain point.

So... when it comes time for the most extensive re-design ever of the most "innovative" UI ever what do they do?

Rip-off the Windows 95 design like everybody else did - oooh, but they put in those purdy mac colors. But they weren't through. No... not  if they were going to save their glorious OS business.

NeXT, they had to rip out everything under the glass and replace it with the OS of Steve Job's (latest) failed business enterprise, an OS based on tons of '80's BSD C code. It was then crowned as an "object-oriented" OS and received the usual mac (Job's) hype. Their "object-oriented" OS went nowhere, possibly because the grand sounding title was nothing but porting the BSD C over to C++! Wow!

And this is the junk mac sells you as "innovation" and "creativity"... ripping off the UI design from one company and the OS from another. And to top it all, these guys couldn't even come up with an original name for their company. They had to steal that too.

There's your Experience.












 

golfZulu said:

I hate macs.

They make a decent gadget but macs are basically door-stops.

That "mac attitude" the company tries so hard to convey, the hipster/fashionista come-on... and using the term "experience" for firing up one of those bloated, over-designed, over-priced relics to update your Word document is exactly what I'm talking about. The marketing to the hipster wannabe, the avant garde-a-clue crowd, the guys who's writing "a novel" on his laptop but never quite gets around to actually writing anything, the dude who's bored - like, totally - by all that un-cool, tie-wearing business stuff and can't be bothered...

Well, the other 99% of the world could definitely be bothered and cares very much about business and getting things done - fast and accurately. And that's what the PC and the Windows OS - first the client, and now more and more the server - are built for. So news flash:  A vast majority prefer the Windows "experience."

And until mac releases their "Super Wowie Thought Control" UI, that's the only "experience" that matters:  performance, apps that just work without gunked out expensive emulation or lousy (lack of) web features.

But the image machine kept going for these guys. All the "We're cool!" "We're all about fun!"

Let's take the "Fun!" part.  In 1993, the "We're cool!" people put out the worst computer game of all time - "Myst." That same year, the Windows/PC crowd put out "Doom" and games were never the same again.  That's true creativity, not mac hype. PC's are the common, ramshackle computer of the people.  You can start from scratch and build your own, limited only by your imagination. That's creativity. A mac is a shiny locked box oozing pretension.

Mac hype IS the mac "experience."

This "experience" this guy on top is panting about basically comes down to this.  It's a marketing strategy designed to convince people that you somehow "define yourself" by the technology brands you choose. If you seriously believe you need to pick a cell phone that "says something about your personality", relax.

You don't have a personality. 

It's always cracked me up the way the mac people, from day one, did nothing but rave about their user interface... so innovative, so artistic, etc., as compared to the ugly, plodding Windows interface. It was always that UI they would never shut-up about.

Because it sure couldn't be talk about their development tools or their (what is a) server products. I've been a developer for seven years, about equally distributed between Windows and Solaris, and the true innovation from Microsoft's Dev Tools and Server divisions during that time has put both Sun and Apple to shame.

The only thing deader than Java is King Tut. Or mac server gigs... no, that's not right. "Death" implies "Life" at a certain point.

So... when it comes time for the most extensive re-design ever of the most "innovative" UI ever what do they do?

Rip-off the Windows 95 design like everybody else did - oooh, but they put in those purdy mac colors. But they weren't through. No... not  if they were going to save their glorious OS business.

NeXT, they had to rip out everything under the glass and replace it with the OS of Steve Job's (latest) failed business enterprise, an OS based on tons of '80's BSD C code. It was then crowned as an "object-oriented" OS and received the usual mac (Job's) hype. Their "object-oriented" OS went nowhere, possibly because the grand sounding title was nothing but porting the BSD C over to C++! Wow!

And this is the junk mac sells you as "innovation" and "creativity"... ripping off the UI design from one company and the OS from another. And to top it all, these guys couldn't even come up with an original name for their company. They had to steal that too.

There's your Experience.












 

 

 

 

 

 

 

golfZulu said:

I hate macs.

They make a decent gadget but macs are basically door-stops.

That "mac attitude" the company tries so hard to convey, the hipster/fashionista come-on... and using the term "experience" for firing up one of those bloated, over-designed, over-priced relics to update your Word document is exactly what I'm talking about. The marketing to the hipster wannabe, the avant garde-a-clue crowd, the guys who's writing "a novel" on his laptop but never quite gets around to actually writing anything, the dude who's bored - like, totally - by all that un-cool, tie-wearing business stuff and can't be bothered...

Well, the other 99% of the world could definitely be bothered and cares very much about business and getting things done - fast and accurately. And that's what the PC and the Windows OS - first the client, and now more and more the server - are built for. So news flash:  A vast majority prefer the Windows "experience."

And until mac releases their "Super Wowie Thought Control" UI, that's the only "experience" that matters:  performance, apps that just work without gunked out expensive emulation or lousy (lack of) web features.

But the image machine kept going for these guys. All the "We're cool!" "We're all about fun!"

Let's take the "Fun!" part.  In 1993, the "We're cool!" people put out the worst computer game of all time - "Myst." That same year, the Windows/PC crowd put out "Doom" and games were never the same again.  That's true creativity, not mac hype. PC's are the common, ramshackle computer of the people.  You can start from scratch and build your own, limited only by your imagination. That's creativity. A mac is a shiny locked box oozing pretension.

Mac hype IS the mac "experience."

This "experience" this guy on top is panting about basically comes down to this.  It's a marketing strategy designed to convince people that you somehow "define yourself" by the technology brands you choose. If you seriously believe you need to pick a cell phone that "says something about your personality", relax.

You don't have a personality. 

It's always cracked me up the way the mac people, from day one, did nothing but rave about their user interface... so innovative, so artistic, etc., as compared to the ugly, plodding Windows interface. It was always that UI they would never shut-up about.

Because it sure couldn't be talk about their development tools or their (what is a) server products. I've been a developer for seven years, about equally distributed between Windows and Solaris, and the true innovation from Microsoft's Dev Tools and Server divisions during that time has put both Sun and Apple to shame.

The only thing deader than Java is King Tut. Or mac server gigs... no, that's not right. "Death" implies "Life" at a certain point.

So... when it comes time for the most extensive re-design ever of the most "innovative" UI ever what do they do?

Rip-off the Windows 95 design like everybody else did - oooh, but they put in those purdy mac colors. But they weren't through. No... not  if they were going to save their glorious OS business.

NeXT, they had to rip out everything under the glass and replace it with the OS of Steve Job's (latest) failed business enterprise, an OS based on tons of '80's BSD C code. It was then crowned as an "object-oriented" OS and received the usual mac (Job's) hype. Their "object-oriented" OS went nowhere, possibly because the grand sounding title was nothing but porting the BSD C over to C++! Wow!

And this is the junk mac sells you as "innovation" and "creativity"... ripping off the UI design from one company and the OS from another. And to top it all, these guys couldn't even come up with an original name for their company. They had to steal that too.

There's your Experience.












 

 

 

 

 

 

 

brich said:

golfZulu said:

*snip*

You are f*cking clueless, Padre...

foreachdev said:

brich said:

*snip*

Lol I think in terms of expeirence not whether its a Mac or PC. People want a good experience whether it is a Mac or Pc. This is similair to how Political pundits try to sell you on the Liberal agenda or Conservative agenda like there are only really two choices.

There is definately a Apple Tax if you ever looked at thier prices. Apple sells HARDWARE not the software. Thats why they are always trying to make thing smaller, thinner, with a better screen.  Microsoft takes a less hands on approach and lets the vendors have more of a say with hardware.

Apples potential is limited. They can't be all things to everyone and scale with their strategy. But thats never been their goal. They are a high end solution for egocentrics and those who do not look at the price tag.

blowdart said:

Wow that is very desperate. Calling it a tax is silly; you wouldn't say there's a Porsche tax or a Ferrari tax, those are premiums.

Compared to previous windows licensing where manufacturers would pay a charge per PC, regardless of the operating system installed on them ... now that's a tax.

It's only fair game to point out what you perceive (or want to have perceived as) the cons or costs of alternatives. Other brands and non-brands do the same. And frankly, it's a more intelligent response than the empty "I'm a Mac" commercials. I'm not sure how effective they'll be though. Microsoft has previously pushed the TCO against Linux and with the Mac it's a Tax. Fair enough. Let the flames begin.