Daring Parlay
August 11th, 2004This much I know. Dan Gruber (of Daring Fireball fame) knows his shit. It’s mostly talk of Apple this and Apple that, but why should I credit him with any more brilliance. His recent lengthy article (and not just in title alone) The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform Licensing and Market Share is quickly becoming a seminal blog entry among Macheads. In it, he articulates why Microsoft is the beheamoth that it is today, while in comparison Apple remains relatively short on market share, despite having a superior product.
He argues historical relevance to dispute the age old belief that " If only Apple had licensed the Macintosh, they could have been Microsoft."
[…] Apple couldn’t just license the “Mac OS” (which wasn’t called “Mac OS” until the mid-90s) in 1984, because there weren’t any computers that could use it. Much of the original Mac operating system was implemented in ROM, as hardware. The Mac’s designers didn’t do this to tie the operating system to Apple’s proprietary hardware — they did this because it was necessary in terms of price, performance, and the meager memory and storage they had available. Each 400 KB floppy disk had to store the System (to boot the Mac), whatever apps you wanted to run, and your data files. Every KB of the Mac Toolbox in ROM freed up another KB of space on your floppy disks.