Strange Bedfellows

Tina Darmohray, editor of SAGE News & Features, is a consultant in the area of Internet firewalls and network connections, and frequently gives tutorials on those subjects. She was a founding member of SAGE.

I've never been an Apple fan. That's not to say that I have tried them and don't like them; it's just that I can take them or leave them, so I'm not a "fan." It's been my observation, though, that the PC of choice for many UNIX users is an Apple, and they're often pretty fanatic about it. In fact, when I shopped around a few years ago for a laptop to run the common shrink-wrapped financial software, an awful lot of my friends really pushed hard for an Apple product. I wound up opting for a cheap PC because I could get more machine for the same amount of money. My financial software works fine on my PC, save the occasional PC/OS crash under heavy labor.

Despite my lukewarm feelings about their products, I've followed Apple's recent business-roller-coaster ride pretty closely. But I really wasn't prepared for the announcement that Microsoft would invest in Apple! I mean, I guess I knew it was a possibility, and certainly a much-repeated, off-color joke by the anti-Microsoft crowd; but that's a long way from really thinking it would happen. But it did. So now I find myself wondering what the Microsoft investment means for system administrators, other computing vendors, tech stock investors, school kids, legal precedents, and whatever else it might affect.

I have to confess that the message isn't clear to me. I guess that's not too surprising, because the message isn't clear to many who are more astute than myself. So I decided to break it down to the very basics: to categorize the computer solutions into what they had in common, and where they differed, before I considered why some were winning in the marketplace ­ sort of an apples and oranges approach (please excuse the pun).

As I mentioned, when I chose my PC, I looked for the most machine for the least amount of money. Commodity PC hardware running a Microsoft OS with lots of available software won that shop-and-compare battle, hands down. It wasn't until just recently, when I was attempting to put multiple add-on cards in a PC and found that Plug-and-Play doesn't, that I realized how valuable a complete, integrated solution is. It was then that I decided that, at first glance, commodity hardware may seem cost-effective, but there is a cost (in my case, two days of my time) in self-integrating. From that experience, I decided that Apple is more of a competitor with total-solution vendors, like Sun and SGI, that sell an operating system expressly for their hardware, than it is with a software-only supplier, like Microsoft. Based on that analogy, Sun, SGI, HP, DEC, and Apple, are all competitors.

In contrast, it seems to me that Microsoft is a strictly software company that sells computer operating systems and applications. They sell the software, and you buy the hardware anywhere you choose. I can think of just a few competitors in that arena: Sun and BSDI come to mind. And if you get legalistic about it, you're probably down to BSDI. I'm sure I'm overlooking companies in both categories, but you get my point: maybe, strictly speaking, Apple isn't really Microsoft's competitor after all, despite our tendency to group them because they've both been viewed as low-end, personal computing solutions.

Tonight a consultant friend of mine called. I asked his opinion of the Microsoft news. He said he was stunned and confused by it. He said he'd heard different versions of what had actually transpired. I tried to clarify it based on the business articles I'd been reading. He responded with something like, "So, let me get this straight: Microsoft invests money in the hardware vendor that currently represents the least threat, makes money in doing so, and avoids the antitrust lawsuit thing all for $150 million? Brilliant move."

I think someone should tell the monopoly police that Microsoft gave the money to the wrong "competitor."