Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Today, as everybody kicks up their heels at the offices of PC manufacturers worldwide celebrating the 25th anniversary of the desktop computer known as the IBM PC, one wonders what Steve Jobs and the crew over at Apple Computer must be thinking.
As is recorded in most versions of the history of the personal
computer, the Apple II personal computer preceded the IBM PC by more
than four years and, in many ways, was a more advanced machine.
I can remember using the Apple Write wordprocessor on a borrowed Apple
II at home in the early 1980s and thinking how much more advanced it
was than Word Star which was installed on the IBM PC in use at work.
By the time the Macintosh came along in 1984, Apple was so far ahead of
the MS-DOS PC in terms of technology that to this day it has been a
constant source of wonder how the Mac lost the battle for the dektop to
a buggy, user unfriendly operating system sitting on clunky boxes with
green screens.
However, as history shows, personal computing was mostly about the
operating system, not just the hardware. The Mac operating system was
light years ahead of MS-DOS. One could argue that if Jobs had displayed
the vision of Bill Gates back in 1984, opened up Apple hardware and
freely licensed Apple software to all-comers, including IBM, 90% of
desktops today may well have been Mac compatibles. Who knows, Motorola
and not Intel chips may have been the building blocks of the hardware
platform.
As we all know that didn't happen and today Microsoft rules the roost
with Windows. Meanwhile Apple is a minor player staging a spectacular
comeback after adopting an Intel strategy that enables the company to
finally capture some of the market hijacked by Microsoft back in 1981.
The biggest irony of all, however, is that IBM is no longer a player in
the PC market, other than its shareholding of Chinese manufacturer
Lenovo. IBM also discovered much to its dismay when it was too late
that personal computing was far less about who made the boxes and much
more about who made the operating system, as well who supplied the
processor chips.
Thus, if anyone should be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the PC it
is Microsoft, who provided software, and Intel whose x86 processors
were the hardware engines driving the boxes.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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