Business Ideology of Apple and Microsoft - Essay Example

The centralized, authoritarian technology is portrayed as bad technology that squeezes the human spirit and manipulates people’s minds. Apple personified the Mac as the good technology – independent, individualized -- that can liberate the individual from bad technology.

Microsoft presented a similar ideology with the message by CEO Steve Ballmer (1986) that depicted Microsoft providing people-ready computing. Microsoft claimed that its innovations facilitated the supremacy of people. In a comparison with IBM in the form of a direct assault, Microsoft declared that the pitch of IBM is to help companies with its innovations, at Microsoft the tone is to give power to the people to innovate. Microsoft, like Apple, emphasized the ideology of empowerment by making a striking contrast to IBM as the veiled power behind the centralized, spirit-subduing hegemony.

In effect, Microsoft was duplicating Apple’s ideology and strategy. But Apple’s approach went deeper than its marketing implication. Apple advanced the integration of its technology as the nucleus of its strength. By keeping up a closed system, uniting proprietary software and hardware, Apple could provide, it asserted, a more enhanced user experience. The message was: You did not have to be bothered about the technology – it simply worked – so that you could focus and be creative in doing your work.

Microsoft, which built up its market dominance in PCs on an open structural system, is now embracing the Apple strategy as well. Microsoft claimed that its integrated platform of corporate software provided a better-enhanced user experience, from the operating system to the desktop application. Microsoft argued through Jeff Raikes (Business Week, Mar.2006) that Microsoft offered more capabilities by product integration, a blend of technologies having more impact. Again the message was: Liberating people to innovate.
Would this integrated ideology work for Microsoft? It may be recalled that the previous IBM-Apple clash ended up with neither Apple nor IBM emerging as the winner. It was another company that took the prize – it was Microsoft.

In the dawn of desktop computing, Bill Gates piloted the ideology that software was setting off to be the sole currency of the modern economy. Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, Bill Gates managed Microsoft to put up PC hardware as an uncomplicated commodity, leaving software the central source of profits and value in the computing industry. Read More