[opendtv] What Do TiVo and the Mac Mini Have in Common?
- From: Monty Solomon <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipient: ;
- Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2005 23:57:11 -0400
Techno Files
What Do TiVo and the Mac Mini Have in Common?
By JAMES FALLOWS
October 2, 2005
TODAY'S theme is elegant underdogs: the devices or solutions that
don't lead their markets but are in many ways more admirable than the
ones that do.
For years the Apple Macintosh has defined this category. Indeed, the
Mac's business history illustrates important changes in the role of
the tech also-ran. From the mid-1980's through the late 1990's - a
period that started with the widening use of Windows and ran through
the widening use of the Internet - the pressures toward
standardization created not just market leaders but also
all-dominating market leviathans. Consider word-processing software:
through the 80's and early 90's, there were a dozen contenders. Now,
for practical purposes, there is only Microsoft Word.
This era of mass extinction happened to coincide with the first 15
years of the Mac's life. That it did not go the way of other
innovative early computers like the Victor 9000 or the Xerox Star is
testimony to the tremendous appeal of the Mac's design and the
resulting fanaticism of its customer base. (Mac users, no angry
e-mail messages, please. I mean this as a compliment.)
And in the last five years, some breathing room appeared. Every new
approach that managed to survive - Adobe document formats, Palm and
now BlackBerry mobile devices, FireFox and other browsers, Linux, and
Internet-based computing from the likes of Yahoo and Google -
suggested that an ever more diverse tech ecosystem was becoming
possible.
This has created a new opportunity for the Mac, which Apple Computer
has maximized with an exceptionally elegant offering, the Mac mini.
On the market since early this year, it is the first device to give
longtime PC users a low-risk way to try that enticing other path.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/business/02techno.html?ex=1285905600&en=87684755c30204a2&ei=5090
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