By Tom Wallace

A few months ago, word came out from Silicon Valley and Seattle that Bill Gates' Microsoft had taken a major position in Apple Computer, that troubled maker of wonderful machines. Is this the end of the PC vs. Mac battle? Maybe not, but it's certainly a step in that direction. If the game's not already over, it's late in the fourth quarter and the score is PC 88, Mac 6 (which may be a rough approximation of their relative market shares).

How in the world did this happen? How did such a superior product — the Macintosh computer — win the battle for customer loyalty but lose the war for dominance in its industry? After all, Mac users swore by their machines while PC/DOS users swore at theirs. The Mac and its Apple predecessors could do it all: user friendly, easy to set up and operate, a great graphical interface, quick and consistent results. PCs on the other hand were not user friendly, employed an arcane operating system that only extreme nerds could love, and had a far longer learning curve for a user to get up and running.

I can remember some ads that Apple ran on TV a few years back showing a bunch of business people struggling mightily to get a PC up and running, poring over complex manuals, and in general, spending lots of time on that task instead of doing the jobs they were hired to do, i.e., run the business. The selling message, of course, was that if you buy a Mac, you don't have to go through all of this agony; it will help you get your job done instead of being an impediment. Those ads were right on the mark. I know, because I'm a long-term PC user and I went through that agony.

But, you know, after the agony was mostly over, it wasn't so bad. Yeah, there were still frustrations, and we couldn't do some things that Mac users could. On the other hand, there were advantages in the PC world, one being price. For the same dollars, you could get a bigger and zippier machine in a PC than a Mac. Notice, I'm not saying a better machine nor am I claiming that the PC would give you more throughput. But on a price-performance basis, based on the spec sheets, the PC probably looked a bit better.

However, I don't think price is the main answer to Apple's fall. Rather, a much more important factor — perhaps the most important — concerns choice. Thanks to a decision by IBM early on, the PC's architecture was opened up to the whole world. The result probably hurt IBM in the short run, but long term, I believe it led directly to PC dominance. Why? Very simply, it gave the customers more choices — hardware choices and software choices.

If you had a Mac, you were limited to buying the hardware that Apple had decided you should have. Apparently Apple felt that they could "get away with that" because their software was so superior. But Apple's hardware decisions didn't always match what the customers felt they needed. Example: Apple was very late in entering the portable market, and when they finally did, their offering was a machine that weighed about 17 pounds. That was more than a "brick;" it was a "concrete block" and thus as a traveling computer it was functionally ineffective. At that time, in my travels, I was accompanied by a NEC Ultralite that weighed in at under five pounds. That worked for me, even if I did have to hassle with DOS.

Portables are just one example of the hardware situation. Another is ease of ordering. You can buy your PCs from a wide variety of sources. Want one made to your specs and want it soon? Call Dell Computer and they'll get it to you in a few days. Want one that comes in a box that looks like a square cow? Call Gateway. Needs lots of handholding? Go to a full service retailer.

As customer needs emerged in the marketplace, dozens and dozens of PC makers were free to respond, to try and fill those needs in terms of both product and delivery channel. This was a far cry from any one company — Apple or whoever — deciding what the customers needed. The result: More people bought PCs. And as the installed PC base grew, software choices for PCs also outstripped those in the Mac world, by an ever widening margin. The customers simply had far more choices. And so the PC won the war with the Mac, and I think that's probably a shame. But in retrospect, it seems inevitable.

This "war" has similarities with another war that ended recently — the Cold War. What we had was two competing and diametrically opposed economic systems — communism with its centrally planned economy versus capitalism with the creative chaos and "messiness" of free enterprise — locked in intense competition. One message from both of these "wars": centralized decision-making on a large scale doesn't work. What works is giving people choices — as to how and where they live, what they believe, what kind of computer they use, whatever. So capitalism won. Final score: Adam Smith 88, Karl Marx 6. In retrospect, that too was probably inevitable.

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