In an amusing burst of bluster, Acer’s creator, Stan Shih, has charged that Apple doesn’t play well in the ecology of technology by claiming that their products are more akin to “mutant viruses” than properly evolved organisms. And, as if to strain the medical metaphor, he went on to point out that some day other, properly grown, products would immunize against Apple’s quickly growing and changing germs.
Electronista brings us the scoop on this one,
He trotted out the repeated example of the Mac and implied that it was marginalized in a similar process. Supporting an “open” platform like Windows helped competitors evolve to be larger than Apple. A similar effect happened with VHS versus Sony’s in-house Betamax format, Shih said. The executive assumed Android was having a similar result and would help “isolate” Apple.
He didn’t have an answer for why the iPod is still the dominant media player despite being a closed infrastructure. Microsoft had tried to insist that its device-independent PlaysForSure DRM and media standards would overtake the iPod and pointed to many manufacturers that supported it, but it eventually failed out and led Microsoft to kill the approach in favor of the more iPod-like Zune platform. He also didn’t address issues that affected Apple’s performance with the Mac, such as its leadership during Jobs’ absence.
A plague upon Apple’s house—or at least an Apple plague upon the mobile sector!
Of course, the iPod and iPhone still dominate their markets, and in the case of the iPod it has been doing so for quite some time, forcing competitors to “evolve” to simply keep up and not to overtake. Apple did suffer from a certain amount of lock-in prior to the 21st century, but through their numerous breakthroughs into the mobile market, they’ve managed to more than just hold their own. In fact, Apple has carved themselves a very hefty niche out of the handheld device market.
Android certainly is holding its own in the phone sector, but phones currently don’t promise to replace personal mp3 players. As much as many phones have made offerings to become personal music players, most users don’t want to burn battery power they could use communicating with friends when they could instead drain the battery on their iPod Nano instead (and not suddenly end up without signal and without music.)
Perhaps Acer just wants to boost interest in their own products over Apple’s by posturing—to me, Acer is along time producer of PC hardware and motherboards, which is a market already dominated by Microsoft’s OS.
I guess we’ll just have to see what shakes itself out of this amusing foray into stick waving.
I, for one, enjoy my royal purple Typhoid Mary—I mean, my iPod Nano.
