The Macalope has long said it’s amazing how future products from Microsoft beat existing Apple products time and time again. It’s a wonder Apple even bothers trying anymore! Give it up, already, Cupertino! Something Microsoft will ship months from now is clearly better than what you’re selling by the pallet-full right now!
According to Charles Sizemore of the eponymous Sizemore Capital, not only will Microsoft destroy Apple, it’ll “crush Google” as well! (Tip o’ the antlers to Rajesh.) There is no end to the Microsoft winning!
In recent weeks, I’ve written that Microsoft ($ MSFT) will ultimately muscle-out Apple ($ AAPL) as the leader in smartphones and tablets.
And they say Apple fanboi-ism is a religion. Sizemore shows more blind faith here than you’ll find in a jumpsuit-wearing compound resident just before the first predicted rapture ignominiously fizzles.
It will be a long war of attrition, but Apple has no durable long-term advantages-what Warren Buffett calls “moats”-to keep most of its customers loyal.
Uh, you mean other than customer satisfaction? “You know, I really love Apple products but I think I’ll try this inscrutable operating system running on crappy hardware this time instead.”
Sizemore does not, unfortunately, explain why Apple’s been kicking Microsoft’s butt up and down the street in mobile for the last five years, because any such explanation would, by the laws that govern logic in our universe, have to have been hysterical.
It’s also a little odd to hear people complain for years about Apple’s walled garden “lock-in”—AAC files, DRM-protected movies and TV shows and native apps—and then have it dismissed out of hand. But whatever. It’s the fact that the company makes the best things that keeps the butts in the seats.
And Apple’s insistence on controlling every aspect of both its software and hardware puts it at a disadvantage to a more flexible Microsoft.
Microsoft, dragging the legacy of Windows desktop applications on its back like the bloated carcass of a morbidly obese monkey, is supposedly “more flexible.” They sure turned on a dime on the whole tablet thing, huh? Only took them two and a half years to come up with an answer.
An answer which increasingly seems problematic. Your choices for the Surface are now between a cheaper version that has decent battery life but no legacy applications and a laughably expensive version with half the battery life. Oh, and both have significantly less storage space than advertised.
But other than that … no compromises!
And how’s Windows 8 doing?
“Microsoft has reported license sales of 40 million for Windows 8, however this has not yet translated into significant usage figures,” StatCounter chief executive Aodhan Cullen said.
That’s probably because licenses sold to OEMs and sitting on PCs that no one’s buying don’t surf the Web by themselves. Maybe Microsoft can build that in as a feature in Windows 9.
Disclosures: Sizemore Capital is long MSFT.
Good luck with that.