Gruber on 10.6

June 8th, 2008

Daring Fireball: The Ins and Outs of Snow Leopard

Gruber writes:

But I can see it being sold another way. The appeal of Mac OS X versus Windows is what? That it has more features? No. It’s that it is more elegant, simpler, more efficient, and more reliable. So I can imagine Jobs on stage announcing that Apple has assigned their best engineers to a year-long project to focus on just those things. Vista may or may not be getting an unfair rap in the press, but the public perception is that these are exactly the areas where Vista is most disappointing. Apple could press their current advantage by emphasizing efficiency, elegance, simplicity, and reliability.

This line of thinking is what intrigues me the most about 10.6. Up until Vista’s release, new applications and operating systems were judged on their feature set. Release 3 brings x, y and z features so I am going to buy it — that’s why new releases sell.

Vista, though, changed that mindset. Vista brought a nice new UI and a few decent new features, but for many people it was unreliable. Customers realized that while features are great, stability is even more important. If the system doesn’t run, it’s worthless.

As Gruber argues, this gives Apple an opportunity. Their biggest selling point — it just works — plays right into this: people do not buy Macs because of their feature list (and if they did, Macs would not sell as strongly as they are). They buy Macs because they are designed well and generally really do work how they were intended to, every time.

Microsoft competes on the feature list’s length, and so here is an opportunity for Apple to turn the tables on Microsoft. By emphasizing their dedication to reliability and speed with a full OS release, Apple could cement the public’s mindset shift in judging new app and OS releases.

Microsoft may “catch up” with OS X when they release Windows 7 in regard to features, but they will not match what Apple excels at: making things easy to use.