John Gruber of Daring Fireball has posted the best thing I’ve read so far encapsulating Microsoft’s current challenges in the consumer PC marketplace. He puts it in context with the history of Microsoft and Apple’s competition—especially their recent dueling ad campaigns–and takes MS executives to task for being simultaneously myopic, dismissive, and clueless when it comes to what’s happening in the retail computer marketplace.

But my favorite part is where he points out that Microsoft lost the computer geeks a few years ago and that’s the PC platform’s biggest problem. I’ve been saying this to friends of mine for awhile–the nerds all went Mac in droves when being on a Mac began to mean being on UNIX instead of the old-school Mac OS that was rather like buying a Mercedes-Benz with the hood welded shut. When Apple decided to be the platform where all flavors of nerdy digital innovator worked (as opposed to just illustrators, filmmakers and musicians), the nerd herd rallied to their flag fast. He pinpoints a subset particularly close to my heart — web developers.

Web developers had to know both the Mac and Windows, at least with passing familiarity, and the truth is that many, if not most, preferred Windows.

Today that is simply no longer the case. Microsoft has lost all but a sliver of this entire market. People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

This is true in many markets with broad appeal, not just computers. Microsoft is looking ever more so like the digital equivalent of General Motors. Car enthusiasts lost interest in GM’s cars long before regular people did; the same is happening with Windows.

It might be hard to notice if you’re not watching from the techie vantage point, but the trickle-down effect of this nerd migration has been enormous–go into an Apple store on any weekend and you’ll probably have to push your way through a heterogenous crowd of browsing hipsters, grandparents, suburban moms, small children, etc just to get to the middle of the store. Everyone seems to know that a Mac is the thing to buy, and that PCs are cheaper, but they’re cheaper for a reason.

Imagine if this happened with cars

The “Laptop/PC Hunter” ad campaigns that Microsoft is so proud of make no effort to answer Apple’s contention that a Mac is a better computer–Microsoft seems satisfied merely to point out that it is possible to purchase computers for cheaper. This is just stupid. I like Gruber’s car analogy above. So what if someone tried this same ad campaign with cars? What if you saw a commercial in which GMC mocked Honda because a Civic costs more than a Geo Tracker? No one would make that commercial, because anyone who saw it would say “wait a minute–a Civic is a waaay better car than a Tracker. Of course it costs more.”

But to a lot of the people you see in these commercials — the people that Microsoft is actually targetting in a pretty savvy way — you’ll see that these are people who aren’t real comfortable with their ability to discern what’s what between computers. They don’t know too much about how they work, and actually not that much about what you can do with them. Computers make them feel uneasy. But they are comfortable with shopping for a bargain. They’ve made a religion about it, which is how there got to be things like Best Buy and Walmart in the first place.

And Microsoft is telling these people that there is equivalence between the Mac and the PC — that it’s OK to shop for this like you’d shop for a toilet brush and laugh at people who don’t. It’s ludicrous. But people have no other real basis for comparison, because if they think about it at all, they see Apple vs. PC as a tribal thing like Ford/Chevy.

But the reality is that people have settled for Windows machines for years without really knowing any better — no basis for comparison. They thought that Windows was it and computers were Windows.

I mean if you see a commercial hollering that ShitSandwiches™ are 75% off, are you going to get excited? No. Because you were never in the market for a ShitSandwich™ in the first place, thank you very much. Not even if they decide to call it Active ShitSandwich Live 2009™ But what if you don’t know it’s a ShitSandwich™?

Apple is cleaning up

As Gruber points out, MS execs believe that the PC Hunter ads work because… they answered Apple somehow. Well Gruber kicked off his post by referencing an NPD report showing that Apple now owns 91% of the $1,000+ retail computer market. Not a huge portion of the computer market by any means, but MS would do well to pay more attention to that number as an indicator.

Windows 7 isn’t going to be awesome. The Bing/Yahoo whatever isn’t going to do anything more than help out Google by keeping the US Justice Department off their back. The Wii is going to keep kicking the XBOX down the street. Exchange’s market share will get eroded by things like Zimbra (even if perhaps not Zimbra itself) over time. Office 2010 will be a laughing stock for its schizo attempt to mimic Google Docs and its bewildering interface (prediction: MS will fall on its face with something douchey for their web-based document sharing monstrosity inside the next Office). And no one is going to care about Windows Mobile I mean Windows Phone with the iPhone 3GS, the Palm Pre, and new stuff from RIM.

Long, slow decline indeed. Bring it.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 today, and I’m a lot more pleased to be writing this than I would’ve thought two years ago. IE 7 was a significant improvement over IE 6’s miserable standards support, but as Ars Technica puts it, it was still a catch-up release, and IE 8 is a genuine attempt to compete with the new crop of browsers that have come up since IE 7 was released:

what really needs to be emphasized here is that IE8 puts Microsoft back in the game. IE7 was a catch-up release, there’s no question about that. However, with IE8, which is bigger leap from IE7 than IE7 was from IE6, Microsoft is pulling out the big guns and offering features which other browsers have yet to adopt. It’s good to see Microsoft fight back with a vengeance, but the company has more competition than ever before, from the likes of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

At SxSW interactive last week, the Microsoft panelist in the talk on CSS 3 mentioned that IE 8 is more compliant with Acid2 than any other browser out there. Apparently, Acid 3 support is still pretty crappy, which is kind of annoying since Acid3 support isn’t that great yet in any browser with significant market share. One would assume that support for Acid3 in IE 8 would drive more rapid adoption of the cool stuff you can do with the standards tested by Acid3, but it’s apparently not part of their plans for the browser. As far as I’m concerned, this is yet more BrowserFail from MS – W3C standards should be followed by any browser. If Mozilla, Opera, and Apple (and therefore Google’s Chrome) can see this, why the hell can’t Microsoft?

Still, as someone who has to get cross-browser support going for IE, I’m happy to see the improvements that version 8 brings. And if I were inclined to ever use a Windows PC, I’d probably be pretty excited about this feature:

A Web Slice grabs specific information from a website (like the top stories from Digg or the weather forecast) and puts it in a drop-down menu, eliminating the need to browse to the actual website. “It’s about making it as easy for sites to extend and blur into the browser,” Hachamovitch told Ars. This is a brilliant feature but it is completely lost if developers ignore it.

This certainly sounds more interesting than the hideous RSS reader thing in Safari, and of a similar but more flexible functionality. Good to see MS doing this kind of stuff, but I agree with the assessment from Ars that unless devs support it, it’ll be useless. And given devs’ well-known affinity (sarcasm) for doing IE-specific work, I’m not seeing this being as big as it should be, given the quality of the innovation.

As of right now, the thing that pops up when you get to Apple.com is a full-screen promo for the iPhone SDK. Revolutions are coming, because the little computer in your pocket is finally getting the training wheels off — Apple’s letting for-reals development commence on the iPhone.

The announcement video is amazing. No question that this is going to be a big, big deal. EA took two weeks to get a working demo of Spore running on the iPhone. Salesforce.com got an enterprise productivity app going, based on its web backend. SEGA rolled Super Monkey Ball onto the iPhone. Epocrates has an innovative program helping doctors at point-of-care. And to top it all off, Apple erased 99% of enterprise’s issues with the iPhone by making it fully compatible with the ubiquitous Microsoft comms juggernaut Exchange Server. Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. Just like Blackberry, only sexier, and no need to round trip all your data to RIM’s Canadian servers.

Verily, the iPhone SDK is revolutionary. Even Kleiner Perkins thinks so — to the tune of a billion dollars worth of VC.

But here’s the weird thing: everyone who’s tried to get a dev license so far — tried to pay for a dev license from Apple, which Jobs said you’d be able to do and which is advertised on the site itself, has gotten a rejection letter from the company, saying the program is too full right now. ZDNet and Tuaw have both noted the phenomenon, with ZD going so far as to ascribe motive to Apple:

I’m not surprised at Apple’s “greet and toss” tactic – greet the high-profile big-name commercial companies and invite them in under the velvet rope, and toss out the riff-raff who were going to make their products available at a price (or lack of a price) that would mean that Apple wouldn’t be making money off the products.

I don’t think that’s what’s going on. I think that the certificate system isn’t ready yet, and that Apple thought “might as well give people a head start on dev, even if we can’t let them sell for another couple months.”

(Via Slashdot)

I’m loving this pretend fubar of Gmail’s interface if it were re-tooled by the UI sloths at Microsoft.

For another design iteration in our inbox, we will need to camouflage the checkboxes next to the messages by putting a mail icon on top of them. Also, we need to break up messages from conversation threads into their individual parts. Furthermore, this version of Gmail needs to change from context-aware text ads to context-unaware graphic banners, which we’ll require to carry at least one clip art.

Even if this were to take place, it still wouldn’t suck as bad as Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail or the Cornucopia of Infinite Frustration or whatever the hell it’s being called now) already does in real life.