Benedict Evans recently posted this tweet: “I am rapidly losing interest in ‘iOS versus Android‘ as a discussion. Both Google and Apple have won.”
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This reminds me of Steve Jobs‘s keynote at Macworld Boston 1997. After announcing a new partnership with Microsoft (to jeers from the audience), Jobs said:
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….You know, where we are right now, is, we’re shepherding some of the greatest assets in the computer industry. And, if we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here.
We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win Microsoft has to lose. OK? (Applause). We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job, and if others (applause), and if others are going to help us, that’s great, cause we need all the help we can get. And if we screw up and we don’t do a good job, it’s not somebody else’s fault. It’s our fault. So, I think that’s a very important perspective.
I think, if we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude. We like their software.
So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I’m concerned. This is about getting healthy, and this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry, to get healthy and prosper again.
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Replace “Microsoft” with “Google” and the same is true today. For Apple to win, Apple has to do a really go job.
In an excellent piece, Jay Yarrow describes how Apple continues to excel despite reports of the company’s imminent demise.
Jay Yarrow:
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It really feels like 2013 was a down year for Apple as it reset itself to launch new product categories in the next five years or so. If ever there was a year for Apple’s rivals to leap past the company, it was 2013, and it didn’t happen.
[..]
Ever since Android started making noise people have been warning Apple that the iPhone was in danger. There is, of course, no louder proponent of this notion than our own Henry Blodget…
For the last three years Blodget, and people like himself, have been pounding the table that Apple was about to get smoked by Google, just like it got smoked by Microsoft.
[…]
And even with just a sliver of the market it’s generating mind numbing sums of cash, and its iPhone business is growing faster than its rivals’ overall businesses.
It’s time to admit Apple knows exactly what it’s doing with the iPhone.
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