John Gruber's essay on Daring Fireball about the mythical Apple vs. Microsoft conflict illuminates the late history of the personal computer. Few probably remember that before the Macintosh and before MS-DOS—in the early history of the personal computer—there were several personal computer vendors such as Commodore, Tandy, Atari, as well as the IBM (with their PC) and Apple (with the Apple II) and they all pretty much had similar market shares. Homogenization was only apparent in the business world, and back in the day, personal computer was more synonymous with home use. From the business perspective, IBM (later supplanted by the combination of Intel and Microsoft) was really just breaking into a market previously dominated by UNIX and CP/M, which, in reality, is a wholly different paradigm compared to what personal computers had been up to that time.

Eventually, UNIX was proclaimed dead (and it may well have been, if not for the Free Software Foundation and the GNU suite of tools, which allowed the various open source BSDs to exist, and which eventually spawned Linux—but that's another tale to tell.) The personal computer (in the avatar of IBM PC-DOS and later Microsoft's MS-DOS) had defeated the mainframes and the minicomputers. The client-server model was obsolete, and the x86 platform reigned. (Oh, the irony, huh?)

In this context, you could interpret the popularity of Windows simply as Intel and Microsoft leveraging their dominance in the business world into dominance in the home.

In this saga, I think Apple's only real direct competitor was Commodore, who came out with the awesome machine known as the Amiga. Interestingly, the Macintosh and the Amiga ran on similar hardware (that is, on Motorola-based processors) Who knows how history would've changed if Commodore had managed to stay alive?

John Gruber makes the dichotomy that Apple is idealistic, whereas Microsoft is pragmatic, and uses the way they leverage (or don't leverage) their success to extend their dominance as examples of their philosophy. In betting terms, this is known as the parlay—of taking all your previous winnings and laying it all down on the next wager. Microsoft has succeeded so far with parlaying their OS monopoly on x86-based hardware through various evolutions (from MS-DOS to Windows XP) and using this OS domiance to corner the market on productivity suites—with the behemoth known as MS Office. If you think about it, Microsoft really doesn't do that much more than these two products—the OS and the office suite. Everything else has been icing on the cake, or more frequently, have been horrific blunders and miserable failures.

In contrast, Gruber notes that Apple has seemingly never relied on the parlay to create their products. The Macintosh in reality directly competed with their more popular Apple II series. The Newton was intended to be a desktop computer replacement rather than the adjunct that PDAs are. NeXT Step was a clean break from Mac OS.

Maybe the iPod isn't really that different, but thinking about it makes a different paradigm apparent.

Perhaps because Apple has not been chasing the holy grail known as market share, they have been able to muster a different kind of resource. I do not think it would be exaggeration to say that Apple's greatest resource is its reputation of creating innovative products, backed by actual creative talent to implement their ideas. It has become conventional wisdom that, while Apple products are not cheap or as popular, they are certainly pretty and generally awesome. Again, the Macintosh, the Newton, the Powerbook, and the iBook are cases in point. (As an aside, I would hazard to say that Sony had a similar reputation up until they became beholden to the bottomline and the corporate culture. Hence the failure of their Walkman mp3 player, but that's quite tangential.) I think these are the resources that Apple successfully parlays. And thus the iPod was born.

While the first two generations were completely beholden to Apple hardware, now at the height of its popularity, the iPod isn't really tied to the Macintosh either. But it should be noted that the iPod's marketshare among mp3 players was already significant before they rolled out their cross-platform products. Who knows what would've happened if they had continued to tie the iPod to the Mac?

For once, it appears the Apple is actually being pragmatic.

So the iPod spawned the iTunes Music Store. The convergence of Airport and iTunes (few will remember that Apple was one of the first to embrace the 802.11b and now the 802.11g standard) has led to the Airport Express (which, at $129, is reasonably priced for a USB print server, and is reasonably priced as a wireless access point/wireless network extender, and is reasonably priced as an mp3 streaming device, and the wonderfully awesome thing is that you get all three in a package that is barely larger than a power supply brick.)

Hopefully, the innovations will continue, though, and Apple will continue to be unafraid of breaking from the past. With this in mind, hopefully they will never be dependent upon the parlay.