Skip to main content

The implication of free OS X Mavericks and iWork


Today’s Apple event marked another subtle and potentially disruptive poke at Microsoft and it’s core business – Windows and Office. For the first time, Apple gave their next gen OS away as a free upgrade to existing Mac owners. Free. In the past, incremental operating system upgrade cost a minimum fee, around $29. With Mavericks, not only did they change the naming of their flagship OS, moving away from the cats family to popular locations in California, they are also giving it out free.

When Windows 8 was released, Microsoft also provide an upgrade pricing of $40 to existing Windows 7 users but for a limited time. This move was how Redmond reacted to OS X Lion and Mountain Lion's incremental upgrade. But it was limited and now MS is selling Windows 8 Pro Upgrade for $88 and a Windows 8 Pro full version for $189 - and there is also Ultimate, Home, Home Premium and a whole lot of confusing versions. 

Why would Apple release Mavericks as free? 

I believe they learned from their experience in iOS. Every iOS operating system upgrade for the iPhone, iPad and iPod was free. And the rate of conversion from their customers to new OS was remarkable. This rate of adoption made it easy for Apple and its ecosystem of developers to support their customers effectively. In addition, giving away free iOS did not cause them to lose any business but instead it helped moved the millions of devices and customers to a technology platform and direction that is mapped by Apple. I know Microsoft had wished all of their consumer and enterprise customers adopted Windows 8 as fast as they could have liked. Does anyone still remember the struggle MS went through to move people out of Windows XP? Their customers refused to do so and MS is forced to extend their support for Windows XP customers until recently, they finally end of life this product due to the maturity of Windows 7. There is an advantage to have all your installed base on the same level of OS instead of being stuck in a fragmented and disparate environment.

OS X Mavericks has 200+ new features, some of them pretty exciting to me: Finder tabs, filename tags, new Safari that only renders graphics when it is visible to users, thus saving huge amount of battery, iCloud keychain for password management and a host of others. There are also a huge number of apps included from the new iBooks to Maps for Mac, to the usual Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Mails, Contacts, iMessage, Facetime, Phonebooth, etc. The iLife suite, which consist of a photo management software iPhoto, home movie making software iMovie and music composition software Garage Band, is also free.

There are a lot of R&D money pumped into this and it attest to the power of free for Apple to give it away. In one single stroke of ingenuity (well, they have done it in iOS, so it is not exactly original), Apple has elevated itself way past Microsoft in desktop operating system and is now at the playing field of Google.

Giving away iWork, their productivity suite of word processing, spreadsheet and presentation to new Mac and iPhone users is the final nail to MS Office coffin and is now competing with Google Docs. It sucked to be in MS shoes now. No wonder Ballmer left so quickly! 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

One million daimoku

In April 2008, Anne and I started our resolution to chant 1 million daimoku in one year. It's already Jan - and I am only one-third of the way. I really need to WORK HARDER - coz I made another 1 million resolution from Jan - Dec 2009. The chart you see on the right of this post is a chart that we put beside our butsudan. It tracked our chanting progress. Every 20 minute, we coloured one box. Mine is the one on top, Anne's at the bottom - you can see that she made much better progress than me! Hmmm.. come to think of it, I am not even at one third!! --- Edit 22 March 2009: Thanks to Google, a couple of friends in faith found this post and they want to know how many hours of chanting is required to achieve one million diamoku. Here it is. Based on our publication in Malaysia, 20 minutes of chanting is equivalent to 1,000 daimoku. So, one hour is 3,000 daimoku. 1 million would take about 333 hours. --- Edit 8 April 2018: Checking my blogger stats, this post is pretty hi

Amazon Alexa in Malaysia - does it work well? A review...

Feels like Christmas in September. Thanks to Doktor Cinta, my friend who live in Australia. Back in July, Amazon Australia had a Prime Day. I joined the trial using my usual Amazon account and ordered an Echo Dot, Echo Plus (the taller one with a built-in hub) and a Kindle Paperwhite, shipping them to a dear friend in Australia. My friend visited Malaysia and brought the Echos with him two weeks ago. You can imagine my thrill to get my hands on Alexa and start using it... in Malaysia. As a side story, sometimes, you can't believe how events are aligned properly to prepare my place to be a connected home - I bought a superb new mesh network router, eero (by the way, I'd say it's one of my best electronic purchases after an iPhone! It is that good), which acts as a strong WiFi backbone as it blanket my double storey house with a reliable and fast WiFi. Then, maxis launched Fibernation program which let me to upgrade my internet from 6 Mbps (pathetic) to 100 Mbps wit

Who is the official service center for Seiko watches?

The Great Blue; Kinetic Auto Relay 100M I have a 15 year old Seiko watch which I love very much. It's a Great Blue series and kinda one-of-its-kind, because Seiko discontinued it as soon as it was launch. So, there are very limited number of units. The watch I own is a Kinetic Auto Relay which means it is powered by my arm movement. And the nice thing about it is that if I don't use my watch, it hands will not move but the Kinetic capacitor which stores energy (up to 4 years of inactivity) will continue to keep track of the time. When I picked up the watch and shake it a bit, it will wake up and auto adjust to the correct time whether it is AM or PM. But my watch is 15 year old. At that age, the capacitor cannot hold a lot of charges. These days if I left my watch unused for 2 days, the watch stopped keeping time. I need to get the capacitor replaced. But who is the official service center for Seiko? The thing about luxury watches is that if you don't send it to