One thing I have to handle to Apple is that they always knew how to deal with a crowd and manage the expectations of the public, so that they didn’t grow so much that they would end up harming the product because it wasn’t everything that people expected.
This is something Microsoft was never very good at, they always made a big deal out of some product that often had an interesting premise indeed, a product that if they had given enough time, it could have evolved into something bigger. However, they always ended up creating expectations that were too high.
To give you a perfect example of how this negatively impacted a product: Windows RT. The first time they tried to create an ARM laptop, about 10 years ago. Clearly there was a great potential for a new type of experience, as the iPad subsequently came to prove, but they created the perception that you could run your legacy x86 software on it, which was not the case.
Instead of trying to sell the idea of Windows RT as a new type of experience (which perhaps even, more in the future, when the platform was already mature and with a rich ecosystem, they could bring the legacy software to it through emulation to take over a portion of traditional Windows users). This flaw killed the product.
Apple, on the other hand, not only sold the iPad from the start as a new type of experience, thereby reducing public expectations while initially focusing on a niche, but they deliberately lied to reduce pressure on the product.
They have said and said repeatedly until this day that they are not merging iPad OS and macOS (yes, of course they are, wait a few more years and they will merge the iPad with MacBook into some similar product to Microsoft’s Surface Book 2), but they lie, so as not to risk letting their audience get frustrated, because all the software their users use is not yet available on this new platform.
Google with Chrome OS has been doing a similar job as Apple: they found a niche, a particularly distinct experience, and began to evolve the platform, refining it little by little, always without making a big deal about it. A feature that in the future will be essential in the present is seen as an unexpected bonus, such as the idea of bringing Windows software compatibility to Chrome OS via a partnership between the technology giant and Parallels.
In short, expectations are everything… and Microsoft has never quite understood that.
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