You can argue that nobody needs the truck, or at least that the person you're talking to doesn't need the truck, but that's a "you're holding it wrong" or, at the extreme, a "you're living wrong" argument, and it comes down to moral arguments in the extreme case.
> The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
(though, intriguingly, it's apparently unknown whether this is because recognizing faces is important specifically for babies, or because the human visual system is evolved to process that kind of thing. i.e. maybe there are other stimuli, not face-shaped, which would also intrigue babies because they push the visual system's buttons:
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00... )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes#Rooting_ref...
It's also important to note that Apple won in part by embracing a more open software ecosystem. OS X is Unix and inherited compatibility with a massive open source ecosystem. I predict that if Apple locks down macOS(X) like iOS and locks out this ecosystem they will once again decline, especially since both Windows and Linux have improved as desktop/laptop OSes since OS X became dominant at the high end.
I would not argue that Apple was best in the 80s or 90s. They were actually kind of overpriced, closed, and original macOS was not that great. The best of the closed PCs was probably the Amiga, but Commodore's mismanagement botched that one. If Commodore were better managed they could have survived and become Apple.
Windows and Linux still dominate larger desktop workstation machines.
My dad's friend had a store and we had a Mac sitting next to the Amiga and he would get so mad when we would run the emmulator on Amega and compare it to the Mac OS 6.
The Amiga's analogue color (4,096) was 8 years ahead of Mac's digit color which took FOREVER to come out. I was always so frustrated that people just asumed that the Apple computer was just better for graphics back then since it was SO easy to see the difference.
Seriously Mac had monochrome and Amiga had this! Amiga 2000 1987 tv commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I84Oir2G4aw
My friend had this beast and we had it hooked up to a WHOLE 1 GB Hard drive. We then got a Video Toaster for our church in 1991 and gave the computer to them. They used it till 2000.
Much more important than technological features are things like marketing, conformity, and groupthink.
The lesson was reinforced when so many developers and companies started jumping all over the earliest versions of Java, which was complete and utter garbage, and was untested, slow, and immature back then. Yet people were drooling over it.
Today's smartphones are yet another instance of this: they're slow, bloated, and spyware-infested, yet people love them.
Similar things have happened again and again, making me sometimes suspect that if the worse a technology is, the more successful it is likely to be. Worse is better indeed.
Smart phones are disappointing in a lot of ways but they're a big improvement over J2ME flip phones, dumb phones, and PDAs.
The problem with the Amiga was AFIAK Commodore's management. They should have divested themselves of all the old stuff and doubled down on marketing and supporting Amiga. Instead they kept lots of irons in the fire, wasted a lot of money, and in the end got killed by the IBM PC platform juggernaut. I wonder if the clear superiority of their tech made them over-confident.
Perl was a mature, full-featured and very useful programming language when the earliest versions of Java rolled around. Java relied on the bloated, super slow JVM, was super buggy, and really did not add any value. The "write once, run anywhere" hype turned out to be just that. So I really don't see how it was a "huge step up" in comparison. More like a huge step down.
So that's about how Java was back then, and whether it was a "huge step up" from Perl. It wasn't.
Yes, Java improved greatly over time, and yes it's more popular now. Whether its current popularity is deserved or not is debatable, and a separate issue.
Slow compared to what? Both making phone call and sending text message are as fast as dumb phones used to be. The other functions like browsing or playing does not have much to compare to. Maybe some PDA somewhere is faster, but I cant make calls with it so it is irrelevant.
Customers don't care about bloat, unless it interferes with them somehow. Nor have reason to care about it. Bloat is just functions they do not use nor care about.
There is some theoretical network effect in place when it comes to phones. Even if you would make great linux or whatever phone, if I could not run my android games on it I would not want it. However, linux phone I have seen was neither fast nor impressive, so it does not really matter.
Not in my experience. Anything less than a new flagship model and slowdowns are not uncommon, especially when the phone is updating or syncing or whatever.
Outside of enthusiast circles companies are about psychology more than anything. Make the customer feel empowered, even if they aren't, and they'll buy your thing over the technically better option.
And because they did a much better job at building the platform the second time around. iPhone was not just first product in its category, the App Store provided developers a way to quickly make money on the platform, in turn making the iPhone the default choice for consumers and businesses.
Jobs learned a lesson from losing to Windows, and made sure it didn't happen again.
That is, you might make a good case that Wintel systems in 1996 were as good as Apple products in some sense, or even somewhat better, but I think it would be difficult to argue that the difference in quality was such that it paralleled the difference in market share.
A lot of the things you mention are maybe things I think the author would say are examples of social factors that push the dominance of a product outside its objective quality. In the end, I think lots of these issues come down to semantic vagueness, but I think there's a reasonable point in there.
What people tend to forget is that ironically, Windows I think came to dominate initially because it was more open. That is, you could buy it with whatever hardware you wanted, and didn't need Apple's permission.
Apple later succeeded I think because of something more nebulous, including quality on the software side, but also an appeal to the fashion-and-status-conscious (I say this as someone typing this from a MacBook, so I don't mean that as a slight).
The bigger, more serious problem is really freedom of choice and how network effects restrict that. It's one of the reasons I'm so in favor of open standards. We could argue until we're blue in the face about what X is the higher-quality product, but in the end the thing that drives these kinds of discussion is the fact that in certain fields, once a product becomes dominant, you are obliged to use that product because of others' use.
You might like to use some obscure word processing program that meets your needs better, but if the publishers you're submitting to all require Microsoft Word for some obscure feature, you are forced to use that. If your employer requires the use of some software that's only available on Windows, you might prefer Macs or Linux, but then you are forced to spend a lot of money just to run that software. You might not want to use some messaging software, but if everyone else is using it, you often kind of have to. Even with programming languages there's something similar, where you might want to program in a language, but if everyone else is writing libraries in something else, that kind of coerces you to use that something else. That is not intrinsic to the language; it's about societal use of that language.
In some ways, it's life, but I think with tech the problems get amplified because of interactivity and communication demands. At the extreme end you end up with de facto monopolies that are impossible to get out of. In fact, I think a big case could be made that often when monopolies are established in tech, it's been open standards that have allowed for the destruction of those monopolies.
This article seems to suggest that Apple was the better computer in 1996 while Windows was dominating. But Windows was dominating because it was the platform of choice for business users who had trained on it, built custom applications for it, and networked their offices with it. It was the best solution at the time for the customers who needed it.
Path dependence is not evidence of the market not working; just the opposite. It's evidence that products the author of this article likes better aren't necessarily as successful on the market as products most consumers know how to use.
The irony is, that Apple eventually triumphed because it invested in more intuitive design, using path dependence in its own favor. Hence their famous saying: "You already know how to use it"