In the 1990s, the PC market was mostly a corporate market (roughly 75% of volume). Corporate buyers wanted a commodity. They were buying 500 or 5000 boxes, they wanted them all the same and they wanted to be able to order 500 or 5000 more roughly the same next year. They wanted to compare 4 vendors on price with the same spec sheet. They didn't care what they looked like... and they didn't care how easy it was for non-technical people to set them up because the users would never touch the configuration. Nor did they care much about the user interface, because most of the users were only going to be running 1 or 2 apps anyway.

Meanwhile with no internet, home buyers were mainly interested in a PC that ran the same software they used at work (and all of the games were for PC). They may have known Macs were supposed to be easier, but ... Apple's computers were ultimately beige boxes and not really that much prettier than PCs anyway. And they were significantly more expensive.

Hence, in this market all of Microsoft's advantages were in play, and none of Apple's. Apple, in Steve Blank's phrase, did not have product/market fit. ... Apple's selling points were irrelevant, invisible or both.

Labels: apple, microsoft