I play this game on my iPhone called Auralux. Each level consists of a series of "stars". Each "star" produces "Aura". The goal is to accumulate enough aura to take over other stars on the board; you take over those stars by "filling" them with aura. After the star is filled, it begins producing aura for you, which leads to more takeovers, which leads to more aura, and on and on until you can defeat the other AI competitors on the level who are trying to do the same thing.
They key to the game, particularly the more difficult levels, is patience. In order to take over a star that is currently owned by another player, you have to have enough aura to defeat any of the other player's aura that might be surrounding the star, then you have to de-power the star by "filling" it with aura, and then re-power the star by filling it again. That means that one of the most effective strategies is to simply wait. Wait until you have enough aura produced by all of your stars that you can take over the competitors star and have enough leftover to defend your position once you do. If you want to win the difficult levels, you have to take the long view. Start from your position of strength, and then move forward with your strategy.
It strikes me that what we saw this past week is Microsoft and Apple playing a complicated game similar to Auralux. Both competitors are taking the long view. Both are starting from their position of strength. Both are moving forward with their strategy.
The Long View
With the release of Apple's iPad Pro and MacBook Pro, and Microsoft's Surface, both companies showed us what they think is the long-term vision of personal computing. In a way, their competing visions were both realized, in the early term, with these products.
Apple has maintained it's position that a "tablet" and a "PC" are two different things, that they serve different purposes, and that what the consumer does with each of them do not necessarily work cross platform. Tablets are "cars"; PC's/Laptops are "trucks". It doesn't make sense to "touch" a vertical surface in front of you. No one wants a touchscreen iMac, or even a touchscreen MacBook. Yet, while they have maintained that there is a distinction between the two, they have also maintained that most people could replace their traditional "computer" with an iPad Pro. The tension between those two realities–that a tablet is a "car", and a computer is a "truck", and that most people can get away with a tablet–is Apple's vision for the future of personal computing.
I was having a conversation last night with a friend that pressed into the metaphor of cars and trucks and shows how apt it is in terms of Apple's approach. My friend needed to purchase a new truck for his landscaping company and was bemoaning how much it cost. A new heavy duty truck (think, Pro-version), which is what he needed, was going to run him almost 1,000/month in payments alone. That's a lot of money, but it's the cost of doing business. Professional landscapers need professional grade trucks that aren't going to break down, are going to withstand significant wear and tear in the course of a day–from hauling stuff in the bed to towing large trailers–and are almost always used to plow snow during the harsh Northeast winter. My friend would love it if he could get away with driving a compact car. It would be cheap. It would get him around. But it wouldn't get the job done.
Compare that with the average consumer who really just needs to get from point A to point B. They want to do it in the nicest vehicle they can afford. They want to feel comfortable. They also want their car to be reliable, like my friend, but a reliable, comfortable car is a lot easier to come by and a lot less expensive to purchase. (My Ford Focus, for example, is inexpensive, reliable, comfortable, and quite pleasurable to drive.)
Apply the car/truck metaphor to computing and you'll understand what Apple is doing. The MacBook Pro is beautiful, reliable, and going to do basically anything you throw at it. It's also expensive. But hey, that's the cost of doing business. Not everyone needs a MacBook Pro, but those who do will need to and be willing to pay up to get what they need.
For everyone else, we have the iPad Pro. It's nice, reliable, and quite frankly, feels luxurious. You'd have no idea you were driving the "compact" version. It would never occur to you that there was work you couldn't do with your iPad–just like it would never occur to you that you couldn't plow snow with your Ford Focus–because that's not what you needed your computer for. Everything you need to do, your iPad will allow you to do, in a beautiful, reliable, and luxurious way.
The current line-up of Apple products is the early glimpse into the vision of what Apple is doing with their products. They are selling cars (iPads) to consumers, and expensive trucks (MacBooks) to professionals. Both are great products. It just depends on what you need it for.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has maintained it's position that any device should be able to do whatever it is that we want it to do. We shouldn't have to decide between cars and trucks. Cars and trucks, in Microsofts view, are functionally the same thing. The only difference between them is that some of them are bigger. Let's call Microsoft's approach the "SUV" strategy.
What is the SUV, after all, but a car that wants to be a truck? Or is it a truck that wants to be a car? There are various grades of this, obviously, but all SUV's share this basic thing in common. They are all, more or less, beefed up cars, or family-friendly trucks. Ask someone why they purchased an SUV, and their answer will invariably be that they "needed more space" for their kids, or that they "wanted something safe in the winter" (at least in the Northeast.) Fair enough, but basically, they mean that they wanted a car with a little more room, more power, and four-wheel drive. And that same answer applies all the way up to the full-size SUV's, like my Suburban. My suburban represents everything that's good about cars and trucks all rolled into one. It's comfortable, fits my family, drives smooth on the highway–but I can also haul my house off it's foundation if I wanted, or plow my neighborhood, or, pull a trailer (which we do when we go camping) or drive over a sand dune (like we did in North Carolina). There is nothing that I can't do in my Suburban (except save money on gas or protect the environment). No compromises (except those last two).
That no-compromises strategy is what you get when you purchase a Surface, and the recently released Surface Studio and Surface Book. Both of them represent everything that's good about tablets and PC's all rolled into one. One is more "tablet-y" and the other is more "computer-y", just like the Chevy Equinox is more "car-y" and my Suburban is more "truck-y", but the point is, they are both in the same no-compromises category of SUV. Microsoft believes that the future will be exactly this: buy one device, do everything you want to do. Most people who buy a Surface 4 or Surface Book will never go to the computer-equivalent of off-roading, for example, but they'll be glad to know that they could if they wanted to.
Strength
These competing visions of the future make sense coming from these two companies, because both of them are operating from their position of strength. Apple's strength is iOS. Microsoft's strength, although not historically in hardware, is nevertheless in the "desktop" business–making software for laptops and desktop computers.
Microsoft is building on that strength to essentially incorporate "tablet-like features" into it's new hardware. When they came out with the first few iterations of this vision, they were clunky, and not easy to use. The two-sided version of windows that shipped on tablets, where there was the "tablet" side and the "desktop" side that looked like traditional windows, and you could switch between the two, didn't work very well. The "tablet" side couldn't do everything that the "desktop" side could do, and the "desktop" side wasn't made for a touch-screen device. As time has gone on, they've solved a lot of these problems and now Windows feels more and more like a operating system designed for computer that have a touchscreen interface.
Apple, for it's part, has always excelled at making great hardware–but more than just great hardware, their core strength was making hardware and software that was perfectly integrated. The software was designed specifically for the hardware; the hardware was designed with the software in mind. Thus, and iPad was not designed to run MacOS, and MacOS was not designed to run on an iPad with a touchscreen. Even as the two grow closer in terms of feature parody, using iOS does not feel like running MacOS. They correspond to one another in certain key ways, so that it's not completely foreign, but it's also not similar.
I noticed the differences immediately when I began this article–I moved my mouse to the dock, opened safari, entered the URL for my website, logged in, and began to add this post. In the process, I noticed the files cluttering my desktop on my MacBook Air. Contrast this with the same experience on iOS: there is no desktop. Instead, there are a series of Apps. I swipe my finger left or right, tap the Squarespace app, and start typing. When I'm done, the app publishes it to the web. (I am assuming I could also use Safari on the iPad to post this article, but why would I do that when there is a standalone app for just that purpose?)
Strategy
So both companies have devised a strategy that plays to their strengths and accomplishes their long-term vision for the future. Microsoft vision is that everyone will use a Surface. Apple's vision is that everyone will use an iPad, and some people, who really need them, will buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro.
It's worth noting what my teacher said in the early 90's. She said, with a measure of confidence, that eventually IBM and Apple were going to merge and we'd all use exactly the same computer running exactly the same software. It's not worth noting because she was right, but because she was exactly wrong.
In fact, 25 years later, we are still using different devices and different platforms. Competition is here to stay. And not only that, but the three major players (Microsoft, Apple, and Google) in todays hardware and software games are doing now what Apple was already doing then: creating integrated hardware and software solutions.
So who wins this time around? Who knows. Maybe both.
Or maybe it just depends on what kind of car you want to drive.