Walt Mossberg's Perspective

I've just been reading a bit of the writings of Walt Mossberg, a pesonal technology analyst at the Wall Street Journal. (You may remember his name from one of the new Apple commercials.) One of his articles talks about how he believes that the era of the Microsoft model of computers is diminishing, and the Apple model is taking it's place. Here's a bit of what he wrote. I think it's worth a good read-though:

In Our Post-PC Era, Apple's Device Model Beats the PC Way

By: Walter S. Mossberg

In the component model, many companies make hardware and software that run on a standard platform, creating inexpensive commodity devices that don't always work perfectly together, but get the job done. In the end-to-end model, one company designs both the hardware and software, which work smoothly together, but the products cost more and limit choice.

In the first war between these models, the war for dominance of the personal-computer market, Microsoft's approach won decisively. Aided by efficient assemblers like Dell, and by corporate IT departments employed to integrate the components, Microsoft's component-based Windows platform crushed Apple's end-to-end Macintosh platform.

But in the post-PC era we're in today, where the focus is on things like music players, game consoles and cellphones, the end-to-end model is the early winner. Tightly linking hardware, software and Web services propelled Apple to a huge success with its iPod. Microsoft, meanwhile, has struggled to make its component model work on these devices and, in a telling sign, is using the Apple end-to-end model itself in its Xbox game-console business. Now, Apple is working on other projects built on the same end-to-end model as the iPod: a media-playing cellphone and a home-media hub.

The rest of the article can be found here

I'm going to add the link to his website over in the side panel of permenant links. There's a lot of good computing knowledge in there.