Several posts have dealt with brand names like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, Yugo, and open source software(yeah I know it isn't a brand, but it fits in this sense). What makes these worth defending? Some are associated with a certain time or emotion from our past. The relaxation at a coffee shop, a certain taste of the coffee, the adventures of youth, and bucking established companies seem to be some of the reasons for being passionate about their brands. There may be better alternatives, but these are what people want. Why do people have loyalties to specific brands? Is it fear of the unknown, fond memories of the past, or distaste of the alternative?

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Originally posted by obrzut:
Several posts have dealt with brand names like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, Yugo, and open source software(yeah I know it isn't a brand, but it fits in this sense). What makes these worth defending? Some are associated with a certain time or emotion from our past. The relaxation at a coffee shop, a certain taste of the coffee, the adventures of youth, and bucking established companies seem to be some of the reasons for being passionate about their brands. There may be better alternatives, but these are what people want. Why do people have loyalties to specific brands? Is it fear of the unknown, fond memories of the past, or distaste of the alternative?

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It can be anything.

In some cases it's consistency -- one can be sure that McDonalds and Burger King will be somewhere near the bottom of the list of available eating establishments by quality pretty much everywhere, however if all alternatives are unfamiliar, a person would choose something known over them.

In some cases it's belief that the brand associates with some qualities -- or that some others don't, this is why all those "Ford vs. Chevy" wars happen.

In some cases it's an ability to get something that a person had and liked, and had some memories attached to it, every time when he can get an identical product (ex: Starbucks).

In cases it's something unique that the company actually has -- patented technology, monopoly status, but more often just a different strategy that caters to some particular ser of customers (ex: my use of IBM keyboards).

As for open source software, I wouldn't count it as a brand, it overlaps brands, and has a lot of them inside (not necessarily actual companies -- vi and Emacs, Linux and BSD, Gnome and KDE, etc. have pretty good brands wars without any help from anyone's marketing departments). The only brand that is absolutely opposed to open source is Microsoft, and even though Microsoft apologists are trying to make it look like a brand war, it is merely a single company trying to use a brand loyalty to fight against its obsolescence, not against other brands.

Sense of investment? A throwback to tribal pride? I've just wondered that. I feel many of us need to belong to some group of brotherhood. This happens to one both by a given fact (race, social status, geographical situation, religion) and later by choice. You choose your profession, you get to hang with some people. You buy a certain brand, you join another club. You get to know the quirks, the advantages, the secrets that others don't. And you get to flaunt their logos, their icons. You get rubbernecking and envy from the non-initiates.

In software, this may be more subjective to real function than looks. I struggled for years, loyal to the Amiga OS, back when that platform did things with graphics and video that simply weren't possible with other current ones. But the company imploded, hardware stopped evolving, and even the valiant fought of several software developers couldn't save it. In order to remain competitive, I >had< to migrate to Apple, since it was the nearest in its simplicity and elegance of UI desing, plus their hardware was becoming more powerful. So, another brand got my loyalty. And, Jobs and his Distortion Field be praised, I'll defend the true faith to the end.

All true, Alex. And sometimes, it's that if you throw enough money at someone (and don't make any horrible mistakes) you can make them believe whatever you want.

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Originally posted by Alex [but truncated for space reasons]:

It can be anything.

In some cases it's consistency [...].

In some cases it's belief that the brand associates with some qualities [...].

In some cases it's an ability to get something that a person had and liked[...].

In cases it's something unique that the company actually has [...].

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Gunn

The Infinite Matrix
http://www.infinitematrix.net/

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In order to remain competitive, I >had< to migrate to Apple, since it was the nearest in its simplicity and elegance of UI desing, plus their hardware was becoming more powerful. So, another brand got my loyalty. And, Jobs and his Distortion Field be praised, I'll defend the true faith to the end.

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I've always thought Apple has cultivated an unusually strong brand identity. Obviously the platform has merits: eye candy ergodesign, tactilely approachable interface [honestly, who's never wanted to pet an iMac?], elegant and powerful hardware/software, etc...yes, I'm a Mac user too.

But Apple has very strong meta-product affiliations. Their image is of nonconformity, the brilliant rebel company that dares to "Think Different". I love my G4, but I'm amazed at the fanatical devotion some users display. Somehow the PC monopoly has turned the initial specs-and-performance battle into a touchstone for battle on all other fronts; liberal vs. conservative, war vs. peace, pro-life vs. pro-choice, paper vs. plastic and so on. I'm interested in ideas as to why the Mac vs. PC argument seems to dredge up so many other kinds of fundamentalism...thoughts?

The thing which always gets me with apple is that individuality is what keeps it from growing faster. From what I have heard/read, it is a better OS than MS, but it has less market exposure because of its indivuality. Their recent marketing campaigns trumpet how easy it is to switch from ms to apple. To me they need to take it one step further to increase market share. A campaign to show compatability with windows machines could really change the perception of their products. My exposure to apple products is very limited, but as far as I know documents can be transfered from macs to windows with minimal problems. By showcasing this ability, many doubts can be ended in those who would like to leave windows. Instead fence sitters are shown how easy it is to leave the windows world. While I agree it windows is not a perfect os, it is used by many schools and businesses. The windows world is hard to avoid at this time. An os which may be superior is great whether it be MacOS, BeOS, Linux, etc., but when the need to work with other systems arises, a user needs to know their data is transferable.

I think that is one of the reasons people cling to Apple so much. They feel like they are not conforming with the corporate world. By using a system which they feel is superior, apple users laugh at conventional knowledge of the usefulness of a windows pc. In a way they are laughing at the established way of getting things done because they feel their method is easier and superior. Whether they are right or not depends on the changes microsoft forces down my throat next time, I guess.

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Originally posted by obrzut:
A campaign to show compatability with windows machines could really change the perception of their products.

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I agree. From a 'tactical marketing' perspective I think Apple should present a less divisive attitude -- rather than beckon with outright subversion, they could woo consumers with the promise of a *compatible* platform. That way PC users don't have to defect, they can just [if you'll forgive the inherent 'forbidden' fruit pun] steal a taste and decide for themselves. And as long as I'm drifting OT, isn't it perfect how the Biblical tree of knowledge allusion fits so well into their marketing idiom? I have to hand it to their product placement guys.

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By using a system which they feel is superior, apple users laugh at conventional knowledge of the usefulness of a windows pc. In a way they are laughing at the established way of getting things done because they feel their method is easier and superior.

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The superiority complex some Apple users have is another interesting point. It isn't just that they believe Macs are better; Windows machines are seen as actively bad, not just less efficient. With cars, for example, it is common to favor a brand [go Subaru!]...but no one would venture that Subarus are the only decent vehicle, or that Mazdas are somehow the antithetical expression of the neoFascist-corporate-zombie element who are brainwashing the masses. This may sound like overstatement, but if you really probe a Mac user on brand loyalty these sorts of PC-villifications can leak out [I've caught myself on the verge]. Does anyone know of other brands that inspire the same degree of fealty?

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Originally posted by obrzut:
The thing which always gets me with apple is that individuality is what keeps it from growing faster. From what I have heard/read, it is a better OS than MS, but it has less market exposure because of its indivuality. Their recent marketing campaigns trumpet how easy it is to switch from ms to apple. To me they need to take it one step further to increase market share. A campaign to show compatability with windows machines could really change the perception of their products.

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Apple for quite a while was so "individual" that it didn't have a decent multitasking -- then one could argue that Apple computers are used because they are different. However after Jobs returned, and basically upgraded NeXT became MacOS X (4.2BSD => 4.4BSD, NeXTStep UI => Carbon/Cocoa) things changed drastically from a programmer's point of view -- they have a modern Unix now, it's without any questions a superior design compared to Windows, be it different or not.

The compatibility issue is rarely mentioned because at least in the areas where Macs were traditionally used compatibility wasn't really a problem -- even Microsoft made Office for Mac, and IE for Mac is superior to IE for Windows, so I think, no one bothered to remind people about that. Incompatibility with all kinds of specialized software remained, but specialized software changed itself, a lot of things became HTTP-based and therefore accessible from all platforms.

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My exposure to apple products is very limited, but as far as I know documents can be transfered from macs to windows with minimal problems. By showcasing this ability, many doubts can be ended in those who would like to leave windows. Instead fence sitters are shown how easy it is to leave the windows world. While I agree it windows is not a perfect os, it is used by many schools and businesses. The windows world is hard to avoid at this time. An os which may be superior is great whether it be MacOS, BeOS, Linux, etc., but when the need to work with other systems arises, a user needs to know their data is transferable.

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That was more of a problem for other systems -- Linux and *BSD, and since Microsoft definitely was not going to support those, MS Office documents created all kinds of trouble, and IE-isms in HTML (mostly made by Frontpage jokeys) made a situation worse. Now when Mozilla went far ahead of IE, and OpenOffice solved file compatibility problems, the only excuse to use Microsoft is that "brand loyalty", however users are still hard to convince that Mozilla and OpenOffice even exist, leave alone, can be used to replace Microsoft software.

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I think that is one of the reasons people cling to Apple so much. They feel like they are not conforming with the corporate world. By using a system which they feel is superior, apple users laugh at conventional knowledge of the usefulness of a windows pc. In a way they are laughing at the established way of getting things done because they feel their method is easier and superior. Whether they are right or not depends on the changes microsoft forces down my throat next time, I guess.

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It probably was so when Apple had cooperative multitasking, but with OS X there can't be any comparison -- NT/2000/XP line is a mess, and the more Microsoft will push their "technologies" into it (.Net anyone?), the more messy it will be, so the question will be more likely not what will Microsoft do but if Apple will manage to screw up a good thing.

And I am not even an Apple users -- I use nothing but Unix, and all GUIs on my computers are X11-based, and therefore incompatible with Apple. But I have to admit it when I see something done right.

Obrzut, Apple's problem is not that they haven't made it clear that their machines are (mostly) compatible with Windows. The problem is that Microsoft is the safe choice for hundred of thousands of corporate buyers, and Apple is the "creative" (read "risky") alternative.

The fact that their technology and their advertising are intellectually superior to Windows' is unfortunately irrelevant. They are appealing to a niche market, and, except for a couple years in the late 1980s, always have sought to appeal to a niche market. Microsoft actively strove, from 1983 onward to replace IBM as the safe choice for business, and by 1990 they had succeeded. Apple was never in the running, even though they tried,in the Ridley Scott commercial in 1984, to position themselve against IBM. Microsoft positioned themselves *as* IBM, and successfully captured the "safe" postion.

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To me they need to take it one step further to increase market share. A campaign to show compatability with windows machines could really change the perception of their products. My exposure to apple products is very limited, but as far as I know documents can be transfered from macs to windows with minimal problems.

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Gunn

The Infinite Matrix
http://www.infinitematrix.net/

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The fact that their technology and their advertising are intellectually superior to Windows' is unfortunately irrelevant. They are appealing to a niche market, and, except for a couple years in the late 1980s, always have sought to appeal to a niche market. Microsoft actively strove, from 1983 onward to replace IBM as the safe choice for business, and by 1990 they had succeeded. Apple was never in the running, even though they tried,in the Ridley Scott commercial in 1984, to position themselve against IBM. Microsoft positioned themselves *as* IBM, and successfully captured the "safe" postion.

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What was a completely random blind luck -- IBM managed to perform a string of amazing screwups in their dealings with Microsoft, and basically given their monopoly position to them. After that actual advertising on the part of Microsoft was irrelevant (hello? this is advertisement???), it's the usual positive-feedback mechanism of the "free" market. That alone produced the perception of safety, absolutely independed from the efforts of Microsoft executives and marketdroids, that are too dim to know how to manipulate the users.

It wasn't blind luck, just luck. Microsoft didn't get where they are by being slow on the uptake. IBM was blind, and Microsoft was lucky.

You're quite right that Microsoft's advertising has always been boring -- if you'll meet me out by the coffee machine, I'll tell you why -- and it's present market domination is due to, uh, "marketing alliances," not to advertising. But in the early/mid-eighties, when Apple could have achieved a dominant position, Microsoft slipped into the boring "business-friendly," safe-descision niche, while Apple was busy looking creative and hip. This was not an accident: it was done intentionally.

The "positive feedback mechanism of a 'free' market" has nothing to do with it. It's a lot more like what WG was talking about in Thursday's blog: "showing up for work." Microsoft was relentless in its pursuit of marketshare.

I'm quite sure that looking boring and safe when Apple was looking exciting and risky had an effect, just as all the other things Msft was doing had effects, and all those effects added up.

I'm very sorry to see a company as brilliant as Apple be less than completely successful. I hate it when the boring people are celebrated, and the creative people wait tables.

But the dim ol' marketroids have successfully manipulated 97% of the desktop marketplace into using their flawed and derivative operating system.

I'm not defending Microsoft here -- I'm mourning Apple. But I was there, and I saw what happened. Apple lost the battle then.

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Originally posted by Alex:

What was a completely random blind luck -- IBM managed to perform a string of amazing screwups in their dealings with Microsoft, and basically given their monopoly position to them. After that actual advertising on the part of Microsoft was irrelevant (hello? http://www.wehavethewayout.com), it's the usual positive-feedback mechanism of the "free" market. That alone produced the perception of safety, absolutely independed from the efforts of Microsoft executives and marketdroids, that are too dim to know how to manipulate the users.

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Gunn

The Infinite Matrix
http://www.infinitematrix.net/

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Originally posted by Alex:

And I am not even an Apple users -- I use nothing but Unix, and all GUIs on my computers are X11-based, and therefore incompatible with Apple. But I have to admit it when I see something done right.

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http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/

It's only yet in public beta, but a good indication of Apple's embrace of opensource. They're definately trying to reach out to *nix users, espcially those that defected to Linux from Microsoft.

And the X11 beta is an implementation of XFree86 anyway. Check out sourceforge for more, and the Fink for other Unix/OS X goodness.

Justin Roby
Adjunct Instructor in English
GWU

Of course, I know that there are X11 implementations for MaxOS X. What I mean is that as long as I don't use their hardware I don't get any benefit from their software (except maybe indirectly through porting), not that I can't use some Unix software on Mac.

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Originally posted by Gunn:
You're quite right that Microsoft's advertising has always been boring -- if you'll meet me out by the coffee machine, I'll tell you why -- and it's present market domination is due to, uh, "marketing alliances," not to advertising. But in the early/mid-eighties, when Apple could have achieved a dominant position, Microsoft slipped into the boring "business-friendly," safe-descision niche,

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Larry Ellison always was an "exciting" figure, and corporate-oriented Oracle marketing was "exciting" compared to the rest of databases. Did not hurt them a single bit.

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while Apple was busy looking creative and hip. This was not an accident: it was done intentionally.

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I disagree -- Apple did not try to look anything, hip or otherwise until Microsoft got the dominance handed to it by IBM. Before that Apple was the only general-purpose personal computer, and whatever they looked like was the norm, however after that, when IBM still was the "safe choice" for business, and it started making PCs, Apple was immediately placed into a defensive position, where it remains ever since. What you see is effect, not the cause.

Microsoft merely got a nice ride from IBM, and when the clones arrived, IBM's example of Microsoft-exclusive licensing was picked up by clone makers. I guess, if even such a thing as DR-DOS was able to gain any significant market share Microsoft would never have a chance for a dominance, but this is how the high-margin business works, once someone jumps to the top, he will be stuck there by "negotiating power" alone.

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The "positive feedback mechanism of a 'free' market" has nothing to do with it. It's a lot more like what WG was talking about in Thursday's blog: "showing up for work." Microsoft was relentless in its pursuit of marketshare.

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And what did it do that requires to shw up for work? 100% of the original PC market was a decision made once and not even by Microsoft, exclusive licensing agreement for PC clone makers certainly did not take two decades to develop, and the idea of "windows isn't done until Lotus doesn't run" is rather easy to come up with if you are a monopoly already.

So everything else is merely a positive feedback loop of the market, and the current situation, Microsoft winning over everything that is playing the same game, and losing only to entities that are immune to traditional "market forces", is a proof of that.

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I'm quite sure that looking boring and safe when Apple was looking exciting and risky had an effect, just as all the other things Msft was doing had effects, and all those effects added up.

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And I am sure that no one looked anything, boring or exciting until the battle was over for Apple.

Right now Apple has more to gain from Microsoft being weakened and stretching its forces too thin than from being boring, exciting ar whatever else, so Apple's strategy is to merely make its existence known. If that makes them look exciting, so better for them because companies' executives only base their decisions on the secondary effects, not on the image that the company is trying to project on home users, that all Apple and PC computer ad campaigns are always targeted to.

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I'm very sorry to see a company as brilliant as Apple be less than completely successful. I hate it when the boring people are celebrated, and the creative people wait tables.

But the dim ol' marketroids have successfully manipulated 97% of the desktop marketplace into using their flawed and derivative operating system.

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Marketdroids are good at taking credit for things they rode upon, and this is the case -- Microsoft's manipulation started and ended with the exclusive contracts and writing shitty software that nothing can interoperate with at the time. Everything else that they did is pretty much irrelevant.

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I'm not defending Microsoft here -- I'm mourning Apple. But I was there, and I saw what happened. Apple lost the battle then.

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It would look that way if one does not see what happened before. What you see as a battle was its aftermath.

Apple did a lot of other "bad" moves later -- keeping an outdated OS kernel, lack of policy that would allow them to co-exist with clones, ridiculous pricing. However all those things have more to do with their position of a niche player than with anything else.

Branding issues aside (for the moment), looking at today's boxes in terms of performance, clock speeds, software, support, etc.: "To Mac or not to Mac? That is the question."

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Originally posted by mudman:
Branding issues aside (for the moment), looking at today's boxes in terms of performance, clock speeds, software, support, etc.: "To Mac or not to Mac? That is the question."

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Don't ask me about raw performance on desktops, I didn't run a CPU-bound task in years.

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Originally posted by Alex:
Don't ask me about raw performance on desktops, I didn't run a CPU-bound task in years.

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Correction -- applies to my desktops, and it's except video codecs and some games.

.... what I was getting at is whether the cyber-techs are still sold on Macs for the performance stuff (vid/music, etc.). Much ado lately as to Intel chips being faster (P4), PC software shaping up, and thus PCs being up there with Macs, but at much less $$.

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Originally posted by mudman:
.... what I was getting at is whether the cyber-techs are still sold on Macs for the performance stuff (vid/music, etc.). Much ado lately as to Intel chips being faster (P4),

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If you do anything that requires high performance, and need something that works but not overpriced, Athlon would be a more reasonable alternative, unless you need the very top of performance at any cost and willing to put up with performance weirdly depending on the task -- and then you can get that from P4. Differences between OS are pretty much irrelevant for actual processing because OS does not participate in number-crunching, only in I/O, resources allocation and scheduling.

I don't specialize on image/video editing, so I prefer Athlons and even PIII, and depend on the OS a lot more than someone that does video/image editing.

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PC software shaping up, and thus PCs being up there with Macs, but at much less $$.

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Most of the performance-sensitive pieces of software are the same everywhere -- while GUI convenience and set of tools vary, MPEG2 codec is MPEG2 codec everywhere, and so would be deinterlacing algorithm, image processing plugin, etc.

As for music, I don't think, performance differences really matter now, everything can be done in real time on any modern CPU already, so usually this makes a machine wait for human, not human wait for the machine.

And just to give a reference point:

When I had nothing better to do I wanted to make a "remote DVD player", so I can watch DVDs on my small Sony notebook in another room. The only box with DVD drive was a Duron 850. I have modified a bit mencoder, so it produced a stream from a DVD, and sent it over the network where mplayer picked it up on a notebook. There were two problems:

1. 333MHz PII was rather weak to run MPEG2 decoder, deinterlace and scale the image in software in real time.

2. I wanted to see English subtitles and Japanese sound, and my simplistic setup produced only a plain AVI.

Not expecting much I have reduced video to 320x240 (from 480x480), and told mencoder (running on Duron 850) to re-encode it after overlaying the subtitles as mpeg4 using ffmpeg library. To my surprise it cheerfully produced a stream, and PII 333 played it back without a problem.

The quality was not exactly professional (mostly due to 320x240 size), but everything, including animation that usually has high demands for encoding, was certainly watchable.

So much for performance requirements.