“The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste,” Steve Jobs once said. “And I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their products.”
Author John Edson expands on this idea in his book, ‘Design Like Apple’, where he contrasts the trajectories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, whom he notes were both born in the same year (1955), became obsessed with technology in high school, dropped out of college, and, of course, went on to create companies that changed the world.
“Gates was a master software entrepreneur who through partnerships and licensing deals dominated the personal computer market,” writes Edson.
“Gaining market share was his driving passion, while design rarely figured into his business plan. By extreme contrast, of course, Jobs formed Apple around the concept of design and saw everything through that lens. Apple has a deep and abiding sense of design taste. Microsoft does not.”
There is a reason why designers were among the first to adopt Apple products en masse – and stick with the brand even when almost everyone else embraced the Microsoft ecosystem.
Good design was so inherent to the Apple experience that switching to their products felt like a digital rebirth.
But Microsoft dominated the market for decades. If you had a job outside the creative industries, or had a home computer, it was very likely powered by Windows.
These days it is different. Go to any coffee shop or lecture hall in any major city in the world and you will see a sea of Apple logos.
Based on sales figures it is more likely than not that you have an iPhone.
I was reminded of this after seeing Mark Zuckerberg reveal his latest vision for the metaverse – called Horizon Worlds – which his company, Meta, has spent $10 billion developing.
Zuckerberg, like Gates, has never prioritised beautiful design. Perhaps this did not matter as much when the goal was to efficiently push content into a grid.
But Horizon Worlds looks like a soulless hellscape. I am sceptical as to whether virtual reality will ever be more than a niche gaming experience or a tool for very specific industrial applications. If Zuckerberg’s aim is to inspire it fails miserably.
Money can buy a lot – including a virtual world, apparently – but it cannot buy taste.
