Microsoft’s rivalry with Apple may be over, but that doesn’t mean it has been done over. Microsoft has been trying to compete with Apple since at least Microsoft’s inception in 1975, and they’ve been trying to do so for at least a decade. It’s time to move on now.
Apple has been playing catch up to Microsoft most of the time, but this time its been back. Microsofts newest video game, Microsoft Flight Simulator, has been available on the App Store for over a year, and has had a solid release every year since. It has the most complex, detailed, and realistic simulator of any game on the App Store. The only problem is that its been available for free, and has a free version that is supposed to be the one that is the most accurate.
Apple’s version isn’t the only game that is free. Microsoft’s version of Flight Simulator has been available for years and has had a pretty solid release every year since. The only problem is that it was free. The company didn’t pay Microsoft a dime for the game, only the developer did.
Apple’s version of Flight Simulator is actually a very good game. It’s not perfect, but it is very well polished and quite detailed. It also has a pretty darn cool feature that lets you choose the “satellite view.” It’s like if you had the ability to zoom in on your flight, but you have to drag a little bit out of place, like you were in a photo you were snapped at a different time. It’s very cool.
It would have been possible for Apple to pay Microsoft a few hundred dollars for the rights to the game, but it didnt. There is a good reason Apple gets all the cool features of Flight Simulator (and others like iWork and Keynote) at a low price. The reason is because they believe in the future of software. They are not just looking to sell computers. They are looking to build an entire ecosystem around their software.
And that ecosystem is not the usual consumer computing stuff. It includes a whole slew of apps that are designed to be used with a wide variety of hardware or software. It also includes a broad set of apps that the average consumer will use to work on, play a video game, etc. But this ecosystem is also open source and free. And it’s not just for consumers. It’s also for developers of all kinds.
Apple is using Microsoft’s open source ecosystem to develop a whole new set of apps, and Microsoft’s open source ecosystem is already being used for developing its own apps. With the release of the new iPhone coming in just a few days, this could be a huge opportunity for Microsoft to expand a new ecosystem. It could be the beginning of Microsoft’s “new” version of Windows.
Well, they could change the name of the software to simply Windows Phone, but the idea is that a small group of developers would create a bunch of apps, build up an ecosystem around them, and then release them to the public. The hope is that by doing this Microsoft could be the first company to have its own version of the Windows OS and the first to have a complete ecosystem of apps to go with it. That and a huge revenue stream.
I don’t know, I’d rather be stuck on an island with no phone and no apps, but I could see Microsoft’s business model working. I mean, Apple’s business model is so obvious that it almost seems like a cop-out.
Microsoft is going to have to really push its own apps, both in terms of their own developer ecosystem and in terms of hardware. For the first time in history, the Windows OS will be a complete ecosystem of apps that can run on every platform. Microsoft has said that it wants to have apps compatible with the rest of the world, but I think they may be waiting for the next version of Windows to actually be a complete ecosystem.