15 years ago, my hair started falling out. I still blame the bad bleach jobs to dye it purple, fuchsia, green, red, orange, blue and every other unnatural color I could get my grubby paws on. Then my eyesight gradually started to go but I did nothing about it until finally giving in recently and getting my eyes checked, finding I need a fairly strong prescription to remove the blur. A busted ankle that’s taking a long time to finally heal has me walking with a cane.
None of this however compares to the level of confusion I now experience when visiting Microsoft, Oracle, HP and IBM’s websites. Tons of consolidation has happened in the industry over the past decade and many of the products from other companies have been folded into these 3 sources. Trying to find out information about the current state of products and what’s available yields very little information about what anything is being used for and what I could put into the lineup of products I’m currently working on.
However, I don’t think this is my own aging that’s at fault but the rapid pace at which these companies are aging. There seems to be no clear focus in these places as the product lines have swelled beyond comprehension and there’s no cohesive focus to address specific business or consumer needs, rather a mish-mash of trying to be everything to everyone. The current lineup for Windows is dizzyingly confusing with too many editions depending on what features may be most important and that’s just the desktop operating systems. The server editions are baffling and there’s several cases of very ambiguous product naming and descriptions that make it difficult to pin point which product fits the current needs.
Oracle is even worse. The database software will always be the database but now they’ve got mySQL. Add to that their acquisition of Weblogic and it’s confusing to figure out where their OracleAS server landed in the product mix. Add to that they now own Sun and all the Javasoft offerings, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what their current Java strategy really is.
IBM has made it impossible to figure out what they’re even doing these days and HP offers so many different versions of each product, each with a crazy number of options that it’s worse than trying to pick out a pair of eyeglass frames I could live with.
I’ve realized all the noise in the signals of these companies and products are the real reason I’ve been pulled toward Apple. The place has a vision for their products, they offer a handful of options in each product class and leave it up to the buyer and the 3rd party market place to customize to your heart’s delight. They have 2 editions of their operating system, clearly identified as the base OS and a Server add on and the bastardization of it into other product lines that aren’t specifically a general purpose computer are kept hidden from the buyer since the focus is more on what you can do with the product rather than the confusing array of ways you can customize it. This is why they’ve won a lot of business from me in the past couple years.
I hate to quote Absolutely Fabulous but Apple seems to be the only shop right now who gets the message, “I don’t want more choices I just want nicer things!” That about sums up how I feel right now. I don’t think it’s me who got old, I think it’s the large tech firms. The lack of focus feels like dementia has set in on them and they’re desperately trying to prove that they’re still useful. *sigh*