Computer war and Mac vs. PC

While reading through this morning's headlines I decided to see what was going on in the trenches of the hard-fought and fast-paced world of Computer News. What better place to see how the byte war is doing and who has progressed to claim title of mountain king for the day. While there I began thinking of how the industry has grown,

Since the dawning of the computer revolution, heated industry rivalries have existed, some even disliking the other bad enough to secretly want to put the other out of business, some of these guys just do not play too well together.

This was a different world when the home computers were born, comprised of people that normally hung around computer clubs, friend's basements, building breadboards, they were loners, geniuses, whiz-bang students with ideas and garages to build computers within and often got their own way.

They formed businesses; work clothes varied, cut-offs or sweat stained dress shirts, depending on which business you visited that day. Oh, they were there nights too, because that was how they did things, IQ's as high as theirs did not give them much of a peer group, at least at work they could enjoy things, tinker with electronics, software, play computer games, they did not think the way other people did, they thought out of the box. One of the two, soon-to-be largest competitors had a penchant for flying a large black, skull and cross bones pirate flag outside of his offices, yep, thought out of the box. Even when competing against one another, they took it to new levels completely.

Truth be told, competitors within the same industry have always been at one form of war or another with their rivals. Of course, these battles have traditionally been waged in the field of advertising, not the field of battle, The concept of the battle for name recognition was nothing new to end users like us, after all, we had survived the first-shots in the battles for name recognition, with "Where's the Beef?" and the Coke vs. Pepsi wars.

The computer wars have always held a certain fascination for me, this was not a battle for our taste buds with the winner throwing the best knock-out punch in the media ring and our well sought after spending dollars as the championship belt. This was the dawning of the age of computers, hardware, software and peripherals were rushed out of research and into the end-user market faster than a 1200 baud modem.

That area though was not where the true problem was hiding, as IBM quickly learned when preparing their home computers for market, they needed something to make everything work cohesively as one unit, not more hardware, what they needed was an operating system.

When the computer revolution began the concept of one, universal anything was as alien as high speed connections. The VHS vs. Betamax war had recently ended, we would be using VHS until something new came out for the recording industry to wage war over, perhaps something like, Blue-ray vs. HD DVD. We consumers had only recently discovered we could actually effect what product would be an "industry standard," now we needed to choose an operating system and most of us were asking, what is an operating system?

Of course, we all know the outcome very well, Bill Gates did pretty fair, he and his Microsoft taught IBM all about software licensing with their MS DOS. Today, well, to make the story short, Microsoft and Apple are the winners and Microsoft really does not like losing, so much that their legal expenses probably run higher than some of the national debts of smaller countries. BUT THEY WIN!

Good old Jobs, Apple went down hill, he made them winners again. Steve has this attitude and tends to be a winner.

Apple's "Mac vs. PC" commercials now have their own following, they also have a full after market as well as the basis for many spoofs. The link I created will take you to Google Video and load the Bloated PC video with many others to watch.

There has been quite a few spoofs of this commercial; a few have been pretty good. Here is one from MojoFlix that is quite funny at times. It is a cartoon parody, titled: MojoFlix, Gates vs. Jobs, Microsoft vs. Apple.