Nobody can deny the huge effect Steve Jobs had on the field of technology. Not only did he invent the iPod (the first decent portable music player), the iPhone (the first decent smartphone) and the iPad (the first decent tablet); but with Steve Wozniak he also invented the first successful desktop computer with a GUI. Not only that, he founded what is the largest company in the world (by market capitalisation), ran Pixar, and is the largest shareholder of Disney.

For me, his biggest achievement is the hysteria surrounding luxury product after luxury product, version after version, all the way through this financial crisis. Every year, millions of people that can’t afford to fill up their cars or go on holiday spend thousands of pounds on getting their latest technology fix. Originally with the iPod, it was the only decent music player available, and no other portable device (such as a phone, radio or CD player) could duplicate what you do with it. But now, everyone has a smartphone, and most features can be replicated on any number of other devices, yet they keep buying iPhones, and they keep updating them for every release. That creation of universally-desirable products is genius, and not even the supercar industry has that level of appeal, never mind being within the financial reach of millions of people.

The new iPhone 4S was a let down for many Apple fans. A few behind-the-scenes technical upgrades (which are actually pretty good), an improved camera and a new voice-command system are all well and good, but with no aesthetic changes there was no desirability over the previous iPhone 4 (from June 2010). To use a technical industry term: there was nothing shiny about it. Whilst a tech-spec upgrade and OS update are good things, they should have been released quickly and quietly with little fanfare to allow users to discover its improvements themselves. Let’s face it, news like that isn’t going to go unnoticed by gadget fans. But making a big Jobs-esque presentation over a dull product update, showing graphs of improved performance, is the sort of thing I would have expected Microsoft to do. The big news really was the re-release of the old iPhone 3GS for free on contracts, making iPhones accessible to many more consumers – that is a big wise move for Apple.

The Next Industry Leader

With the departure of Bill Gates from Microsoft in 2009, and the loss of Steve Jobs from Apple in August this year, where is the leadership and vision in the technology world? Steve’s replacement Tim Cook didn’t do as good a job as Steve would have with the 4S launch. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is certainly enthusiastic, but fails to really have that effect on others.

Microsoft are steering Windows 8 towards a potential ‘miss’. If they focus too hard on non-existent future tablets and ‘feature PCs’, the ordinary user with the keyboard and mouse will be left behind. I used Windows 8 for two weeks, and although there were several improvements (the new fast startup time is amazing, seriously), the new start menu UI was frustrating and unwieldy to use. The simple act of shutting down required 5 actions, including mousing over to two different corners of the screen; whilst searching across your whole screen (and more) for program tiles felt like the old days of messy desktop icons. Little things like that add up, and when they annoy you every day, you end up with a product that you really don’t want to use.

Microsoft have already said there will not be a separate edition of Windows 8 for tablets, that this new UI will be standard across all editions, so it had better be ‘good enough’ for every user – from me to my mum, and including business workstation users and executive. But in these days of iPads and increasingly-good rival operating systems, Microsoft can’t afford to even just be ‘good enough’. They need to hit the ball out of the park with a first-class operating system that fixes all the problems we still have with this era of Windows. Simple things like a new all-in-one control panel, rather than a thousand different windows and dialogs – we all know how ridiculous a struggle it is to change your IP in Windows, whilst in Mac OS X it’s just a couple of straightforward and obvious clicks in the network settings tab.

Windows Phone is doing alright, but it’s by no means a game-changer. The recent Mango update (7.5) does fix a number of problems and introduce a couple of features, but with near-zero customisation and a poor suite of apps, it just can’t play with the big guns in the industry. It’s Android’s flexibility that’s making it outsell iOS devices several times over. In the US in August, that’s 48% of smartphones running Android to the iPhone’s 27%, 25% Blackberry and 6% Windows. The smartphone market is pretty saturated, with everyone fighting to come up to the same level and struggling to advance much further in terms of features (beyond improving technical specs). Whoever makes the next big leap in technology will have the advantage, but with everyone tied up in contracts that gives the opposition plenty of time  to catch up before they lose the next round.

Joe Belfiore has been leading Microsoft’s Windows Phone efforts, and before that he was responsible for Zune, and before that the Windows XP user interface. He’s near the top of the line to head-up the next version of Windows, but whilst WP7 works well (much better than any previous Microsoft mobile OS attempt) my concern would be his focus on the locked-down one-way pre-determined user experience. The iPhone UI is harmless and natural, so there’s no huge call to be able to alter it, but WP7 does take some getting used to.

But don’t forget Apple’s products weren’t perfect from the outset. The first iPhones didn’t have copy/paste or 3G, and you couldn’t plug most headphones into its recessed adaptor. Later versions had problems with hairline cracks, battery life and dodgy antennae. Even the iPad suffers from being a closed system controlled by Apple, with even huge companies such as Google being shut out of the App store. Yet all of these products had enormous success, because the positives appealed to the users they were willing to forgive its flaws. Microsoft has the reverse approach of making an unexciting product work well, which means any failure in its operation makes for very unhappy customers.

And it’s not as if it’s all down to just one man – Apple has around 50,000 employees (to Microsoft’s 90,000 and Google’s 30,000), and many partners and suppliers who all played a part. Steve had an immense amount of luck in being able to realise his vision, both in terms of technical capability and corporate influence. Don’t forget that he left Apple for many years, and was eventually invited back when his new company was bought-out by Apple.

The cloud is of course the buzzword of the year, with Microsoft’s Office 365, Intune and Azure products, Google Apps, Amazon EC3 and many other variations. We all understand the power behind cloud computing, but many businesses are reluctant to outsource processing and data in the levels required to make use of the cloud. Email and websites, sure; but not operating systems, desktop applications or directory services.

Other Players

It’s not just Microsoft that are struggling to capture the imagination in the way that Apple do. Google have had quite a few misses in recently years (Google Wave, anybody?), whilst HP have slashed their operations, fired two CEOs and exited the PC business in an attempt to return to profitability. We can’t forget the other players that had a huge effect on the computing industry either. It was not Apple, Microsoft or IBM who created the first desktop computer with a GUI – it was Xerox.

Although Apple and Microsoft could both be considered as being at the top of their game (with very very good current versions of their products), the time is ripe for another player to snatch a key market or invent a new segment of their own. All it would take is a Facebook OS or enabling Google’s cloud-based Chrome OS to roam freely on tablets to change the game of computing in currently-unforseeable ways. If Apple and Microsoft stray too far over the line to the dumbed-down shiny consumer products, ignoring the big businesses that really drive computing,  they’ll be in line for a huge loss that even Steve Jobs couldn’t prevent.