Apple and Microsoft do sometimes agree

In the computing world, Apple and Microsoft are often considered opposites. Microsoft makes software; Apple makes hardware (primarily). Microsoft sells to enterprises; Apple sells to consumers. Microsoft products are ugly and buggy; Apple products are beautiful and "it just works".

Yet they do agree on one thing: The center of the computing world.

Both Apple and Microsoft have built their empires on local, personal-size computing devices. (I would say "PCs" but then the Apple fans would shout "MacBooks are not PCs!" and we don't need that discussion here.)

Microsoft's strategy has been to enable PC users, both individual and corporate. It supplies the operating system and application programs. It supplies software for coordinating teams of computer users (ActiveDirectory, Exchange, Outlook, etc). It supplies office software (word processor, spreadsheet), development tools (Visual Studio, among others), and games. At the center of the strategy is the assumption that the PC will be a computing engine.

Apple's strategy has also been to enable users of Apple products. It designs computing products such as the MacBook, the iMac, the iPad, and the iPhone. Like Microsoft, the center of its strategy is the assumption that these devices will be computing engines.

In contrast, Google and Amazon.com take a different approach. They offer computing services in the cloud. For them, the PCs and tablets and phones are not centers of computing; they are sophisticated input-output devices that feed the computing centers.

That Microsoft's and Apple's strategies revolve around the PC is not an accident. They were born in the microcomputing revolution of the 1970s, and in those days there was no cloud, no web, no internet. (Okay, technically there *was* an internet, but it was limited to a very small number of users.)

Google and Amazon were built in the internet age, and their business strategies reflect that fact. Google provides advertising, search technology, and cloud computing. Amazon.com started by selling books (on the web) and has moved on to selling everything (still on the web) and cloud computing (its AWS offerings).

Google's approach to computing allows it to build Chromebooks, light-powered laptops that have just enough operating system to run the Chrome browser. Everything Google offers is on the web, accessible with merely a browser.

Microsoft's PC-centric view makes it difficult to build a Windows version of a Chromebook. While Google can create Chrome OS as a derivative of Linux, Microsoft is stuck with Windows. Creating a light version of Windows is not so easy -- Windows was designed as a complete entity, not as a partitioned, shrinkable thing. Thus, a Windows Cloudbook must run Windows and be a center of computing, which is quite different from a Chromebook.

Yet Microsoft is moving to cloud computing. It has built an impressive array of services under the Azure name.

Apple's progress towards cloud computing is less obvious. It offers storage services called iCloud, but their true cloud nature is undetermined. iCloud may truly be based on cloud technology, or it may simply be a lot of servers. Apple must be using data centers to support Siri, but again, those servers may be cloud-based or may simply be servers in a data center. Apple has not been transparent in this.

Notably, Microsoft sells developer tools for its cloud-based services and Apple does not. One cannot, using Apple's tools, build and deploy a cloud-based app into Apple's cloud infrastructure. Apple remains wedded to the PC (okay, MacBook, iMac, iPad, and iPhone) as the center of computing. One can build apps for Mac OS X and iOS that use other vendors' cloud infrastructures, just not Apple's.

For now, Microsoft and Apple agree on the center of the computing world. For both of them, it is the local PC (running Windows, Mac OS X, or iOS). But that agreement will not last, as Microsoft moves to the cloud and Apple remains on the PC.