Apple has consumer computing all sewn up. MS fans can't understand why.
Microsoft has business computing all sewn up. Apple fans can't understand why.
The asymmetry is that Microsoft seems to think it ought to own consumer computing as well, and is wasting billions trying to achieve that, while Apple is playing directly to it's strengths with almost pathological vigour and knows it's limitations.
As an aside this is why I think MS should have jumped into bed with Blackberry, not Nokia, on the phone front. Their natural market is corporate mobile communications, from which they could then attack the consumer market - actually just as BB did before Apple ran them off the smartphone road.
The thing is that nontechnical people want to use the same OS at home and at work. This is because of the differences between OSes and applications which trip them up. Microsoft is simply putting up consumer computing as a first line of defense against competitors trying to attack their hold on business computing.
Apple's chief weakness is that it doesn't really try to attack business computing, from what I can tell. That's all fine and dandy - consumer computing is rather large - but it essentially relegates them to second place because of Microsoft's dominance in business computing.
The asymmetry is that Microsoft seems to think it ought to own consumer computing as well, and is wasting billions trying to achieve that, while Apple is playing directly to it's strengths with almost pathological vigour and knows it's limitations.
As an aside this is why I think MS should have jumped into bed with Blackberry, not Nokia, on the phone front. Their natural market is corporate mobile communications, from which they could then attack the consumer market - actually just as BB did before Apple ran them off the smartphone road.