Why the PC makers and Microsoft will never beat Apple

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that struggling Hewlett-Packard was doubling its investment in PC designers to overcome its design disadvantage against Apple. The Journal quoted CEO Meg Whitman, who took the job a year ago, as saying when she became CEO she was handed a “brick” that had no appeal to her as a user. This anecdote was supposed to explain how HP has ended up becoming a boring PC maker with declining sales of PCs against the Apple juggernaut.

Maybe I’ve been in this business too long, but I’ve heard this refrain from PC makers every few years, and it goes nowhere. Remember Dell’s Adamo design a few years ago meant to compete with the stylish and, for its time, impossibly thin MacBook Air? Before that, Lenovo was banking on innovative design to make people want PCs; prior to that, it was Acer, preceded by HP. On and on it goes. Every time Apple has come up with an innovative industrial design, PC makers have tried to copy it for fashion points.

[ Is the traditional office doomed? Why it both is and isn’t. | Subscribe to InfoWorld’s Consumerization of IT newsletter today. | Get expert advice about planning and implementing your BYOD strategy with InfoWorld’s updated, in-depth “Mobile and BYOD Deep Dive” PDF special report. ]

Each time, PC makers found it didn’t really help.

Don’t get me wrong: Aesthetics matter, and it’d be nice if so many PCs weren’t mere bricks. But putting a PC in a nice case doesn’t address the real reason PC sales are struggling while Mac sales continue to zoom — and iPad sales even more.

The real reason for Apple’s growth in a stalled PC market is that the entire user experience is better. Apple designs the complete environment: the OS X operating system, the hardware, the core applications, and the constellation of services such as iTunes, iCloud, Time Machine, AirDrop, and AirPlay that together create the Apple experience. Even when some components are not very good, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

That’s not the case on a PC. At best, a PC’s whole is the same as the sum of its parts. More typically, the whole is less than the sum. Windows 7 is a good operating system, for example, but it doesn’t fit all the scenarios of the hardware it runs on, and individual PC makers vary widely in the quality of their drivers and so on. As a small example, OS X knows to put an Eject icon in its menu bar when you attach a DVD drive to a Mac that doesn’t normally have one such as a Mac Mini, for which users bring their own keyboards that may not have an Eject key.

But where PCs really fall down is in the extended ecosystem, where the variety of possible hardware makes it difficult for any one PC maker to create the equivalent of AirDrop zero-configuration file sharing, iTunes media management, AirPlay streaming, or Time Machine automated backup and versioning. Apple provides a wealth of services, not just computing devices. PC makers need Microsoft to do that before they can nurse any hope of the technologies working across a large spectrum of devices. Apple’s proprietary nature solves that challenge in the OS X world.

Microsoft now seems to understand the advantage of a tighter ecosystem, as Windows 8 attests. Windows 8 adds the equivalents of iCloud and Time Machine, for example. But there’s no native equivalent to AirPlay or AirPrint. For streaming, Microsoft could impose a standard on DLNA streaming, which is deployed in a highly fractured way in many consumer electronics and Android devices. Until it does, companies like HP and Dell are stuck. They can go all-proprietary, as Samsung has tried in the Android environment to poor effect — or just wait.

Similarly, look at how Apple has approached the slow integration of OS X and iOS, bringing increasing touch capabilities to OS X, while providing simple hardware (the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad) to retrofit almost any Mac for touch. In the PC world, Windows itself has limited touch capabilities that don’t work well, and you need to buy a new PC to get touch capabilities. That’s a sure way to create a confusing, fractured ecosystem. The supposedly touch-savvy Windows 8 shows that in spades.

I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that Apple is perfect; its handling of the iPhone 5’s new screen dimensions and Lightning connector port shows it too can neglect its ecosystem. But because Apple runs the whole show, it can design the whole experience. By contrast, the Windows universe is a federation of hardware, operating system, application, and service providers that will always have some stitched-together qualities. In that world, the company that pits the guts in a case and installs someone else’s OS and apps can only play with the surface attributes.

The real problem that HP and other PC makers face is not that their PCs are ungainly — some are, some are not — but that users are both beguiled by the holistic experience they get from Apple and entranced by the new style of post-PC computing that the iPad, iPhone, and Android represent.

PC makers have long been able to counter the all-Apple benefit by offering a much more diverse set of software and hardware offerings with which users can fashion what they specifically need — a battle between customization and completeness. But we’re long past the days of people assembling their own PCs. Plus, the common software needed are now available on both OS X and Windows (directly or via the cloud), so the value of that heterogeneity is less. In a world where a PC and a Mac offer largely the same capabilities, the user experience advantage of OS X matters much more than it ever has.

Additionally, PC makers have no idea what to do about the post-PC attraction that favors iPad sales over Ultrabooks, much less standard-issue “bricks.” Ultrabooks have not sold well, as users opt for the real thing (a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air). At the same time, Microsoft’s attempt to create an operating system that serves both the PC and post-PC worlds — that is, Windows 8 — is an awkward, “Frankenstein” platform. I strongly suspect users will reject it.

There’s nothing that HP and the other PC makers can do about this problem. It’s not their OS. Frankly, it’s not even their hardware — Intel pretty much designs the guts of PCs, with major input from Microsoft. The fact that Intel thinks a touchscreen is both a new idea and the PC’s salvation should frighten the entire industry. Besides, nearly everything is built by parts makers in Asia; at most, companies like HP can fiddle around the edges, such as designing power-savings capabilities for their hardware for central management by IT.

One solution is to fight a proprietary ecosystem with another proprietary ecosystem — as seen in Microsoft’s experiment with its Surface tablet effort. The other solution would be for the PC industry to act as a cabal, but that would raise antitrust concerns and require each PC maker to cede the hope of breaking out of the pack — as they all aspire to, at least in their boardroom discussions.

If I were Whitman, I’d certainly encourage a distinct visual style for HP PCs. I’d also try to capture some sense of cool, cutting-edge personality in the technologies I chose to adopt in my PCs and the surrounding ecosystem where I had some control (such as printers and storage). But I don’t think it’s enough to compete with the Apple advantages.

HP blew its long-shot chance to join the post-PC party when it dumped WebOS, and only a miracle would let it start over on its own at this point. Adopting Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 isn’t the answer, though it may be expedient. Adopting Android would give HP more control over its destiny, as well as real differentiation from everyone else (Amazon.com has shown it can be achieved with the Kindle Fire). However, that would require HP to remake its relationship with Microsoft, a big business risk that Whitman’s predecessor Léo Apotheker took, then abandoned quickly.

Until the PC makers figure this out, we’re likely to see Apple continue to ascend, the PC industry move more to Microsoft’s direct control, and the Android axis led by Google and Samsung emerge as the real competitors to Apple.

This article, “Why the PC makers and Microsoft will never beat Apple,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Smart User blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.