On August 6, 1997, Steve Jobs took the stage at MacWorld Expo to announce that "[we] have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose." He went on to introduce a smiling Bill Gates via satellite telecast in an absurd, ostensibly unintentional recreation of the famous 1984 ad.
As it works out, Steve was absolutely right. In May 2010, Apple's market cap passed Microsoft's. And then, for the first time ever, the number of Apple devices sold in Q4 2013 outstripped the number of Windows PCs sold. Sure, this is sort of an apples (and iPhones and iPads) to oranges comparison, but the fact remains that we have taken an irrevocable step away from a PC-centric market.
It's clear that Microsoft is reeling from the one-two punch delivered to them by Apple and Google over the past several years. What's not clear, yet, is whether they have a coherent strategy to address this seemingly existential threat. Only time will tell, but don't count them out yet.
Best,
Aaron
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Control of the Week
PopulateKit
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Populate is both an iOS app and library to easily create random-generated contacts.
MIT licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
FPBrandColors
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A category for UIColor & NSColor a collection of major brand color codes via http://brandcolors.net MIT licensed. |
NAKPlaybackIndicatorView
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NAKPlaybackIndicatorView is a view that mimics the music playback indicator in the Music.app on iOS 7. It has three vertical bars and they oscillate randomly. MIT licensed. |
MKFoundationKit
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Collection of categories for NSFoundation classes to accelerate development. MIT licensed. |
LTHMonthYearPickerView
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Simple to use month & year picker view MIT licensed. |
JJTopMenu
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Simple top menu with selected indicator. MIT licensed. |
LGBluetooth
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Simple, block-based, lightweight library over CoreBluetooth. Will clean up your Core Bluetooth related code. MIT licensed. |
GHContextMenu
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Pinterest like context menu control for iOS MIT licensed. |
PACScrollView
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ScrollView with blurry background depending on scroll position MIT licensed. |
ANBlurredImageView
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Animated blur-in and blur-out on UIImageView. License unspecified. |
ISVerticalMenuView
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Simple vertical menu implementation. License unspecified. |
ASScrollView
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ASScrollView animation an ios control which scroll between image with fading animation and it can be used as an image gallery License unspecified. |
ACReuseQueue
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A queue to keep and reusing objects. A reuse queue is a way to quickly reuse objects when object allocation and initialization is time-consuming. This reuse queue is inspired after UITableView's for reusing cells, headers and footers. MIT licensed. |