Herd Mentality
Friday, 23 October 2009
Conformity is a powerful instinct. There’s safety in numbers. You have to be different to be better, but different is scary.
So of course there’s some degree of herd mentality in every industry. But I think it’s more pronounced, to a pathological degree, in the PC hardware industry. It was at the root of long-standing punditry holding that Apple should license the Mac OS to other PC makers, or that Apple should dump Mac OS and make Windows PCs. On the surface, those two old canards seem contradictory — one arguing that Apple should be a hardware company, the other arguing that it should be a software company. But at their root they’re the same argument: that Apple should stop being different, and either act just like other PC makers (and sell computers running Windows) or else act just like Microsoft (and sell licenses to its OS).
Friday, October 23, 2009
★ Herd Mentality [via Daring Fireball]
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