把它归结为微小差异的自恋。苹果和微软看起来比其他任何一家科技公司都更像。他们都是三十多岁的专注于软件的公司，在全球多个市场都有影响力。两者都生产大量硬件（尽管苹果生产更多）。他们的两位首席执行官都被一项不可能完成的工作困住了，那就是追随创始人预言家们，他们通过传统的个人电脑看到了个人电脑的未来。他们都沉迷于通过关注语言的细微变化来渲染这些愿景中的细微差异。

因此，微软首席运营官凯文·特纳（kevinturner）今天在辞藻上的转移，正如《边缘》杂志的汤姆·沃伦（tomwarren）早些时候报道的那样，将微软与苹果（Apple）对决，“PC Plus”与“Post-PC”

特纳的幻灯片题为“在我们看来，苹果错了！”，指出2010年乔布斯（Steve Jobs）和2012年库克（Tim Cook）的话强调了平板电脑与传统PC的区别，并宣布iPad的推出开启了“后PC时代”。特纳随后介绍了微软最喜欢的短语“PC Plus”。事实上，乔布斯至少早在2007年就在讨论iPhone和iPod时公开使用了“后PC”这个短语。与此同时，“PC Plus”更为古老；正如汤姆所说，1999年，比尔·盖茨在《新闻周刊》的一篇专栏文章中一直在使用它，这与特纳和微软今天使用它的方式大致相同。

更重要的是，当你检查它们时，“PC Plus”和“Post-PC”这两个框架实际上是相同的。两者都在描述一个日益增长的移动性和云存储模糊了不同设备上软件和数据之间区别的世界。在开发策略和用户界面上存在一些差异。但最主要的是，微软的言辞强调创新从PC转向Xbox或**，苹果的言辞强调创新从iPhone和iPad等移动设备“回到Mac”

不过，从结构上看，差别其实并没有那么大。这是两家竞争激烈的公司不遗余力地宣称自己在不断发展的个人电脑领域占据主导地位，并宣布：“我们在这里负责。”

以下是盖茨在1999年对即将到来的“PC+”前景所说的话：

For most people at home and at work, the PC will remain the primary computing tool; you'll still want a big screen and a keyboard to balance your investment portfolio, write a letter to Aunt Agnes, view complex Web pages, and you'll need plenty of local processing power for graphics, games and so on. But the PC will also work in tandem with other cool devices. You'll be able to share your data — files, schedule, calendar, e-mail, address book, etc. — across different machines; you won't have to think about it; it will be automatic. If you want to find the best price for a new car — and check out your budget to see if you can afford it — you'll be able to do that at the dealership, on the device you have with you. Wherever you are, whatever you want to do, you'll have all the information you need.

“我认为个人电脑将继续。无论是平板电脑还是笔记本电脑，这种通用设备都将继续与我们同在，与我们一起变形。”

现在，这里是史蒂夫·乔布斯在2007年说的话——碰巧，他坐在比尔·盖茨旁边（对面是AllThingsD的沃尔特·莫斯伯格和卡拉·斯威舍）——当乔布斯第一次开始公开谈论“后PC”这个词时：

I think the PC is going to continue. This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it's a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that'll be something that most people have, at least in this society. In others, maybe not, but certainly in this one.

But then there's an explosion that's starting to happen in what you call post-PC devices, right? You can call the iPod one of them… There's just a category of devices that aren't as general purpose, that are really more focused on specific functi***, whether they're phones or iPods or Zunes or what have you. And I think that category of devices is going to continue to be very innovative and we're going to see lots of them.

很明显，乔布斯和盖茨都没有将“个人电脑”的概念局限于任何一种操作系统或形式因素。双方都强调，个人电脑将继续发展和持久，由一个广泛的，多功能的计算设备扩展个人电脑的定义类包围。

“我相信平板电脑的外形因素。”

2007年，乔布斯和盖茨都非常非常看好平板电脑。令人惊讶的是，考虑到平板电脑的发展历史。事实上，在那次联合采访中，有一个令人啼笑皆非的时刻，莫斯伯格指出平板电脑的外形因素“还不一定席卷全球。”盖茨回答道：“我想这就像是Windows1992。也就是说，我对自己的“平板电脑”信仰毫无悔意，他认为平板电脑离主流接受度还有三年左右的时间。我怀疑盖茨是否相信苹果会成为2010年实现这一目标的公司。再说一次，1992年苹果公司很少有人能完全意识到windows95会对个人电脑上GUI的主流接受和Mac的进一步边缘化起到什么作用。

不过，盖茨准确地预测了他认为未来平板电脑的样子，它几乎等同于第三代iPad和运行Windows RT的微软Surface（旁边是智能**、Xbox 360，以及我们从微软研究中看到的一些东西）：

[In five years], I don't think you'll have one device. I think you'll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you'll do dramatically more reading off of that… I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you'll have voice. I think you'll have ink. You'll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that.

And then you'll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there, you know, there's navigation computers, there's media, there's phone. Technology is letting us put more things in there, but then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect. So there's quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket-size device. But I think those are natural form factors and that we'll have the evolution of the portable machine. And the evolution of the phone will both be extremely high volume, complementary — that is, if you own one, you're more likely to own the other…

[At] home, you'll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that's connected up to the Internet and there you'll have gaming and entertainment and there's a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you'll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information, you know, your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate things.

因此，即使在这里，盖茨也不相信这些设备中的任何一个都是其他所有设备环绕的核心或枢纽。事实上，与乔布斯公开支持的笔记本电脑加智能**计划相比，他对个人电脑的设想更为激进。对乔布斯来说，“后PC”首先是一个设备类别，一种描述“另一种形式的电脑”的新兴类别的方式，轿跑车和轿车开始从卡车的世界中脱颖而出。

实际上，直到2011年你来到iCloud，乔布斯才开始用“后PC”来形容他在2007年描述的PC的演变：

About 10 years ago, we had one of our most important insights. We thought the PC would be the hub for your digital life. What did that mean? Where you put your photos, your video, your music. You were going to acquire it, and sync it to the Mac, and everything would work fine.

And it did, for the better part of ten years, but it's broken down in the last few years… Why? Because all your devices have changed. They now all have music; they now all have photos… and keeping these devices in sync is driving us crazy!

We've got a great solution for this problem. We think this solution is our next big insight. We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device. Just like an iPhone, or an iPad, or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.

这都是“后PC”的意思：从手动有线连接到设备间的自动无线连接，同步、计算和通知都可以通过客户端应用程序和后端服务之间的通信来完成。这是PC对计算世界霸权的终结，而不是它的死亡和衰亡。这就是乔布斯的意思，也是蒂姆·库克的意思。从根本上说，它的意思和比尔·盖茨、史蒂夫·鲍尔默以及微软的其他人所说的“PC Plus”完全一样

现在，公平地说，这两家公司确实存在真正的分歧，但主要是在可以说是后PC设备的问题上，选择的范围正在迅速缩小。以下是其中的大部分：

• 微软与一小部分硬件合作伙伴合作，在非常严格的标准下授权其智能**操作系统。苹果自己生产智能**硬件。（在更广阔的市场上，Android采取了一种更为宽松的方式，而RIM可能会走在苹果和微软之间。）
• 微软和苹果都设计了自己的平板电脑软件和硬件，针对多点触控界面和低功耗ARM系统芯片进行了优化。微软也许可这个ARM版本的平板电脑软件。
• 微软和苹果都认为，为支持物理键盘而构建的操作系统应该不同于那些以软件键盘和语音控制为主要接口的操作系统。
• 微软认为平板电脑上的键盘是必不可少的，而笔则非常酷。苹果认为平板电脑键盘是一个不错但不重要的选择，而笔是蹩脚的。两家公司都相应地定制了自己的平板电脑操作系统。
It's the end of the PC's hegemony over the computing universe, not its death and decay
• 微软和苹果都认为，在大多数情况下，较大的平板电脑比较小的平板电脑更好。（平板电脑市场上几乎所有其他人的做法都不一样。）
• 为了快速启动移动开发，微软将尽最大努力让轻量级应用程序在**、平板电脑和重量级PC上都能运行；苹果拥有足够的移动应用程序开发人员，它真的不必担心这一点，甚至可以吸引一批移动开发人员到它的桌面平台上。

说真的，就这样。

我们真的要假装其中一家公司试图将多个设备链接到云上是无可争议的正确，而另一家则是无可救药的错误吗？

毕竟，亚马逊、谷歌和facebook这些仍处于青春期的网络公司，几乎和苹果和微软一样相似。亚马逊或谷歌的设备变成了纯粹的设备，用户数据、媒体消费和购买意向的通道。你使硬件和媒体尽可能便宜，并通过你能了解到的关于你的用户和他们如何使用你的服务来弥补平衡。

这些公司越是了解到，将用户留在他们控制的平台上，他们就越会对传统的PC合作伙伴的服务产生怀疑。

这就是今天最重要的区别：不是兄弟姐妹之间的竞争，而是世代之间的冲突。