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Apple vs. Microsoft Myths Revisited
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Aug 09, 2004 07:18 PM
from the never-heard-that-one-before-no-sir dept.
from the never-heard-that-one-before-no-sir dept.
allgood2 writes "John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a great article exploring the myth that Apple could/would be Microsoft if only they had licensed their operating system. This myth has oft been purported in technology and business media."
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Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
http://solutions.sun.com/catalog.static/en_US/7
Parent
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then thing in the Apple universe, if you want to buy a computer that can run the Mac OS, you have to buy it from Apple. They can release whatever type of computers they want, for any price they want, and that's what we have to live with if we want to run the Mac OS.
Would allowing clones out there for the rest of the Mac community have helped? Maybe in the long run. The more computers out there built for the Mac OS, the more PowerPC chips being made, the more money for Mot (now IBM), more incentive to invest in chip design and research, and so forth.
I think what we found out when Apple did allow clones was that people who wanted to run the Mac didn't have to have the coolest looking machines with the liquid cooling, flip open doors (okay neither of those existed back then, but...). They just wanted something that was affordable. That's something the clone makers could do. Make something for cheaper and, in the case of Power Computing, cheaper. Apple couldn't keep up and they started to lose market share to the Mac clones (heck, I bought several clones during that time period). Heh, instead of competing with them, they shut down the cloning business.
Oh well, who knows how things would've turned out. I say instead of pushing for licensing and clones, push to have the latest games released simultaneously for Mac and Windows. Most of the people I know buy Windows so they can play games when they're hot. They could care less which platform they do email, web browsing, word processing on. They just want to make sure they can play all the games out there.
Parent
Won't work so well now. (Score:5, Informative)
These days, it's pretty much a wash. Despite what people like to crow about on
So you've got a platform that costs more money, doesn't run all the games as you noted, and doesn't offer any real noticable improvements to your average user other than eye candy both on and off screen. Means that the eye candy crowd is who you are going to attract.
Parent
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think you're thinking of Windows XP [frogdesign.com]
Apple's UI has always been done in-house. Their HI guidelines [apple.com] are probably the most comprehensive ever published outside of academia.
Frog did once design hardware for Apple...they designed most of the beige "Pizza box" style Apple machines in the late '80s/early '90s (before the iMac.) Those machines looked nothing like today's curvy/shiny/artsy Macs; they look like any other PCs. So far as I can tell, thier work for Apple ended with Steve Jobs and the iMac.
Parent
Re:Personal connections? (Score:5, Insightful)
The big issue was the one raised in the first post. Apple would have had to give up hardware to become the dominant O/S player. The PC manufacturing world chose Microsoft windows for one reason, Microsoft was not IBM. There was no way Compaq or any other clone maker was going to let IBM define the hardware and software platform, not after they declared their intention to take the market proprietary with the microchannel architecture.
The other reason that Apple could not be a player was that between the launch of the Mac and the launch of Windows the Mac O/S pretty much ossified. Apple saw it as job done, finished. There was no forward movement. All the research dollars went into whacky stuff like the Newton and Dylan. It took the launch of Windows 95 for Apple to pull itself together, kick the deadweight out of the executive suite and bring back Steve.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start. The NeXT box had some really funky stuff but it was light years ahead of MacOS or Windows at the time. I would have been really interested in getting into it if it had not been obvious that an education O/S pitched at that price point was a sure fire looser.
If you put Clive Sinclair and Steve Jobs together and took the median you might get something useful. Clive Sinclair could have defined the personal computer market if he had put a real floppy drive and a real keyboard on the QL. Steve Jobs could have done likewise if he had spent less time thinking about the correct shade of black for his magnesium cube and instead made something affordable in a plastic case.
Parent
Re:Personal connections? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good idea! Too bad Jobs already thought of it. Anyone who's programmed for Mac OS X should instantly recognize all the NeXT APIs from back in those days. Nearly every API is *exactly* the same, right down to the byte length of the parameters. The only thing that's changed, is that the look of the widgets is far less "Unixy" than NeXT every was.
NeXT OS is not dead. It has merely evolved into a higher plain of existance.
P.S. For laughs, try typing "man open" in the Terminal application. The man page should give you some nice background on how the command originated in NeXT OS.
Parent
On Apple market share (Score:5, Informative)
Apple's shipments, in fact, increased from 452K boxes to 495K, but the market grew at a rate of 10.9%, while Apple grew at the rate 9.3%, so officially they lost market share.
Re:Make an entry level computer! (Score:5, Funny)
I agree, even asinine. But you evidently did the usual Apple slam of only comparing against their top end desktop. OK, let's go to the Apple store and see what I can get. The cheapest desktop is $1049 CAD [apple.com] ($799 in America, btw). That is a lot less asinine, or even assinine.
What's that? You only count the high-end stuff worthy of your attention? OK, fine, but then do the same when comparing a Dell. If you compare low-end PC to high-end Apple, you'll end up looking assinine and asinine.
Parent
Apple's are price competitive with Dell's (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is that Apple sells their systems with base models that are usable configurations. When you look at the Dell (or HP, Sony, etc), their base models have too little RAM, to small or too slow of a hard disk, etc.
The PC companies know 1) that you look at the initial price, and 2) once you have seen that price, you won't question the price of the options. The options are seconday.
This is how Dell makes tons of money. Ever seen their prices for video upgrades, more memory, larger hard disks??? Their add on cost is higher than what the part goes for at Fry's.
Point is: When you look at a configuration that you will actually use, the Apple systems are extremely price competitive.
Parent
Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
"But the truth is that Apple and Microsoft have seldom been direct competitors."
I agree, but disagree. It's not so cut and dry, and even though he doesn't
claim it to be cut and dry, it's just too simple of a concept to throw out there.
Apple was a desktop machine, for people. Microsoft aimed dead ahead that market
as well. (business, school, and home). Were the Apple II and Macintosh just for
school and home, not business? I think VisiCalc would answer that one pretty easily.
Same thing with Filemaker. The Apple was a great business machine, a machine for
students, and for the home. Microsoft took dead aim at all of them, and continues
to do so to this day, as it tries to enter nearly every market out there, even hardware.
The part of the article I do agree with, says:
"Thus the difference between Microsoft and Apple wasn't about open-vs.-closed; it was pragmatism-vs.-idealism."
How many times do you hear Bill Gates talking about being a pirate? Well, maybe he
does, but you hear MORE of the idealistic talk from Steve Jobs and co. I find it odd
that an idealistic company can exist at all. Normally they remove such things (idealism,
morals, quality) when money and profit take precedence. But, as the author says, I guess
that's why Apple only earns millions, but Microsoft earns billions.
In my mind, Apple has taken steps that will ensure it some great success. It has
entered into many markets, not just one. It has servers, desktops, and peripherals.
It hocks software *and* hardware. It has embraced open source (let's not discuss to what
extents) and made quite an amazing set of documentation for users and developers alike.
For me, as a humble developer, it is a godsend. Yet, for my 78 year old father in-law,
it's just as amazing. How can that be? And, for an IT company needing a server, it may
very well be just as appreciated.
Microsoft made attempts at all of that, too. In my mind, they are competitors.
Could Apple have been Microsoft? That's a loaded question.
I would question why any company would want to be Microsoft.
Moreover, why not be like Apple?
I'd rather be the old, trustworthy shoemaker on the street corner, making quality in
a niche market, than some big shoe company spread all over the world. (if the analogy
makes sense)
Re:Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple (Score:5, Funny)
Why must the US stick to imperial units? The proper terminology is a metric fuckton. Standards, people, standards.
Parent
Re:Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple (Score:5, Insightful)
They weren't declared to be "an illegal monopoly". They were declared to be a monopoly, (which isn't illegal, there's tons of legal monopolies) and some specific actions of theirs were declared to be illegal (bundling IE with Windows and pressuring OEMs not to pre-install Netscape). You can call that nitpicking, but it's the difference between "You're stupid" and "That thing you just did is stupid." The courts haven't declared Microsoft to be bad. They declared some of Microsoft's actions to be bad. By blurring that line, you do yourself a disservice. Do you think those illegal policies were inacted by some mid-level manager, or by Bill Gates himself? If the former, why blame the whole company for it? If the latter, will you stop thinking Microsoft is immoral when Gates retires or dies and hands the reigns over to someone else? You've developed a moral opposition to an amoral (not immoral) entity.
There are some of us who will not invest in, work for, or buy from criminal enterprises.
You keep telling yourself that. Just about every company valued over a billion, hell, over a couple million, has done something criminal. Good luck not trading with any of them at all. Plus, our entire country was founded on a "criminal enterprise". We refused to pay taxes, and rebelled against our government, killing lots of its law enforcement and military officers. I bet if you look at all the laws of this country right now, you probably disagree with several of them, and have violated several of them (software copyright? speeding? narcotics? oral sex?).
Look, if you hate Microsoft for emotional reasons, fine. You're not alone. Half of fucking slashdot probably agrees with you. But don't try to paint it as black-and-white, Microsoft is criminal and we're not. Grow up.
Parent
Modestly profitable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is a Fortune 500 company modestly profitable?
Well, ok. This is 2004. Let me try again.
Since when has a modestly profitable company lasted for so long in the Fortune 500 ranks?
Apple makes money. Everyone tells them what they ought to do. Like it or not, Steve Jobs is usually right about what they ought to do. It isn't licensing. Profit != marketshare.
Fuzzy Logic... (Score:5, Interesting)
As he meanders past this rather bizarre statement, I began to lose interest in its increasingly meaningless prose, ending with a stunningly profound (note my sarcasm):
"There is only room for one PC operating systems monopoly".
Not frontpage material IMHO.
The number of errors is huge (Score:5, Insightful)
No not quite. CGA was 640x200 and Hercules had an even higher resolution. These are of course monochrome.
"The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design. The mouse pointer. The desktop metaphor. Overlapping windows. Icons. WYSIWYG word processing. Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac."
Of course by 1985/86 The Atari ST and the Amiga had a very simular UI and they both added color. The Amiga added stero sound and multi-tasking.
The Macs real strength over the Amige as printing. The Atari had some real good DP stuff.
"It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995, a decade after the arrival of the Mac."
I would say to be fair that Windows 3.11 did not totaly suck and was even useful. I did use it. I will admit that I used to say that Windows 3.11 sucked less than DOS and that Windows 95 sucked less than 3.11. Lets not forget the problems which was System 7 on the Mac.
The Mac was a big step and OS/X rocks but lets get our facts straight.
Apple would never have been like Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
In the DOS days, Microsoft had tremendous mindshare, but they still faced real competition. IBM had PC-DOS (which may have just been licensed MS-DOS... it's been too many years and I'm not sure anymore.) And Digital Research had DR-DOS. Now, neither of these were BIG competitors, but the barrier to entry in the DOS market wasn't that high.
There came a time when the world was ready to start transitioning to GUIs. The Mac had shown it was possible, and PC hardware eventually got fast enough to do something similar. Microsoft had their Windows product, but its early incarnations were absolutely terrible and nobody bought them. IBM partnered with Microsoft on OS/2, and for a long time, it looked very much like that was the way the world was headed. The expectation in all the magazines at the time was that OS/2 was everyone's future. (and, for the record, it was an excellent operating system, one which I liked very much.... with some of the worst documentation and error/help messages ever done. IBM was used to mainframes, not Joe Computer User. No big surprise that it failed, in retrospect.)
When Windows 3.0 came out, it started selling reasonably well. But what REALLY made it take off... was Word.
Word for DOS was a good product, but was always an also-ran next to WordPerfect. WP was arcane and difficult, but it was tremendously powerful. Word for DOS was easy, but not very powerful, and wasn't taken seriously by very many.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done. When people saw how easy it was to, for instance, lay out a table -- they switched from WP 5.1 for DOS in droves. EVERYONE wanted Word: it was THE program. This was the 'killer app' that drove Windows to monopoly status. For a long time, the only real competitor on the Windows platform was Ami Pro, which was a neat program, but more of a page-layout tool than a true word processor. Word kicked its butt for most tasks. WordPerfect took years to come out with a really good Windows version, and by the time it arrived, the market had shifted and they were dead.
THIS is the key to Microsoft's dominance... a single program that was so good, everyone had to have it. They sold mountains of copies, tens of millions (into a much smaller market). And then they really started using the dirty tricks they learned in the DOS days to lock their competitors out. They dropped OS/2 like a hot potato, and made damn sure that it was never preloaded on ANYTHING.
All those billions really come down to two things: a single, insanely great program, and absolute ruthlessness. It is very unlikely that Apple could have survived that environment. Had they come out with MacOS for Intel, then Microsoft would have flexed their TRUE monopoly, that of Word... and stopped development for MacOS. Without Word, MacOS was dead. And Apple has certainly shit on their users many times, but they have very rarely been genuinely ruthless toward their competitors. It's not in their nature; they're trying to excel. Microsoft wants everyone else dead and buried.
I do think that Apple should have licensed their software onto other manufacturer's machines. Power Computing moved the Mac faster than it has moved before or since. But they had NO chance at becoming the new Microsoft without Word... and a sharp knife for their competitors' backs.
Ahhh... but Excel came from the Mac! (Score:5, Informative)
Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (1987) was therefore version 2.0
---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel [wikipedia.org]
Your corporate clients knew Excel was the right took. They just never dared not buy IBM-compatible. Wimps. Just like today they do not dare buy OS X.
Parent
I agree... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because of that blunder, Microsoft was able to sell a truly IBM compatible product to business, which were the primary buyers of computers at the time. It was the "IBM compatible" part that was of the utmost importance to business.
Apple NEVER had that "in" with business and any attempt to sell its OS separate from its hardware would have failed.
Also, by exerting control over both the soft and hardware, Apple is able to achieve a more stable platform. Sure having tons of peripherals and software to chose from on the IBM compatible PC was and is great. But more choices leads to more complexity. And complexity leads to instability.
Still, I wish Apple would release an x86 version of OSX. I've played around with it a bit and would really like to run it. Sure I could buy an Apple, but building yourself is just too much fun to give up. And it's cheaper too.
Quote-Unquote!?!?! (Score:5, Funny)
It all made perfect sense, back then. (Score:5, Interesting)
Until the PC came along, microcomputers did not have really compatable upgrades. Sure, CP/M stuck around for a while, but after they ran out of steam in the 8080/Z-80 systems, everybody migrated elsewhere.
Same thing happened with mainframes. There was all kinds of crazy incompatable mainframes, and *then* IBM made the System 360 series and suddenly stability hit.
This is why Apple made the Apple
I think the big thing not addressed in the linked article was the possibility of creating an "open" hardware standard, like the PC. Given that Atari and Amiga both followed with their own 68k systems, and Sun and others were making workstations out of them for quite some time, it's not entirely impossible that they could have produced a compatability standard.
Not like it would have worked, mind you. It's important to remember that, were IBM to have only been in the PC business, they would have been slaughtered by how the PC became an open standard. And it also could have happened that Microsoft, Amiga, Atari, or others would release a competing operating system and deprive Apple of the OS revenues.
I think the big thing is that Apple's decision made complete sense given the situation at the time. The big players would often try to sue or otherwise prevent their plug-compatable competition from stealing their business.
And there weren't Commodore or Atari clones, either, mind you.
In a certain sense, we only think that Apple made the wrong move because of the partially-accidental semi-open PC platform. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. It is now possible to trust somebody other than IBM/Apple/Amiga/Atari/etc. for hardware, but it wasn't back then. I mean, when my parents purchased stuff for their Apple II, there was one Genuine Apple disk drive and one off-brand clone. But you had to have the Genuine Real Thing, Just In Case.
Well, it was really (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem was that PC users were dicks. Let me rephrase that - "mice are for wimps." The culture of business IT back then was "macho at all cost."
At the time, there was no client-server, no distributed systems. Computer people were basically mainframe guys. And what self-respecting mainframe guy back in the day wanted a GUI? Easy-to-use software? Interactive terminals?
Every computer that was easy-to-use was one more nail in the mainframe coffin, and a knife in the heart of batch job bozos. Would they actually buy something that made them obsolete?
Nope!
PCs were non-threatening things that they could turn into dumb terminals (can anyone say TN3270?).
Give an IT guy back then a Mac, and he'd freak out. It was only until Windows 95 that GUIs became "acceptable" to corporate users. Win 31 worked, and WfW sort of worked, but it was Win95 that brought the GUI to IT.
Before then, IT people would rather have eaten their left testicle than buy a GUI-based computer, much less a Mac. Let's get real.
If Apple had licensed the Mac, they would have tanked, pure and simple...much like the way Power Computing almost destroyed Apple back in the day.
It's amazing that people that cry "licensing" don't remember the times. It was 15-20 years ago, but still, you'd think that some of them would have exited puberty by then.
significant error with video hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
Apple didn't go for the high-volume market (Score:5, Insightful)
If your plan is low margins and high volume, you have to beat everyone else who has this plan. If your plan is high margins and low volume, there's a lot more room for competition. Of course, in a market with a successful company of the first type and a number of successful companies of the second type, the first one has almost all of the market share, but that doesn't matter all that much. And as your margins get higher, the market share you need drops.
Apple probably could have done better by continuing the Apple II line until it could be folded into the Mac line, thereby keeping a foot in the low-end market and providing an upgrade path. They'd also have done better in the business market if they hadn't already orphaned a system, which makes users have to face the fact that they're using a closed system. But licensing the Mac to other companies would just have driven down the margins and made them need more market share.
Wait a minute... (Score:5, Funny)
Quothe the article:Was you PC going "Blee-ble-ble-ble-ble-bleeee" so long that you missed the Switch commercials? That's kind of..........a bummer.
It's all John Scully's fault (Score:5, Interesting)
Answer: It's not.
Apple's real problems started after the ouster of Steve Jobs by his hand-picked protege, former Pepsi executive, John Scully, in 1985. What followed was a decade of mismarketing, management reorganizations, engineering chaos and declining market-share. It was Scully and Spindler that refused to license Mac OS (and that squandered years of profits on aimless persuit of countless technological fantasies). It took a half-dozen reorganizations, three changes of top management, and the loss of more than half of Apple's market before the morons that hijacked the company were finally willing to try licensing. By then it was far too late: Apple no longer had the market position or resources to survive the transition.
Maybe licensing would have been a success in the late eighties or the very early ninties, but, by 1995, it was too little too late. Could licensing work now with Mac OS X? Probably not: Apple still doesn't have the resources to survive such a transition and the advantages of Mac OS X over competing products (including Windows and Linux) is not great enough to ensure success.
On top of this, Steve Jobs has some experience with producing an OS for the IBM-compatible market that suggests support costs would likely bankrupt the company (they barely have the resources to support OS X on just the recent Mac models): in the mid-ninties NeXT ported NeXTSTEP to x86 and sold it for general consumption. The Achilies heel of the strategy was that NeXT could not possibly support the full range of hardware in the IBM-compatible market. Essentially the same barrier stunted the early growth of Windows NT and actually killed IBM's OS/2. Even Microsoft can't muster the required resources: they rely on market position to persuade other manufacturers to do the development and maintenance for free. The problem is, once the third-party manufacturers have invested in developing Window's drivers, they don't have the resources or will to develop much of anything else. It's a classic network effect: once MS had the largest piece of the market (even without having a majority) all the manufacturers jumped on the MS bandwagon.
Overcoming the network effect at this late date is nearly impossible: you would need nearly unlimited resources, and it would still be an uphill battle (as the Linux/FOSS community, which happens to have such resources, is finding out). Apple hasn't got anything close to adequate resources for that fight and they know it. Instead they have cut their liabilities and are choosing their fights very carefully. It may not be a plan for sure fire success, but it's the best plan given the circumstances.
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac.
Then my Amiga, and the GeOS package running on my C64 were figments of my imagination? Or was the author of that article still in the alternate universe?
From the lips of the creators (Score:5, Informative)
BYTE Macintosh Preview [aci.com.pl].
BYTE Macintosh Team Interview [aci.com.pl].
I have a collection of most 68000 compact macs and play with them every now and then, they're quite fascinating little machines. I can feel the amount of bloat between every release. System 1.0 boots in 2-3 seconds from a floppy! (System 7 takes about a minute from a hard disk on the same hardware). Some of the difference is of course due to the few features but mostly it's the difference between compiled C and hand-tuned ASM.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" -Steve Jobs
I could quibble with many points in the article... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've owned Macs since junior high, and I can't remember a point where they weren't "the alternative." I mean, wasn't that what those 1984 and Lemmings commercials were about? Wasn't the computer always aimed at, or at least embraced by the various creative fields? I can't tell you how many offices I've worked in where the art department used Macs, and everyone else used Windows. So, yeah, they're "the alternative", which usually implies a smaller but cultlike following as opposed to "the popular." Mac users are kind of like the Goths and Punks in the corner of the lunchroom sneering at the Preps and Jocks.
The Mac has its lot in life. And it's not a bad one. It's possible Apple could've done something different and sold more computers, and from a business standpoint they could be considered a failure because they aren't worth ten times as many billions-- but they are still worth billions, and that's saying somthing. Apple also has something that Microsoft never had and never will, millions of loyal users, many of whom border on the fanatical.
Me, I'm happy with where they are and where they're going. I mean, look at DVD Studio Pro 3 and Final Cut 4, Shake... The soon-to-come Motion... But then, I'm an animator, so my needs aren't everyone's.
This Paragraph caught my attention (Score:5, Interesting)
Having been an employee at NeXT and Apple between the years 1996 and 1998 I can testify that not only was the 1999 modest but in fact, in 1997 Apple had only 3 months worth of working capital on which to run the company. One of the most necessary and drastic actions Steve took was to revoke the Sabbatical Program. Nearly 1/3rd of the entire staff had earned up to 12 weeks of paid vacation. Not to mention the merging of 20 some odd separate marketing departments into the vaunted "Think Different" single marketing department. Or the over 500 staffed IT Department costing the company over $45 Million annually to run with over 180 in-house applications that had yet to be sold to consumers? Steve gutted that group and what useful software has and continues to be adapted to current and hopefully future software from Apple. We all found the gluttony within Apple to be disgusting (meanwhile during the merger Apple Engineers were pissed with our free variety of beverages perks and how upbeat and enjoyable the NeXT headquarters work environments actual were). My personal favorite change was when Steve gutted the outside Latte/Espresso vendor from within Apple proper along with the Cafe staff. It sent a storm of posts on the internal web anonymous bitch section (employee feedback section) until the day arrived when Steve was praised because he introduced everyone to the newly revamped Cafe with free Coffee/Lattes for Staff. It just reminds me how speculation can sure create wild stories, and how experiencing it in actuality helps calm those storms of BS.
We only had 12 weeks in which to effectively redefine Apple, trim the exhorbitant costs that it was taking just to keep the company afloat, and more importantly market products to get Apple back on track. It was then early in 1998 we all were asked to head off campus to what would be the unveiling of Apple's Future--iMac.
I agree the clone licensing campaign that Steve revoked was necessary for Apple to survive. Steve learned well with all the grandiose ideals at NeXT and was not about to make the same mistakes back at Apple, now that he had one last chance.
How many people realize that a stroll around Steve's neighborhood with an Executive of Microsoft turned into the $150 Million non-voting shares investment from Microsoft back into Apple and how when that was revealed in Boston that most folks hadn't a clue how important ending that feud was to Apple's future bottom line.
What is in Apple's back pocket....? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) They have a fully functional GUI on top of an open source OS
2) their open source OS is still building on BOTH Power PC and Intel platforms.
3) a version of Microsoft Office (like it or not, this is a huge advantage that the Mac has over other Open Source OS's)
I don't have insight into why Apple continues to do Intel builds of Darwin. It could be for no other reason than to keep IBM in check.
It would be interesting to see how Microsoft's reaction would be if Apple took that Intel build to market. Microsoft needs Apple to remain in business, but how badly? Would Microsoft do another build of Office to run on an OS X for Intel platforms?
The future could be interesting.
It is worth adding.... (Score:5, Interesting)
One of those others was Microsoft. Besides producing several programming and software packages for the Apple II, they wrote a portion of the machine's ROM. Look inside an Apple II; the ROM chips have a Microsoft copyright.
Apple couldn't "be" Microsoft. They could have, however, maintained the sort of relationship they'd had, and used Microsoft to continue support and further development of their line. Unfortunately Jobs saw fit to take yet another opportunity to try to prove Woz wrong. Now, Apple has a small fraction of the market share they did before Jobs did so.
Much of that is wrong (Score:5, Informative)
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
Jobs Learned How to Parlay (Score:5, Insightful)
The article mentions Sculley's Newton and how it barely interacted with the Mac and was instead intended to supplant it. A few years later the Palm Pilot would clean up because it integrated with the desktop so successfully. Similarly, one of the the key selling points of the iPod was, and continues to be, its tight integration with iTunes, an application that people really like.
Further, the author goes on to sketch a vision of how Apple could have been Microsoft through evolutionary improvement - first with backward-compatibility from the Mac to Apple II software, then the Newton as a peripheral. He points out that this would have involved Microsoft-style parlaying of dominance in one platform into dominance in another. This too is exactly what Jobs is doing, with the popularity of the iPod promoting the use of iTunes Music Store, to the point that almost 2% (!) of legally sold music in the US is sold through iTunes Music Store.
Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
Me too.. and, while we're at it, I'll nitpick a chunk of the otherwise-excellent article at DF:
The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design. The mouse pointer. The desktop metaphor. Overlapping windows. Icons. WYSIWYG word processing. Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac.
The Amiga had all this, along with much better colour support, far superior sound hardware, some rudimentary hardware acceleration for graphics, and pre-emptive multitasking.
What they didn't have, was a parent company with any scruples, so out it went... but the Amiga 1000 smoked the Macintosh back in the day.
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Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Open Market
2. Cheaper to Develop
3. Cheaper computers
4. More Customers
5. More Developers (Games)
6. Goto 2
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Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
(But seriously, I do own a G5 and I do not regret it one bit.)
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Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can get a serial ATA hard drive from CompUSA. Where the fuck did you come up with sending it back to Apple?
And if you're going to screw up the mobo and CPU by disconnecting and reconnecting a hard drive, maybe you should take up a new hobby other than computers. Like sitting in the corner and drooling.
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Re:Wow, what a load..... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Wow, what a load..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget Daystar. The first (and to my knowledge only) company to make a 4-Way SMP [everymac.com] Mac OS machine.
Problem is that Apple didn't start licensing the machines until after they had lost the battle for supremecy. Had Apple licensed 10 years earlier they may have had better results. By the mid-1990s people had chosen their sides. The availability of clones meant that people who were unwilling to pay top dollar for Apple branded upgrades had the choice of buying a clone instead of going over to a Win-PC. They didn't bring many new users over from the windows world because it was too late.
LK
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Re:As the article says (Score:5, Funny)
So it'll be a while.
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Re:Icons. (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl (Score:5, Insightful)
Why did you take John's nicely formatted article and ass it up like that? Additionally, he's selling memberships to help pay for his site [daringfireball.net], I'm sure he'd probably like people to actually come to the site to buy them...
~jeff
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Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl (Score:5, Insightful)
Hence, the entry-level investment has always been higher for a Mac. You couldn't say "I'll buy this crappy one, and if I like it i'll upgrade later". Or simply speaking, if you had a thousand bucks to buy a machine, there was no alternative.
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Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now Cisco's market cap is just over $135 billion. Apple comes in at almost $12 billion. I guess there's niche, and then there's niche.
I don't see anyone running a PC running IOS, which is what the "business analysts" claimed Apple should have done with Mac OS.
There actually are tons of "PC's" (x86 servers) running Cisco software. Cisco PIXes, Content Engines, NAMs, Call-Managers. I could go on. These are also "proprietary hardware" (they're mostly re-branded stuff from other PC manufacturers, but you still gotta buy them from Cisco, in the bluegreen boxes with the bridge logo on them).
But your use of Cisco as a parallel to Apple isn't that bad. If I had to distill it to a one sentence explanation, I'd say:
Cisco and Apple both went for high-end proprietary hardware, emphasizing good design over low price, but Cisco targets businesses who will drop millions of dollars to go from a 2% failure rate to a 1% failure rate, or to save their support staff 15 minutes of time in a crisis, whereas Apple targets individual users who don't have the same attitude towards how much money they should spend on their computer systems.
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Re:What a load of BS... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Anon. Karma Whore (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on. Windows 9x/NT was better than Mac OS 9 and prior.
I know this for a fact because at one time I owned a mac that had OS 9 as my only computer and I recall going with my girlfriend to her college computer labs that had windows 9x/NT with MS office. Windows was just no nonsense usability. Write your paper, print it, simple no-nonsense usuability. The Start button just made perfect sense, task bar, quick launch, system tray, file explorer, and having menus on windows did too. I really wondered then why I was using a mac.
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Re:Anon. Karma Whore (Score:5, Insightful)
At any rate, Windows NT4 most certainly did not suck - it had full multitasking, something that Macs really didn't have until years later - granted it wasn't as good as the Amiga's multitasking at the time, but for popular use, it worked just fine, was very stable, and had a reasonable level of user-based security (something that was not at-all common on PCs at the time).
Now as for the past - wouldacouldashoulda - I don't really care about Apple failing to license their products in the past. OS-X is a whole 'nother ballgame. It's basically unix and with a modicum of tweaking and some extra drivers, should be possible to compile for X86 CPUs and most anything-else out there.
But it will never happen, because Apple is too fond of their own hardware solutions to see the bigger picture, and they really want to keep their "designer" image - there are still a lot of people out there for whom owning a Mac is a status-symbol of sorts (read: bumpersticker about how intelligent and artistic the owner is).
Eventually when Linux is getting to the point of becoming common on the desktop (say, 5 years from now), Apple may re-think it's strategy, but for the reasons I lised above, I doubt it.
Apple has, however, conquered the one major problem that Linux still has - for it to be commonplace on desktop PCs, Linux needs to be able to be installed, configured, and maintained without EVER seeing a command line interface or editing config files by hand. I know unix-types want their CLI and I'm all for having it, buried some some folder of the operating system that normal users never need to look at.
As soon as Linux can consistantly pull-off this trick, the userbase will skyrocket and application developers will follow.
N.
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