Apple vs. Microsoft Myths Revisited 845
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."
Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
http://solutions.sun.com/catalog.static/en_US/7
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.
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Apple was actually upset that the clones were competing on the basis of being faster & cheaper. Power, for example, were shipping machines with recently announced PPCs faster than Apple could manage to, and were thus eating into Apple's high-end sales, rather than just competing at the low end, where Apple wouldn't have minded losing some market share in order to build the total user base for the OS. Much more of a hit to profits that way.
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.
Re:Won't work so well now. (Score:4, Interesting)
As for XP, the UI is worse than Windows 98. There's no doubt that it looks nicer, but the way it behaves is dumb. There are many X11 desktop environments that work better.
I don't buy Macs for the looks. If I wanted looks, I would make a custom case out of an odd household device. If I wanted to be different, I could be different enough running Linux. I buy and use Macs because the less I have to think about how to do what I'm doing, the better. Apple makes things very similar between different programs, and that makes it easy to use different programs. When I launch a program I've never seen, I already know the exact location of the application's preferences, and I have a good idea of the location of application's menus.
It's called an API, folks (Score:5, Insightful)
And let's review, kiddos: has Microsoft "gotten" this extraordinarily simple idea -- the central insight behind the 1984 Mac OS release?
Does the standard Windows API include dialogs that handily address 99.7 percent of all the situations you need in something like, oh, a Word processor? Or are your applications littered with shoddily-written, badly-contructed dialogs that force the user to wade through double negatives and ambiguous choices in order to do things like save a .csv file from Excel? How consistent are the menu options you get?
This isn't just a matter of Apple having the control to make its OS for a limited range of systems. That Excel example is real: the choices you get when saving to any format other than Excel are ridiculously muddled, and have been for several generations of the program. In Word, the outline features have always been at war with the style features -- and we never, never have any sort of consistency across the basic Office products in how they do stuff. This is in Microsoft's flagship products.
Do a mental tally of how many developers you think truly understand and accept the importance of consistent API. They're impatient with it, by and large. To wit: Linux. Apple really does understand this, and seemingly very few other companies do. Heck, big brand software makers bring in scads of money just changing their interface and releasing new whole-number releases. (We know where you live, Adobe.)
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:4, Insightful)
And so is Dell [upgradinga...ingpcs.com], unfortunately for many users.
Apple doesn't build their own hardware any more than PC makers do. Apple is not building their own DVD-ROM or hard drives, they're buying them from companies like Toshiba and Maxtor/Seagate/whoever. They buy their PowerPC chips from Motorola and IBM. They buy their graphics cards from ATI and NVidia. I don't know whose memory they're using but it ain't Apple's own, I'll tell you that.
All Apple does is design their motherboards and cases, just like PC makers. In fact the architecture itself these days is basically the same with the exception of the CPU.
The PC world competes solely on mindshare.
So what you're saying is there's no difference between PC's other than the case? That a Dell Dimension is the same as my scratch-built machine is the same as a Falcon Northwest is the same as a Sony Vaio? I don't think anybody could seriously argue that. It's like saying all cars are exactly the same just because they all burn the same kind of gas. Only their exterior shells are different.
PC makers do compete in a lot of different areas, and many PC makers have totally different target markets. So you'll get PC's all up and down the pricing spectrum, at varying levels of true quality (build, materials, etc.) and with varying levels of features, performance, and yes, aesthetics. You can even significantly deviate from "standard" PC architecture, with RAID arrays, dual graphics cards, 64-bit AMD processors, etc. and you can still claim to own a "PC" (in the colloquial parlance of our times, that is - Macs are technically PC's too, of course).
With a Mac, you're stuck with the configurations Apple wants to give you - they'd be like a single PC maker in a sea of hundreds on the other side of the fence. Now, obviously this is working for them in some ways, as they're generally profitable of late, though mostly due to iPod. But I'm not sure that I buy this idea that they'd be less profitable if they'd continued licensing their OS. I understand the whole argument about diluting the brand name, yadda yadda yadda, so what? There's a tendency for people to believe that because of the way things turned out in the world, that that's the only way they could have turned out, and I don't believe it.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because that wasn't (and isn't) where they want to compete. They are aimed at the professional high-end desktop market. They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't. They're pretty much like Sun, only they get their chips from moto and ibm, and obviously the two companies haven't put their research money in exactly the same places.
Was it the right choice for Apple? Was it right for Sun? Did they screw up? It could be fun to conjecture, but it's really just water under the bridge.
All we can do is look back and thank God they didn't turn out as Microsoft. Whether it was due to not licensing or not catering to the low-end market or something else it just doesn't matter.
Re:Apple being Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
Insightful my ass - you're full of shit. They seem to have been profitable for three YEARS prior to the iPod, due to things like the iMac, iBook, Powerbook, etc. Gee, these are HARDWARE devices that they may not have sold if they'd licensed the OS. They tried the OS licensing idea - it was the clone years of the mid-90's. It was a flop - people didn't buy more Macs, people just bought cheap hardware from clone makers, killed Apple's profits, and saddled Apple with a huge support legacy.
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share? There has to be a reason, and it's not all because MS is a monopoly. MS was not always a monopoly. When I owned my Apple II, Apple had more than 50% of the PC market. The supposedly superior Mac line eventually dropped them to the 3% they have today. The market was Apple's to lose and they lost it. At some point, you have to stop blaming the rest of the world and look inward for the reasons why.
It's because of compatibility. If you want to move from one platform to another, companies move with the path of least resistance. Over time, CP/M gave way to DOS, which went to Windows 3.1, to Win 95, to 2000, to XP. Each time there was minimal pain in moving.
Meanwhile, Apple II users had NO upgrade path. They migrated sometimes to the Mac, sometimes to the PC. Why didn't they all go to the Mac? They bought into a platform (the Apple II) that cost them less than $1000, and were being asked now to buy into a platform that cost at least $2500, usually more, plus all new software.
That brings me to my final point - even if Mac OS X were available on generic x86 and Apple found a magical way outside everything we know of economics to survive, a lot of people STILL wouldn't migrate. They'd still have to buy all new SOFTWARE, and let me tell you - for a lot of people that can dwarf the cost of the hardware.
Score 5 Insightful but hasn't read the article... (Score:5, Informative)
There is a reason, and it's explained (rather well) in the article. If you're intelligent enough to grasp it, I encourage you to read it.
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.
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.
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.
Re:Personal connections? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Nothing. At all. At the time, making their own hardware was the best option.
When NeXT started out in 1986, there was no such thing as a commodity personal computer. There were IBM clones but they weren't anywhere near standardised and in any case, the most advanced of them were based on the 80286, a thoroughly shitty 16-bit processor.
The other players--Apple, Atari, Commodore and others I'm forgetting--were mostly better in that they generally used 680x0 CPUs but they still weren't particularly decent. They certainly wouldn't have run NeXT's software.
But they're irrelevant because the NeXT systems were workstations, not personal computers. Workstations were the serious computers of the day. They were still single-user (mostly) systems but they were fullblown Unix boxes. If you wanted to do any sort of scientific or industrial computation, that's what you got. They were priced in the $10k-$100k range and the big-name players in that arena were (IIRC) Sun, HP, DEC, IBM and SGI (and probably others) and NeXT was competing with them.
If NeXT had gone software-only, they would have had to pick their platform(s) with no clear winner in sight, then live or die at the mercy of its vendor. They would also have missed out on the huge piles of money they made by building and selling hardware. In those days, there was still big money in proprietary hardware.
IMHO, NeXT went software-only at about the right time, just as commodity (IBM-compatible) PCs were getting powerful enough to eat the workstation market. I doubt, though, that that would have been enough to save the company. Once you get into the PC operating system market, Microsoft will kill you, as Be found out.
Just before Apple bought them, they were selling OPENSTEP, the NeXTStep API and framework ported to a variety of platforms (including Windows NT). I suspect that if they hadn't taken over Apple, we'd all be developing our "real" apps for OPENSTEP now (or GNUStep if you're a Debian user) and porting them as necessary.
ObCitation: here [wikipedia.org].
As an aside, Apple is in a pretty wierd place. They're a throwback to the '80s when it was still enormously profitable to make computer hardware. It isn't anymore (although Apple seems to still make a modest profit from it) but they've got a tiger by the tail--if they move to commodity hardware, they have to compete with Microsoft who can and will kill them.
Their current strategy is to stay out of MS's range by remaining incompatible with PCs, all the while using as many commodity parts as possible and focusing on innovation and good industrial design. Given those strengths, I wouldn't be surprised if they minimized the computer business or got out of it entirely. They're currently much more adept at competing with the likes of Sony.
The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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
Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:3, Informative)
I was primarily a Mac user until 1996. I wanted to get into PC Gaming. I built a Pentium 100 PC. Over the years that followed I spend money upgrading both platforms. My PC was for gam
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.)
Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The reason I chose the PC over Apple... (Score:3, Insightful)
Want to play games? Buy a PC. Want to do work with your computer, instead of working on your computer? Buy a Mac.
I have both. Perfect solution.
Oh yeah, and Marathon kicked the holy hell out of Doom and Doom II (and I happened to like it better than Quake, although Quake had a great engine). Too bad Bungie is now in the belly of the beast...they used to be a great game publisher.
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.
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.
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.
Not so... (Score:4, Insightful)
What a load of crap. I called Apple to get the iBook 800Mhz two years ago in the basic configuration with 128 Mb RAM. The Apple sales person told me (and I quote): "128 Mb is not enough memory for this computer, it will barely be usable".
They have since upgraded memory for their bottom line computers, but they are in no way better than Dell in this area.Wow, what a load..... (Score:3, Informative)
Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.
Re:Wow, what a load..... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow, what a load..... (Score:3, Informative)
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
Re:Wow, what a load..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Learn some basic comprehension skills, THEN post. You look like less of a dumbass that way.
It would be a good ide
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:4, Insightful)
In this case, the obvious answer is the correct one: many, many companies would love to be like Microsoft, because Microsoft makes a fuckton of money.
You can talk about soul-searching and whether or not money is really all that fulfilling, but you asked why a company would want to be like Microsoft, not why a worker or a CEO would want their company to be like Microsoft. Publicly-traded companies want (as far as any non-living, non-sentient entity can be said to want) only one thing: increase shareholder value. That's not cynicism, that's the law. If you, as a company, decide to take an idealistic stance and disregard the priority of making lots of money, you can actually be sued. And with good reason.
Imagine if your checking account was suddenly cut in half, because the bank decided to be idealistic. Would you cheer them on and say "Good for you! Way to be! I didn't really need that money anyway!" That's what you're asking corporations to do. That publicly traded stock represents other people's money. People who don't work for Microsoft buy their stock, maybe as part of an investment portfolio, say for their retirement. Just like your checking account vanishing, those are real people who would be hurt if Microsoft suddenly said "fuck profit!"
Now, if you really meant "Why would an individual want to work for a company like Microsoft, instead of a company like Apple?" I suggest you get to know some moderately sucessful Microsoft employees. Despite the slashdot view, people who work at Microsoft don't approach it with the attitude of "Well, I'll be a mindless corporate automaton, but at least I'll make some good bucks." Many people at Microsoft, especially the top officers, genuinely believe that they're idealistic, and that they're changing the world for the better, doing revolutionary things. Now you can question the validity of that viewpoint, but we can question the validity of Steve Jobs' viewpoints as well. My point is that the contrrast you try to paint between the companies, idealistic vs. pragmatic, while an illustrative look at their business plans, doesn't really reflect the spirit of the company and the people who work there. Both of them are pretty idealistic, and I think that was one of their strengths.
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.
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.
Re:Maybe Microsoft could/would be like Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
Do I hate Microsoft? Um, well, yeah, but not for emotional reasons. I read the Findings of Fact from the Jackson court, the same findings that were upheld in the appeals court. After reading all 150 pages, I realized I despised Microsoft's odd obsession with not being satisfied with 90%-percent of the market but wanting those last few percentages too. And they were willing to bully their partners, threaten them, lie to the public, and basically act in truly sociopathic ways. Yes, all billion-dollar companies engage in some shady deals along the way, but with Microsoft it was the culture.
And yes, I am not a criminal, and I don't engage in such behaviors. Microsoft is criminal, and I'm not.
Anon. Karma Whore (Score:4, Funny)
Such a version of Windows was never released.
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.
Re:Anon. Karma Whore (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder if the parent is trying to be funny, or is this trolling for flame.
Menus are on top of the screen because it is easier to throw your mouse upwards and get the menu, rather than navigate with precision to the menu that follows each window border around.
Menubar on "top" is better than "bottom", because it is easier to move your mouse forward than to pull it back. These are the 5 precise points that the mouse pointer can get to on any screen:
1. the current point (contextual menu is useful)
2. top-left, bottom-left, top-right, bottom-right.
I do agree that contextual menu was a good thing. I think Apple was just too stubborn after having a one button mouse for years and still argues that you don't need more.
Quick launch was something that I remember using in OS 7. It was called launcher. Later, the control strip (from powerbooks) took over with same functionality.
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.
Re:Anon. Karma Whore (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, I think Apple sees the bigger picture very clearly (the thousands of flakey, low-margin, made-in-Taiwan chipsets, each with its own set of hardware bugs to work around, the risk inherent in competing directly with Microsoft, the inevitable mass piracy eating most of the profits, and the fact that every resulting problem would be blamed on Apple) and they want no part of it.
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.
Re:Modestly profitable? (Score:3, Interesting)
If Apple wants to increase Profit, it needs to increase Market Share. Margins are already too high for 90% of the market. Most of the reasons people will not purchase a Apple is Purchase Price or Market Share.
Re:Modestly profitable? (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Apple does QA testing... (Score:3, Funny)
What a load of BS... (Score:4, Interesting)
My biggest problem with the article is that the author has a hard time telling the difference between hardware and software. The more than decade lack of an adequate GUI OS for x86 can't be blamed on the platform but the software developer (MS), but Apple is its own hardware/software vendor. That's why a direct comparison can not be reasonably made, although it is my opinion that since Apple was ahead in the early days if they had left the hardware open (like IBM did the x86) Apple would have a much greater share of today's market.
Re:What a load of BS... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What a load of BS... (Score:4, Insightful)
IBM did leave the hardware open when compared to Apple (except the MCA bus developed later).
Seriously, the author of the article has a very very good point when he mentions that terminals at the time were 40-column (80 if you were lucky) text displays -- not machines capable of displaying 512x384...it was the integration of hardware and software that made [and still makes] the mac what it is.
The video lilitation for PCs of the day was largely due to the amount of available video memory. Instead of storing data about the location, value, and attributes of an ASCII character, you needed enough memory to store data about the position and color of each pixel. The fact that most of the static data on the Apple was stored in ROM just made things easier. Unfortunately the PC market could employ this "shortcut" because no single PC entity developed both the hardware and software. It would require cooperation between corporations, which is difficult even to this day.
Apple has slowly been adopting various ideas from the PC market over the last decade or so. The move from SCSI to IDE as the default option is one example. The move to PCI is another good choice. Most Mac users don't have to go out and buy 5 volt buffered DIMMs either. Apple has done a great job of accepting some PC standards to reduce the cost to its customers. In order to do this they had to seperate the hardware from the software yet allow them to interact as if they were still one.
Apple makes great machines at a fairly reasonable price, but they made their decision about 2 decades ago and continue to choose to live by it. Articles like this serve no purpose than to bring out the trolls.
Oddly enough... (Score:4, Insightful)
- _Quinn
Re:Oddly enough... (Score:4, Informative)
The problem was that the IIgs had a 65816 processor, not a 68000. So it's not quite an "underclocked Amiga". Now, the 65816 is pretty impressive given the context, but even then, it really didn't have much future to it compared to the 68k series.
And, if you look at the competition, everybody else on the 6502 (NES, Commodore, Atari, Acorn, etc) reached for the 68k, except for Acorn who made the ARM instead. And the big people working on the 6502 line was Commodore (who owned MOS) and Western Design Center (who were and still are a small company). Whereas the 68k line was backed by Motorola, who has a lot of resources to throw at it.
And the IIgs, while well designed, was pretty far out of headroom for growth, without some major changes.
So really, even though the IIgs was a great computer, Apple really shouldn't have released it because all it did was prolong the inevitable end of the Apple II line without actually "parlay"ing it into the future.
Really, they "should" have killed off the Mac and do what Acorn did -- release a new computer based on a newer processor that was able to emulate the Apple II. The problem is that, while the ARM was fast enough to emulate a BBC Micro, the 68k probably wasn't, so they wouldn't have been able to just make the Mac do it.
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.
Hercules (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Apple would never have been like Microsoft (Score:3, Interesting)
It wasn't until they started bundling them as Office, and bundling THAT with PCs, that Word took off. Why buy another word processor when y
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.
Re:Apple would never have been like Microsoft (Score:4, Informative)
And also something of a rip-off of MacWrite, which also came out 6 years before. It was MacWrite that was everything above you claim for Word, and it inspired Word for Mac, which long predated the Windows version. So if your argument has merit, one could say that what Apple should have done was to develop MacWrite and make it available for Windows as well, much like their modern iTunes strategy.
Ahhh... but Word came from the Mac! (Score:3, Informative)
The version of Word which killed WordStar 2000 and WordPerfect came directly from the Mac:
For the release after Word 2.0, the team merged with the MacWord team (then on release 5.1), and built a shared product called Word 6.0 (released in late 1993). That's why on Windows the Word version numbering seemed to jump from 2 to 6 - because the Mac was already on 5.x.
---http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_p [asp.net]
OS2 as the point of departure (Score:3, Interesting)
At the same time, IBM shot themselves in the foot by coding OS2 for the 286, which could only support one DOS box.
In the early days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, actual Windows applications were the exception. Most people used them to multitask DOS and *hope* that native Windows apps would be available soon.
The truth is, hardly anyone ever ran OS2 on a 286. If IBM had introduced OS2 1.0 for the 386, they would have lost very very few customers but would gain market dominence. There would be no Windows.
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
And a couple of years later, the Amiga was at the same point. And Beta was better than VHS, etc., etc., ad nauseum. It's not performance or technological superiority that guarantees success, but money and advertising.
Duh.
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.
too hard to program (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's business decisions gave them one segment of the market, Microsoft's gave them another, and Sun got yet another. And none of them invented much of the basic technology themselves anyway: just like Windows was a stripped down version of Macintosh, so Macintosh was a stripped down version of the Xerox GUIs. And Sun's business was built on the software they had gotten from Berkeley.
None of those companies have anything to complain about: they made a lot of money with technology they got elsewhere, and they each got their market segment, to this day.
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.
Re:Well, it was really (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the Mac had a 64k ROM. And EGA was introduced in 1984 (same year as the mac). EGA did 640x350 in 16 colors. The Mac did 512x384 in B&W.
Even back in 1984, the Mac hardware was nothing special (overpriced, underpowered) it was the OS that was something to look at.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong on the hardware. (Score:4, Informative)
Well, a computer company that licensed the Mac OS could include the Mac OS 64k of ROM on the motherboard with minimal difficulty; the whole 64k E segment of the first megabyte of memory was reserved for BIOS use, but was not actually used on any machines until the PS/2 came out. (Heck, of the 64K in the F segment, only 8k was used by the actual BIOS; on the original PCs and XTs, 32k were used by the IBM Basic and the other 24k were unused.)
There was no retail OS market at the time, but they could have been accomodated as well; ship an adapter card with the ROM on board, to be decoded to the reserved-for-adapter-card-ROM C or D memory segments. Heck, use the same adapter card to attach a bus mouse if you like . .
Graphically, he's wrong, too. A 1982 Hercules graphics card was perfectly capable of displaying 720 x 348 on 1981 IBM monochrome monitors. Sure, that's 36 pixels shorter vertically than the Mac display, but it's actually higher resolution (250,560 pixels vs. 196,608). When dealing with monochrome graphics, the computer neither knows nor cares whether the monitor uses amber, green, or white phosphors. And a 1984 EGA display, at 640x350, is just barely inferior to a Mac in resolution, and delivered sixteen colors.
There are other issues, of course, which may have made making a Mac out of the PC much more difficult. But Mr. Gruber clearly doesn't know what he's talking about when he opines on early '80s PC hardware.
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.
My "Apple coulda been" idea (Score:4, Interesting)
The useful bits of IRIX could have been merged into what became OSX. Apple could have gained some machine-room credibility, SGI could have obtained some valuable consumer end applications. I kind of envision a software-unified product line with Apple's ease of use and SGI's CGI muscle.
The finished product could have been a networked computer system with Macs on the desktop and SGI servers in the machine room, with apps running NUMA-style on whatever CPU they needed.
I had a similar fantasy about a Sun/Apple merger as well, but instead of focusing so much on media/visualization, it became the uber-alternative to Microsoft -- great, easy to use desktops AND servers you could build a total enterprise business out of, with the PHB's approval, all with a unified OS.
This last one could be an IBM fantasy, too, since it might be easy to build "fat" binaries that would on on Power and Apple's PPC variant at the same time (CPU pedants feel free to correct me).
Most people slap me down when I post this on Slashdot, with the idea that Apple is a "consumer company" and doesn't want to compete in the business space, but why bother with Xserve and other server-type techs if that's the case? There's enough interest in Mac-only solutions that a merger with someone who has industrial computing experience could create interest outside of boutique shops that run on Mac-only setups.
Apple is an Innovator, not a Market Share Whore (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think Apple could have been bigger nor should it be bigger. As an innovator, Apple is necessarily relegated to a minority market share. And I think that is OK. I put more detailed thoughts on all this in my blog entry [reese.name] on the topic.
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
Apple could have changed it's plan (Score:4, Informative)
The question is more that they would have had to charge high prices for the licences of the MacROM (prior to the neworld machines that had the ROM in software) and/or the motherboard design in order to offset the loss in marketshare of their hardware.
If Apple had stuck to three basic designs - one desktop, one laptop, one tower - plus perhaps reserving special stuff like the iMac as Apple only and made sure that the quality of their machines were absolutely the best, I'm pretty sure that sales would have been high enough in the professional Mac sector in order to let the clones live and hopefully raise overall MacOS marketshare. I refer to the quality as important because Macs used to be the most qualitative computers around, but over the years have dropped slightly in order to reduce costs. I mean, IBM's Thinkpads sell extremely well despite their high price chiefly because of their quality, and this in the cut throat PC market where most stuff is dirt cheap and dirt crap, quality wise.
Apple invests a large amount in R&D and would need to basically finance that in order to grow and survive. If Apple had continued on their way, iMac and iBooks (both with looks copyrighted or patented), iPod, OSX (free on Apple's machines, discounted as OEM to clones but still with a price), excellent software division (FCP, shake etc) they would have possibly less hassle today than they do, and a higher marketshare to boot.
Not only that but a higher marketshare would bring CPU prices down.
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.
getting rid of sabbaticals was critical? (Score:4, Interesting)
And the number of people who had earned the sabbaticals was stated in the comm meeting as 1/5th. I know, I was there. Yes, 1/5th, as in you get a sabbatical every 5 years. This seemed every bit as Dilbert's "40% of sick days are taken on Mondays or Fridays" joke statement.
As to gutting the Coffee bar, I was good friends with the owner of the coffee bar. He had taken it and made something of it. Steve decided he had to take it away and give it to one of his cronies. This was months after he changed the cafeteria, which was pretty much a good thing, except for losing Jaime at the grill.
I have no idea what your comment about 180 in-house applications is. We have almost as many in-house applications now. And those in-house applications were never supposed to be sold to customers in the first place, so to say they were languishing is ridiculous. Finally, if you think we have fewer than 500 IT people at Apple now, you really need to get a better count. Have you been upstairs in Valley Green 6? How about the music store folks? That department is all IT.
I've was at Apple in 1991, 1992-1993, and 1995 to present. And the number one thing that burns my behind is the NeXT wingnuts coming in and acting like they saved Apple. NeXT didn't get where it was by knowing how to do business. And the engineering is horrid. No one at NeXT had any idea about release to release compatibility. Have a new OS coming? Just call up your 12 devleopers and get them to release new versions.
The X folks in their wisdom threw out everything that Apple had developed to make the machine easier to use. Amazing how with Rendezvous now you can just open a browser and find your printer! Heavens! Perhaps with future enhancements you'll be able to find them on other subnets! The Mac could do this in 1986, but the NeXTies threw it away. Then they can rediscover it later and look like geniuses.
How about the ability to share a folder on your hard drive over the network? Mac OS 7-9 could do it. Windows can do it. Mac OS X still can't do it. You can only share a certain folder in your home directory.
It's all stupid. Apple wouldn't have survived the idiocy of the NeXT OS crew if it weren't for the improvements in the hardware org that were made at the same time. Killing the 20 machines Apple made and releasing good ones using commong chipsets really saved the company, not MACH.
Hardware vs. Software (Score:4, Interesting)
This is one of the more insightful articles about personal computer history that I've read. With Apple being essentially an innovative hardware company is it any surprise they have had the revolutionary mentality rather than Microsoft's evolutionary mentality?
Apple were never about fitting in with anyone else; Microsoft were prepared to find any niche with any platform to survive. You could say that Apple are invested in their corporate personality, whereas Microsoft never believed having one was useful. And yet it's ironic that both companies are so dependent on the personality of their founders.
All this might sound peripheral but it translates into very real strategy. Apple are addicted to inventing hardware. Microsoft is addicted to destroying competition. There are echoes of their origins in that strategy also: Apples compulsion towards UI design (like those cool iPods), and Microsofts compulsion to outdo IBM (they really have a thing about IBM).
The article's point about Apple successfully avoiding direct competition with Microsoft shouldn't be taken as some sort of ideological cant, either. Look at Adobe (who have had very profitable dealings with Apple not coincidentally), or Cisco. Even when Microsoft decided they were competitors, these companies kept their focus and ultimately kept their mindshare.
Now that the tide is turning again, who will survive into the next decade?
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
Re:Much of that is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft WAS willing to write for Copland - but it was cancelled because it was way over budget and behind schedule. The thing just wasnt going to make it out the door. So Apple bought NeXT to get their OS. That was more than six months before the famous MS investment. What Microsoft did NOT want to do (along with Adobe) was create "cocoa" versions of all of their apps - thus the modern OS X came from Rhapsody in about 1998 (shipped much later obviously).
As far as Microsoft support for Mac apps goes - besides IE I just dont see it. Office 2004 is a nice update to Office v. X IMHO
Office is really the key app there - and dumping that app would be very bad for MS. Office is their cash cow, so why give Apple and all the Mac users of the world a great reason to push OpenOffice? Do you think Apple getting behind OOo (perhaps file format compatibility in their new office suite - making the only viable cross platform option the OASIS format) would be good for Microsoft? Probably not
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.
The Mac's *REAL* Problem: It Worked Too Well. (Score:5, Insightful)
It works like this.
Back in the early days when Macs were a serious competitor to Dos, anybody who knew anything about computers knew that Macs were better than PCs. That essentially accounted for about 5% of the population.
Another 15-20% of the population knew somebody who was willing to tell them that macs were far better than PCs.
The other 75%-80% of the population would just go look up computer consultants in the phone book. That's where the Mac fell down.
You see (and just about everyone here knows), the mac was so well designed and easy to use, that the average Mac consultant could handle about 5 times as many customers as the average PC consultant. This means, that -- even if Macs had half the market, there'd still be 5 times as many PC consultants... That meant that the vast majority of sad sacks who wanted to get a computer would end up randomly calling a DOS consultant.
Now what software do you think that a DOS consultant is gonna suggest to a know-nothing would-be customer???
Thus began Apple's death spiral.
para-Quote from a friend of mine (circa 1995).:
(sigh....)Re:As the article says (Score:3, Insightful)
The security issues in Windows have nothing to do with having drivers for every computer accessory ever dreamed up by Man and beast. It has to do with incredibly stupid decisions made by Microsoft. Just look at some of the fixes that Windows XP SP2 includes that people have been clamoring for since Windows 95 was released!
Re:As the article says (Score:5, Funny)
So it'll be a while.
Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, that's why that cisco company never took off.
Re:I, for one, do not welcome the formatting overl (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention, I don't see anyone running a PC running IOS, which is what the "business analysts" claimed Apple should have done with Mac OS.
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.
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
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.
Re:Icons. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Icons. (Score:4, Informative)
The third one does, and but only in the context of dragging icons and double clicking them (in the June of 1981 line item). It comes up tangentally later in the 1988 and 1991 sections amount Microsoft. That particular line item in June of '81 I believe is referencing a computer made by Xerox not Apple.
Any chance you'll point out the specifics of the text that clarify that the Mac's didn't specifically take the concept of Icon's from Xerox? Or that Job's inspiration for developing a GUI based computer didn't come directly from his visits to PARC.
Heck, even Jobs openly admits that at PARC, they showed him three things, and he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't even notice the other two (OO programing, and networking).
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html [pbs.org]
Search for the text "three things". It's right there. Now, Raskin did work there for a little under two years before the PARC visit, but unless it's the "PITS" thing, I don't see anything that leads me to believe that Apple didn't get the idea of a GUI directly from PARC. Raskin might have had the concept in a design 15 years early in his Ph.D, but PARC appears to be the one who shocked Jobs into realizing it was a revolutionary idea. So in the end, it appears PARC deserves a lot of credit you seem to want to deny them.
Re:Icons. (Score:3, Interesting)