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PC Mag Compares G5 to Xeon
zpok writes "PC Magazine did a comparison between a dual 2.0-GHz Power Mac G5 and an equally expensive Dell Precision 650 Workstation running dual 3.06-GHz Xeon processors. Their conclusion: 'we see that indeed the G5 is generally as fast as the best Intel-based workstations currently available.' But of course 'our cousin Ned can build you a better'un at half the dough.'"
It's great to see so many people excited about the things they accomplished at Apple. The things we did were wonderful, they improved people's lives, and they are worth celebrating.
But I think we should not lose sight of the fact that Apple Computer as a whole was a massive failure. Our fundamental goal, if you remember, was to transform the world by setting people free from bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates. "The Computer for the Rest of Us," we promised.
Today "the rest of us" are a passionate but small personal computing clique. The company is treated as the eccentric uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer as powerful or dangerous at it once was.
Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop. The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years.
Why? Because they don't have to change. Because there's no effective competition. Because Apple failed.
Those of us who use Windows every day at work are reminded constantly of our company's failure. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is being punished along with us.
Yet no one takes responsibility for what happened. In fact, most of the people who were at Apple claim passionately that the company's collapse wasn't their fault. Some have written whole books to prove that they had no blame for what happened.
It's a terrible gap in company's history that no one takes responsibility for its fall. So let me fill in that gap and let you know who was responsible.
I did it. I killed Apple Computer.
Of course you helped too, if you worked there. Sure, we were assisted by a number of feckless executives, and by venal behavior at Microsoft. But more than anything else, Apple -- the old Apple we knew and loved, the one we're celebrating here -- was destroyed by its own diseased and dysfunctional culture. By the time Steve Jobs returned to the scene, very little could be saved. I salute him for what he accomplished; I don't think anyone else on this Earth could have pulled it off. And maybe the new Apple he's building will someday have the same authority and heft as the old one. But let's not lose sight of the fact that he had to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it.
What went wrong?
The story of Apple from the late 1980s to the late 1990s is, in my opinion, a story of individual brilliance and group stupidity. From the moment I joined the company in 1987, I was amazed by the energy and intelligence of the people around me. Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again. And yet, despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of computing.
For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent?(1) Kaleida?(2) Jaguar?(3) OpenDoc?(4) The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user interface ideas in the Sybil(5) project.
It's easy to blame all these failures on the company's senior execs, but frankly, they weren't powerful enough to inflict damage this comprehensive. Far too often, the problem was that we didn't work together toward common goals. This was partly due to the usual politics you get in any large company, but in addition we all believed we were so smart that we were unwilling to compromise and follow the visions of others. We'd sit in meetings and smile and nod at the pla
lall! modding me as a troll will not change the pure FACT that building a machine yourself is cheaper than buying it from a company FACT. Don't let them get in the way of your arguments hey?