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Interview with John Scully
worm eater writes "CNet news has an interesting interview with John Scully, CEO of Apple back in the day. He talks about problems and potential in the computer industry, and expresses regret over the opportunities Apple missed with some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton."
That's what killed me in the mid 80s to the early 90s - the prices. I love Apple products, but at the time, I just couldn't afford them. Whereas PCs were becoming cheaper and cheaper.
There is no spoon or sig.
Scully mentions how hypercard was sort of a predecessor to HTML interfaces. I disagree, it was more like an early version of Visual Basic or Python.
I learned how to program on Hypercard in highschool. It was a huge thing to be able to code simple visual applications quickly because before that it required alot of work to get GUI apps working. Its too bad that Apple ditched hypercard because it could have turned into a very useful tool to teach people how to program.
In linux libertas
Remember back in the day when the original line of Macs and their immediate successors had maybe not a huge, but at least somewhat significant market share? You could see that looking in the Byte magazine articles of the mid-to-late 80s. They actually made software for Macs! You don't see too much of it anymore, sadly.
You are absolutely right. They were able to charge more because they worked better, offered better features than the Wintel boxen with its myriad, incompatible graphics adapters, and were generally a hell of a lot easier to use. But as soon as Windows was released and a common set of standards for graphics cards and buses were introduced, thus allowing the price to drop, Apple did not follow suit. Arrogantly, I believe they thought that their platform was still better. It might have been, but is it really worth the 50-80% premium in price?
Anyway, what Apple needs to do now is lower their prices even further to bring them on par with the likes of the mass-market Dells. Otherwise, Apple may find itself a thing of the past.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
There's nothing interesting about an interview with a coulda-shoulda-woulda Monday morning quarterback, especially Sculley. He damn near killed Apple singlehandedly with his poor leadership. Why would anyone think his opinions today are any better?
I miss the days of HyperCard. I spent most of my middle school years in a small little computer lab teaching myself how to you it. Then the school got read of it for that bastard program hyperstudio with its color and sound. I weep every day for those lost days.
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
OK, it's been said a million times before, but Apple is a hardware company.
Mac OS X is a great product, but its sole purpose is to sell Macs. If they ported it to run on generic X86 boxen, they'd never sell enough to recoup the losses on hardware sales. Plus supporting the myriad combinations of hardware would cost a fortune, and lose them the "it just works" factor.
HyperCard was an incredibly powerful and flexible tool for development. You just had to know how to code for it so you could extend its capabilities.
Any tool today that allows for drag-and-drop interface design is a descendent of HyperCard. Macromedia lives off it, by creating products like Flash, Director and Authorware. Even high end development tools, like Metrowerk's CodeWarrior borrows from it.
It's easy for people who only saw the technology later in the game to blow it off. But for those of us who have seen and worked with the technology since it was first released in 1987, it was a major deal. HyperCard showed us that Apple was already preparing for the multimedia-governed future we take for granted now.
This was later proven in 1993, when Cyan used HyperCard to create its smash hit game, Myst. The game showed us all the true power hidden inside the deceivingly simple-looking HyperCard, and ultimately shaped the multimedia industry we know today.
8==8 Bones 8==8
John Sculley did a pretty good job. Michael Spindler is the problem. Michael Spindler is personally responsible for honestly the majority of Apple's past and present problems.
Newton's problems as I saw them:
1. Too heavy. It was big, especially the MessagePad 2000. It was unwieldly where the PalmPilot was sleek and comfortably fit into the hand or a pocket.
2. Too early. Apple has a history of putting out things on the cutting edge, but early adoption wasn't as common back then. "Trendy" is much more important now than it used to be. So, the Newton came out, and it was a great tool, but it was hard to get people to buy something completely new that replaced substantially cheaper notepads and organizers.
3. Wrong market. The people who benefit most from PDAs are those with lots to remember - professionals, doctors, etc. Apple just isn't big in those markets, and, especially then, it was hard for them to separate a new product from the Macintosh platform. It wasn't until the iPod came out with a Windows version that Apple could show they made things not tied to the Macintosh.
4. It's tough being first. The PDA was a revolution. They are being replaced with/morphing into handheld computers as desires for additional functions become common. The Newton had the power years ago to be a handheld computer, and it's Soups and association capabilities were amazing. It isn't easy to convince people they need something they have always done without, and Apple just didn't manage to do it.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
John Sculley probably did the right thing booting Jobs out of Apple at the time, as Jobs was simply too young and brash to take responsibility for his actions. I think the time at NeXT where Jobs had no one else but himself to blame for the company's failure to promote the Cubes and Stations was what taught Jobs to think about what he did before doing it.
Sculley certainly had good idea, the Newton being the chief one amongst them, but he didn't have Jobs' feel of design appeal to get that thing to a point where everyday joes would want one. Take a look at the phenomenal success of the Apple iPod and you realise what Jobs could have done with the Newton if he had been the one to introduce it. It's sad but it's the way things are and Jobs is certainly correct in not getting Apple to try and compete in the desasterous PDA market of today, which is dying due to competition from mobile phones.
I think that there were many other technologies that Apple introduced that could have made more of an impact in the market, but which, mainly due to Apple's poor marketing and market position at the time, never made. Hypercard was one, although Applescript can today do a lot of what Hypercard did then. OpenDoc/Cyberdog was another. openDoc was such a phenomenal innovation that Bill gates made it part of Microsoft's contract forbidding ex MS employess to work on OpenDoc for 3 years after leaving MS. The concept was in competition to and superior to MS' OLE and that worried Microsoft a lot at the time. It would have meant that components could be placed from one programe into another, such as being able to, say, do image editing in word processing and vice versa. Brilliant.
The strange thing today is that the services which are part of OSX are very neglected und undermarketed although they serve a similar purpose. Perhaps Jobs just doesn't get it?
When he made all educational sales direct.
He made the fatal assumption that all of the schools were loyal to Apple as opposed to being loyal to their local dealers.
When those local dealers couldn't sell Apple products anymore, they started to sing the praises of Compaq and HP, the schools believed them and slowly started to switch.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In some fairness to Gil Amelio, he didn't really have time to show if his ideas would work. He came in and did a bunch of cutting, and then was removed before he had any time to rebuild. I'm not saying that he would have done a great job, we'll just never know what kind of job it would have been.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Had Steve Jobs not been kicked out, Apple might have been like NeXT - trying to sell (even more) ridiculously expensive hardware, except with a shitty OS. And probably would have gone bankrupt, too.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.