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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.
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
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
Actually, I went and priced Laptops on Dell and Apple today. A 15" PowerBook and a 15.4" Inspiron 8600 are almost even on similar configurations (Dell comes out $50 less in my comparison). If you max the Inspirion to match the 17" PowerBook (2GB DDR333, 80GB, 802.11g, Bluetooth, DVD-R, 64MB Video, Extra Battery, No Floppy, 3yr Warranty) you can add a 40GB iPod, an iSight, and the high-end AirPort Extreme Base Station on and still not hit Dell's price. Dell's has the $200 mail-in rebate (Dell rebates are a PITA, just ask Young America who handles them...)
All-in-all, the prices are pretty decent. The high-end G5 costs plenty more than the high-end Dimension XPS, but it's barely $100 more than a similarly-equipped Precision 360, but it can double the RAM, has FireWire 800, Bluetooth and 802.11g support, and a bit more processing power, depending on who you ask...
Sure, they can't compete with the Dimension 2400's $599 price tag, but the low-end eMac is $800 to the Dimension 4600's $849.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit