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."

Comments

Not tech related but...

[MisanthropicProggram]

what I never got was, why didn't he price Apple Computers more competitively with the Wintel stuff? He was after all the President of Pepsi at one time and you can't get into a more price competitive market than soft drinks. I think that was his biggest mistake with Apple.

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.

Re:Not tech related but...

[0x0d0a]

why didn't he price Apple Computers more competitively with the Wintel stuff?

Because it wasn't in Apple's interests. Mac users are willing to pay Apple prices, so Apple has enormous profit margins.

Think about what cutting prices would actually have done. It would have placed Apple in direct competition with Dell, with Compaq, with Micron, with HP, with a host of large manufacturing companies that are very, very good at shaving down manufacturing costs and operating with tiny profits. There's so little profit in the desktop market today that companies have been exiting market for some time -- focusing on the higher-profit laptops and servers.

That would have been a difficult-to-compete arena for Apple. Apple made a decision that has kept them a successful business -- it was probably the right one from a business standpoint.

Of course, I agree with you WRT to use of Apple products. I gave up on Apple when they revoked clone makers' licenses. People that choose Apple are choosing to work within a niche market, pay significantly higher prices, and have less software and hardware choice. That makes sense for many people (you get a black-box solution that works out of box, which anyone, even the tech illiterate, can comfortably use). It was not a product that I was particularly interested in, but that doesn't make it an invalid business -- Apple's done pretty well for themselves.

HyperCard: Its Effects On The World Today

[Bones3D_mac]

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.