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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."
Runtime Revolution
Compile on any platform, to any platform- including a ton of *nix variants. A very nice cross-platform rapid application development tool with a very complete set of functionality (interface, database, tcp/ip ports, etc.), all coded in a HyperTalk-descended language.
X-Builder
Mostly designed for multimedia, I don't know as much about this one...
I remember using HyperCard in 6th grade. There really was not too much programming involved, just placing buttons and having them perform actions. It was really the first time I ever had experience with GUI based programming. It seemed to have some potential, but once Visual Basic 3.0 came out HyperCard really didnt seem to matter to most people.
I haven't checked it out myself but PythonCard is supposed to be good.
You forgot the single key failure of the Newton, the one thing that made it useless compared to the Palm -- not power, not cost, not market timing, but the inability to sync the data on-board with a PC. I think they added the feature very late in the development, but by then it was too little, too late.
And with Hypercard, they didn't know what to do with that, either.
In other words, Sculley didn't understand how to make these technologies into things people would actually be able to use. And therein lies his primary failure as a CEO. Now that time has passed, he can look back and see how they would have been useful. So asking him how things are going to be in the future thus doesn't seem to be a promising line of questioning, because his past shows him to be a lousy visionary.
Back in the day, Apple computers were loaded with custom chips that gave them unique capabilities. The downside to this design was that it limited Apple's ability to manufacture machines.
So, they basically had more potential customers than they had computers. There's two ways they could deal with this situation:
a) Move to an 'open' architecture and bring in 3rd party manufacturing
b) Keep raising prices until the demand curve falls off.
Scully chose Plan B, which pretty much permenently doomed them to a nitch player. The upside is that their profits were so high that they built that $4 Billion bank account that people are always talking about. Apple is really more of a mutual fund now days than a computer manufacturer.
There's a history of Apple by Jim Carlton that covers the decision not to allow 'cloning' in great detail.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
...why didn't he price Apple Computers more competitively...
I believe this was where Scully and Jobs clashed. Jobs wanted the mac to be priced low enough so almost everyone could buy one. Scully wanted big profits immediately.
The board of directors listened to the one who would make their stock options go up sooner.
he was hired away from Pepsi to work at Apple. I think Jobs gave him that old "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?" speech.
The Newton was fine, except that it cost more than the average person was able to pay, and the handwriting recognition needed work. They fixed it later.
Sculley brought about the Color Macs, under Jobs it was still greyscale and B&W. I have a Mac IIcx under my desk which I don't use. One day I may hook it back up. Maybe run Linux on it or System 7?
Microsoft beat down Apple, Windows kept taking marketshare, and Apple did the best it could to compete. The Creative Content market was the bulk of Apple's marketshare. This helped to cotribute to Apple's Dark Ages and loss of revenue. Microsoft was to blame there, even if it did make software for the Mac, it favored Windows first.
Sculley tried to fill Jobs' shoes, but couldn't. He didn't have the reality distortion field or the creative marketing genius that Jobs had. Meanwhile Next wasn't doing so well and could barely hold it's own. Unix was the future, few people saw that at the time. Jobs knew it because he invested in Unix technology for Next. Meanwhile Linux was getting started and slowly started to gain marketshare. Apple's A/UX needed work, but was put on the back burner to favor MacOS.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Oh yes, Hypercard was WAY more than a slide show! My dad has been running his business off Hypercard for over fifteen years! He tracks his time and expenses on projects, which autocalculates the billing, which autogenerates the invoice that gets him paid. It also tracks if the client has paid or not, keeps a 'credit rating' for clients in his hypercard 'rolodex', and handles all the family finances.
My Chemistry teacher and I made a test-at-your-own-leisure testing system for our science department in high school, it was network enabled, and pretty secure. It let us take short tests after we completed our lab work, or during off-hours and study halls. The test was randomized so nobody could make cheat-sheets.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
There is FreeCard - a project hosted on sourceforge.net, more info is available under http://www.FreeCard.org
he shoulda stuck with the sugar water.
m l
After bonehead moves with Apple, he aquired the program/company Live Picture.
Back when RAM would cost you over $6K/gig, it allowed you to do retouching and composites of really big files on a 256meg machine. They also promoted the Flashpix format, which let you zoom into pictures online.
After ignoring many suggestions of how the tech could be used to do some really innovative, useful things, and more bonehead moves, the company dies (assets bought by MGI)
a good page about this can be found at:
http://www.goingware.com/tips/resignation.ht
and
http://www.goingware.com/tips/misery.html
quote:
"The bad VC comes up with ideas about what might appeal to Wall Street or to a possible corporate purchaser and orders you to drop what you're doing and pursue his misguided goal.
A specific example of this was when John Scully directed Live Picture, the company, to abandon development of Live Picture 3.0, the program, and instead pursue development of internet technologies involving the very complex and proprietary Flashpix file format.
You could do really cool things with FlashPix, admittedly, but it's not really what users wanted. Very few people use Flashpix these days, even though Kodak, Microsoft and Live Picture went to no end of trouble to develop and promote it. Instead, people who browse the web still get JPEGs, plain and simple.
But the specific reason John Sculley felt it was important to develop and promote Flashpix - he said as much in a company meeting - was because we were preparing for an IPO, and "Wall Street is not interested in tools companies. It is interested in Internet companies".
Where was that Scully when the technology was closed? Why wasn't it at least open-sourced?
So many stupidy-based decisions were, are and will be driving Apple.
Less is more !
you can't get into a more price competitive market than soft drinks
.5 cents of sugar water, and 47.5 cents of advertising in a can of soda.
Are you trolling? Pepsi, Coke, and Dr. Pepper cost about 50 cents a can, retail Just about every other soda on earth costs about 25 cents a can.
There's about 2 cents of can,
There probably isn't less competitive market than market than soft drinks.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Scully is echoing comments from Tim Berners-Lee during the development of the web. The original proposal for the world wide web specifically mentions Hypercard when describing what the system does.
Due to industry pressures. Period. The fact that you could make modules for OD and string modules together to make an application meant, essentially, that you could drop a type module and a paint module together... and a spell checking module... and BLAMMO! Be running what Adobe didn't get around to doing with Photoshop until v.7 back in the days of OS 8.
:P
Adobe and several other major software houses took notice of this, realized what it could do, and essentially told Apple "Drop this shit like a ton of bricks or we drop support for your platform. Now." (this may also answer your question as to why it was never opened- though asking why older software wasn't open sourced is kind of like asking why I can't get m '57 Chevy with factory air and CD player...)
Same thing with the memory management system that had been planned for MacOS 9.3. Publishers pissing an moaning about "OOOOH WE'LL HAVE TO REWRITE OUR APPS AND YOUR A NICHE MARKET SO IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO JUST DROP IT" has kept Apple hogtied in more ways than one for some time.
Fortunately, OS X and Final Cut Pro are serious coups in this department- Adobe dropped Premiere (which sucks rocks regardless) in response to having to compete against Apple. The fact it was Apple must have pissed them off something fierce- if Macromedia had continued FCP development instead of selling it to Apple, I'm sure things would be a bit different.... and I'm sure FCP would suck.
Anyway. That's the long form. The short form: Get a clue. Talk to a few developers who've actually been to the Apple campus and have been doing work on the platform since the 80's. Get their views.
That said, OD was whacked after Jobs came back, and the OSS buzzword was barely a blip on anyone's radar back in the days of MacOS 8.
It would be too simplistic to say that their profits would go down due to fewer people buying their hardware. They could, for example, realize greater profits from disproportionately greater software sales.
Releasing Mac OS X for x86 might be the best thing that could ever happen to Linux and the worst thing that could ever happen to Microsoft, but it could easily kill Apple.
Getting people to switch to Mac OS X on x86 would be like getting people to switch to Linux on x86, except that Linux is free and runs more applications. As soon as people start to realize that a non-Microsoft alternative exists, the majority will switch to the cheapest alternative they can find, which will be something free (as in beer).
Apple could make it work, but to do so, they'd need to completely change their entire business model. Consider this plan:
1) Release Mac OS X for x86 and PPC for free.
2) port Cocoa (and possibly Carbon) to Linux, FreeBSD and Win32 as well as Mac OS X for x86 and PPC. Charge developers licensing fees to bundle it.
3) Sell Xcode to developers. Make sure by default it builds dual-platform binaries, so compiled apps will run on both x86 and PPC natively, on any OS Cocoa has been ported to.
4) Port all the iApps and sell them. Become primarily a software company, which also sells hardware.
At this point Cocoa becomes the middleware Microsoft was so afraid of a decade ago. Cocoa applications can run on any operating system and architecture that Cocoa supports, so operating systems have to compete on technical merits rather than on application support. Likewise processor architectures - if the price/performance of IBM's PowerPCs is better than Intel's Pentiums, then people switch away from Intel.
It's a risky move, and it might not work. If it does, it could secure Apple's position as the computer industry leader. If it doesn't, it could completely kill any hope of ever making money again.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
an israeli company, who had some interesting web stuff going on in the early 90s. he turned it into gizmoz.com - a charecter animation "web-charecters" company.
It died. big surprise.
"but eight years ago, you could seamlessly import most HyperCard stacks into SuperCard"
You still can, and the OSX version is great.
Oh, Services.
This is something OS X had ever since it was called NeXTStep. Services rock. My favorite one in the olden days was "Define in Webster", _so_ useful when you were writing term papers. There was a cool one called TclServices that would let you select any bit of text and execute it in a Tcl interpreter (useful if you are writing in Tcl...) Every app has the potential to offer Services.
In fact, I remember the feeling that, dialing up to the university's network over 19.2 modem, that the tools of the NeXTSTEP environment (including Services) were a lever to move the internet world through that little terminal window.
Maybe that's what Tim Berners-Lee was thinking when he wrote WorldWideWeb.app originally on that platform. : )
Anyway, I'm behind the curve with the cool services these days. Any favorites to recommend?