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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."
"Tonight, on CNET, we reveal the interview they didn't want you to see."
Scully VS Jobs
Only, on CNET Cable...
The newton was origionally going to be called the iPalm. However, when someone wrote that into a prototype iPalm, the thing read it as 'Newton'. And so it remained.
... some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton.
Now call me ignorant, but I haven't heard very much about those two technologies recently at all.. Are/were they really that 'key'?
John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water? Or do you want to change the world?
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...
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.
The Newton was the sole creation of Steve Sakoman (ex-Be, now back at Apple) under the supervision and the "protection" of ex-Be's JLG (ex-Apple executive as well). Sculley had VERY LITTLE to do with the Newton, at least in the beginning.
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.
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
Hardware and software have different volume relationships..
while software once created can be sold at huge volume with low fixed startup costs..
Hardware has high fixed costs to produe it it high volume..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
The poster, and the editors apparently did not, as the man's name is not John Scully, but John Sculley. I can't wait until the fascinating interview of Steve Bobs.
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)
Argh!!! It's "Sculley"! "Scully" is the "Jones" of the county of Kork, Ireland (i.e. the correct spelling). Sculley's ancestors didn't bother to explain the proper spelling to the folks on Ellis Island, apparently.
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?
What about SuperCard?
I don't know how good the OS X version is, but eight years ago, you could seamlessly import most HyperCard stacks into SuperCard...
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.
Yes, but Sakoman's Newton had very little to do with the Newton that eventually shipped. It was a much different project, more along the lines of the Jaguar, than what became the PDA.
opportunities Apple missed with some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton."
Atleast, Newton did not miss his opportunities with an apple.
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
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
Wouldn't that make it the "Apple Newton"?
Couldn't that be confused with a cookie?
Disclaimer: This product not to be eaten.
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...
...that big hairy dude from Monsters Inc.?
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.
Imagine if you could easily pull up cards from stacks on other computers across an AppleTalk network -- it would have very much resembled an early version of HTML -- only more powerful.
Yeah, but remember that just like Word, hypercard has them crazy macroviruses... it would be a bitch to get a trust-model worked out that would protect against macrovirus and cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. Even under OSX, where you could chroot / su it into a very small sandbox, you have to worry about CSS: if it could redefine a procedure in memory, used by more trusted stacks, you could end up screwed anyway.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
the iBooks would normally cost $1500, but every other week would be on sale for $799, or $699 with bonus card, limit 4
I have blog like everyone else
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 !
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.
What someone needs to do is write a drop in replacement for cocoa that runs on top of X.
Some people are trying. Check out the GNUStep project.
Be aware though, that the X window system is roughly equal in capabilities to the original color quickdraw environment, and simply can't handle the sophisticated visual effects that the Quartz engine can.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
While I wouldn't call Sculley an asshole, Apple's boom years during Sculley's tenure as CEO were the result of projects conceived and decisions made before he became CEO. He got to enjoy the fruits of the Macintosh, the Laserwriter, PageMaker, etc. He milked these markets for what they were worth at the expense of moving Apple into new markets (like the doomed "Star Trek" project, MacOS on PCs). He was a mediocre leader at Apple. Michael Spindler, and to a lesser extent, Gil Amelio are the ones that killed Apple.
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
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.