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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."
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.
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.
Both HyperCard and the Newton were innovative, influential, and as is often the case, poorly timed relative to technology trends.
HyperCard: here was a programming and publishing framework designed to be approachable and usable by every-day people, with the added bonus of "immediate gratification"- the act of writing code immediately produced a tangible artifact, much like writing HTML today immediately produces a web page that anybody can visit. But, HyperCard predated widespread Internet usage and the Web, and nobody could figure out what it was good for (except fancy slide shows and choose-your-own-adventure style storyboards).
Newton: to be sure, the Newton borrowed heavily from previous projects and products (including stuff from Xerox PARC and Marc Weiser's ubiquitous computing vision). But, once again, Apple innovated. The device was (almost) powerful enough to run useful software while disconnected, the UI was pen-driven, and the device was energy concious enough to be usable throughout the day without docking it for recharging. Here was a physical appliance targetted towards being a useful digital assistant, and here was a computing model radically different than desktop PCs that everybody was used to. Unfortunately, mobile processors weren't fast or energy-miserly enough yet, handwriting recognition was poor and graffiti-like techniques weren't there, the device was the wrong form factor, and a bunch of stuff was thrown in there that wasn't useful (like the "soup" programming paradigm).
Tons of innovation, tons of influence, but before their time and hence market failures.
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.
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
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.
So the Newton I had with the PC serial cable and the PC syncing software ws what now? The Newton could sync with a PC just fine. Id say the failing of the Newton is due mainly to missinformation from people who never used the product.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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.
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
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 !
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
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
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.
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