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Apple vs. Microsoft Myths Revisited
allgood2 writes "John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a great article exploring the myth that Apple could/would be Microsoft if only they had licensed their operating system. This myth has oft been purported in technology and business media."
Well even if Apple just licensed their OS and didnt make computers they would have alot nicer product on their hands because their engineers know how to create very seemless products. But Apple is a computer company, unlike any other company on the market, they make the OS the hardware and they shiny cases that hold them. I can not think of another company that does the same thing! (maybe Sun but they dont make desktops or laptops) Companies like Dell and HP could learn alot from Apple. I just hope they never just license the OS like microsoft does.
keanmarine.com
.. was Price mainly. That and the availability of lots of software [games] :)
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
Yeah and the French could have been the Thrid Reich had they taken Poland. Whatever. Why is this even news?
In Q2 2004 Apple's market share was at 3.7%, while in Q2 2003 Apple was at 3.8%.
Apple's shipments, in fact, increased from 452K boxes to 495K, but the market grew at a rate of 10.9%, while Apple grew at the rate 9.3%, so officially they lost market share.
Bottom line, had Apple wanted to license the OS, there WAS a market for it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
If only Apple had licensed the Macintosh, they could have been Microsoft.
But this is not a fact. It's conjecture, and barring a time machine, it can never be proven.
Exactly. I could see it now if the roles where reversed - Apple would release an OS bug ridden and easily compromised, partly due to the fact that it would have to support such a vast array of different hardware configurations and the sheer market penetration they have while MS Windows would be touted as an "Elitists OS", one that those Mac people "just don't understand". A secure and stable OS (Because when you don't have a nearly infinite amount of con figurations, it's pretty easy to be secure and stable) with a small band of fans completely devoted to it.
Makes you wonder what will happen when Linux becomes as big as Windows.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
In the article he says:
"But the truth is that Apple and Microsoft have seldom been direct competitors."
I agree, but disagree. It's not so cut and dry, and even though he doesn't
claim it to be cut and dry, it's just too simple of a concept to throw out there.
Apple was a desktop machine, for people. Microsoft aimed dead ahead that market
as well. (business, school, and home). Were the Apple II and Macintosh just for
school and home, not business? I think VisiCalc would answer that one pretty easily.
Same thing with Filemaker. The Apple was a great business machine, a machine for
students, and for the home. Microsoft took dead aim at all of them, and continues
to do so to this day, as it tries to enter nearly every market out there, even hardware.
The part of the article I do agree with, says:
"Thus the difference between Microsoft and Apple wasn't about open-vs.-closed; it was pragmatism-vs.-idealism."
How many times do you hear Bill Gates talking about being a pirate? Well, maybe he
does, but you hear MORE of the idealistic talk from Steve Jobs and co. I find it odd
that an idealistic company can exist at all. Normally they remove such things (idealism,
morals, quality) when money and profit take precedence. But, as the author says, I guess
that's why Apple only earns millions, but Microsoft earns billions.
In my mind, Apple has taken steps that will ensure it some great success. It has
entered into many markets, not just one. It has servers, desktops, and peripherals.
It hocks software *and* hardware. It has embraced open source (let's not discuss to what
extents) and made quite an amazing set of documentation for users and developers alike.
For me, as a humble developer, it is a godsend. Yet, for my 78 year old father in-law,
it's just as amazing. How can that be? And, for an IT company needing a server, it may
very well be just as appreciated.
Microsoft made attempts at all of that, too. In my mind, they are competitors.
Could Apple have been Microsoft? That's a loaded question.
I would question why any company would want to be Microsoft.
Moreover, why not be like Apple?
I'd rather be the old, trustworthy shoemaker on the street corner, making quality in
a niche market, than some big shoe company spread all over the world. (if the analogy
makes sense)
It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995, a decade after the arrival of the Mac.
Such a version of Windows was never released.
"Apple matured into a modestly profitable computer company. Macs account for about 5 percent of the computers in the U.S., and 2 percent world-wide."
Since when is a Fortune 500 company modestly profitable?
Well, ok. This is 2004. Let me try again.
Since when has a modestly profitable company lasted for so long in the Fortune 500 ranks?
Apple makes money. Everyone tells them what they ought to do. Like it or not, Steve Jobs is usually right about what they ought to do. It isn't licensing. Profit != marketshare.
It's become clear over the years that to most folks the GUI just doesn't matter. It may well be the most important component of an OS and the one that determines how much time one spends getting a job done, but people just don't care. Look at the state-of-the-art windows GUI or the most bleeding edgle linux hack. Bleah! Mac built the better mouse trap, but most people just wanted a big, cheap sledge hammer. More power to 'em.
* It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995...
... They released a windows that didn't suck? I wasn't aware that this event had occured ;-)
An interesting article to start off with, but then it started to make sweeping statements about how unchangable the hardware market is. The author assumes that hardware at the time was set in stone, but the fact is that if Apple could build Macs, then larger companies who sublicensed the OS certainly could too.
As he meanders past this rather bizarre statement, I began to lose interest in its increasingly meaningless prose, ending with a stunningly profound (note my sarcasm):
"There is only room for one PC operating systems monopoly".
Not frontpage material IMHO.
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
...is somehow "novel." Paper does this all the time. I'm reminded of the book Alas, Babylon where architects laboriously make blueprints by painting the background blue rather than as a side-effect of a cheap copying technology -- they did it because it was traditional.
Nor is a white display with black letters easier to read -- the reverse is less likely to cause headaches from flicker and doesn't annoy significant others as much when you are working late at night with the lights low.
It takes a certain, umm, Gatesian, disdain for common decency and ethics to act like Microsoft in their drive for every last miniscule market and every single penny that can be squeezed from it.
they could never compete with MS because they bother with all that quality controll non-sense
He makes the argument that because Apple was 10 years ahead they couldn't have licensed their stuff and taken the places of MS. I make the argument that because they were 10 years ahead they were in the prime position to take the lead. When Apple/Mac decided not to license their hardware they chose to be the sole supplier of Apple/Mac hardware thereby reducing options and diversity compared to the PC platform. It ensured hardware compatibility because only Apple and a selectively chosen minority of hardware vendors could make add-on parts. It also bound their hands because their hardware could not be specialized for specific applications using off the shelf parts. The lack of competition also made sure that Apple wouldn't be more than a niche market. The PC market was ripe with competing parts and by extension led to many incompatibility issues. With the advent of much more stable OS's and PCI-x, I see this being a non-issue shortly.
My biggest problem with the article is that the author has a hard time telling the difference between hardware and software. The more than decade lack of an adequate GUI OS for x86 can't be blamed on the platform but the software developer (MS), but Apple is its own hardware/software vendor. That's why a direct comparison can not be reasonably made, although it is my opinion that since Apple was ahead in the early days if they had left the hardware open (like IBM did the x86) Apple would have a much greater share of today's market.
Yeah, that's why that cisco company never took off.
today is spelling optional day.
The Apple IIGS in 1986 ran a full-color MacOS-equivalent (and superior, in some ways) called GS/OS very well, and it was essentially an underclocked Amiga. (The Apple IIGS also had very large ROMs; whether the Macintosh would've made the same impression it did had been released two years later I can't say.) Since it was totally compatible with Apple IIe (etc.) programs, it could have been the kind of "parlay" the article's author went on about, but it sank under Apple's neglect and unfathomable obsession with the the Macintosh.
- _Quinn
Reality Maintenance Group, Silver City Construction Co., Ltd.
I'm happy Apple never did dominate the market, whatever the reason. Having Microsoft in that role is bad enough, but a secretive, litigation-happy company like Apple with monopoly powers would have been a disaster.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Apple hardware use to be top of the line for professional use and it came at a premium price. That is largely what steered people toward the cheaper PC market. And now even though Mac hardware is very affordable now they have to fight that old reputation. And there is also the Windows compatiblity issue now as well.
For a while there it looks like there would be a massive migration away from Windows to MacOS or Linux due to the security scare, but MS seems to have done their homework on it and if SP2 turns out well there will be less motivation to escape the platform plagued by security troubles.
But would releasing MacOS X to PC hardare help out Apple at this point? I think not. They would still have to overcome the compatiblity concerns and the nervousness people have about change when it comes to computers. The average user is afraid of computers already. But I always laugh at people who think going to MacOS from Windows would be hard to do. But I find going from Windows to MacOS X to Linux/X11 is as simple has learning to use a remote control for a Sony, Sanyo or other TV brand.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
Ahhh, but Mac got the idea from Xerox's PARC group.
"Fortunately, I'm adhering to a very strict drug regimen to keep my mind limber..."
Licensing the OS/hardware would have caused the same compatability issues that occured when IBM licensed the "PC". Companies could follow the bus standards, but implement their own versions of video cards, drive controllers, sound cards, modems, etc.
Apple, having to maintain drivers for all of this disperse hardware would have had the same issues that Microsoft suffers from today. Having complete control over the hardware platform allowed Apple to restrict the code they had to implement, thus reducing the potential for bugs.
The bottom line is, Apple has done just fine being a niche player, and will continue to do so until the end of Steve Jobs; after which, Apple will probably drive itself nose-first into the ground as they try to become everything to everyone and hemmorage cash until being picked over by other companies.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
"Or consider the display. The Mac's GUI depended on a 512-by-384 pixel monochrome display, capable of displaying text in the novel color scheme of black text on a white background. This, at a time when PC displays were typically used as character-based terminals displaying orange or green type on a black background, and displayed only 320-by-240 pixels."
No not quite. CGA was 640x200 and Hercules had an even higher resolution. These are of course monochrome.
"The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design. The mouse pointer. The desktop metaphor. Overlapping windows. Icons. WYSIWYG word processing. Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac."
Of course by 1985/86 The Atari ST and the Amiga had a very simular UI and they both added color. The Amiga added stero sound and multi-tasking.
The Macs real strength over the Amige as printing. The Atari had some real good DP stuff.
"It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995, a decade after the arrival of the Mac."
I would say to be fair that Windows 3.11 did not totaly suck and was even useful. I did use it. I will admit that I used to say that Windows 3.11 sucked less than DOS and that Windows 95 sucked less than 3.11. Lets not forget the problems which was System 7 on the Mac.
The Mac was a big step and OS/X rocks but lets get our facts straight.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The OP is not a troll - that possibility is as valid as any other possibility people can dream up.
One thing that most people forget is that Windows didn't start as a monopoly, and probably wouldn't have gotten there on its own (lack of) merit. Microsoft's monopoly is built on Word, not Windows.
In the DOS days, Microsoft had tremendous mindshare, but they still faced real competition. IBM had PC-DOS (which may have just been licensed MS-DOS... it's been too many years and I'm not sure anymore.) And Digital Research had DR-DOS. Now, neither of these were BIG competitors, but the barrier to entry in the DOS market wasn't that high.
There came a time when the world was ready to start transitioning to GUIs. The Mac had shown it was possible, and PC hardware eventually got fast enough to do something similar. Microsoft had their Windows product, but its early incarnations were absolutely terrible and nobody bought them. IBM partnered with Microsoft on OS/2, and for a long time, it looked very much like that was the way the world was headed. The expectation in all the magazines at the time was that OS/2 was everyone's future. (and, for the record, it was an excellent operating system, one which I liked very much.... with some of the worst documentation and error/help messages ever done. IBM was used to mainframes, not Joe Computer User. No big surprise that it failed, in retrospect.)
When Windows 3.0 came out, it started selling reasonably well. But what REALLY made it take off... was Word.
Word for DOS was a good product, but was always an also-ran next to WordPerfect. WP was arcane and difficult, but it was tremendously powerful. Word for DOS was easy, but not very powerful, and wasn't taken seriously by very many.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done. When people saw how easy it was to, for instance, lay out a table -- they switched from WP 5.1 for DOS in droves. EVERYONE wanted Word: it was THE program. This was the 'killer app' that drove Windows to monopoly status. For a long time, the only real competitor on the Windows platform was Ami Pro, which was a neat program, but more of a page-layout tool than a true word processor. Word kicked its butt for most tasks. WordPerfect took years to come out with a really good Windows version, and by the time it arrived, the market had shifted and they were dead.
THIS is the key to Microsoft's dominance... a single program that was so good, everyone had to have it. They sold mountains of copies, tens of millions (into a much smaller market). And then they really started using the dirty tricks they learned in the DOS days to lock their competitors out. They dropped OS/2 like a hot potato, and made damn sure that it was never preloaded on ANYTHING.
All those billions really come down to two things: a single, insanely great program, and absolute ruthlessness. It is very unlikely that Apple could have survived that environment. Had they come out with MacOS for Intel, then Microsoft would have flexed their TRUE monopoly, that of Word... and stopped development for MacOS. Without Word, MacOS was dead. And Apple has certainly shit on their users many times, but they have very rarely been genuinely ruthless toward their competitors. It's not in their nature; they're trying to excel. Microsoft wants everyone else dead and buried.
I do think that Apple should have licensed their software onto other manufacturer's machines. Power Computing moved the Mac faster than it has moved before or since. But they had NO chance at becoming the new Microsoft without Word... and a sharp knife for their competitors' backs.
Even then Bill knew the OS was a marginal business ($50) vs selling an office platform $450 on a $2500 PC. (average price in those days). When Bill realized this wasnt going to happen he built the platform he needed to run his software. IIRC, excel first shipped as a Mac product.
What if there were no Apple Computer and Macintosh Operating System? How would Windows have evolved, if in fact it would have bene developed at all?
Maybe this should be another "Ask Slashdot" question?
Windows existed in the 80's but no one cared. It was only with 3.0 came out that people took notice. That's because, with 3.0, Microsoft took advantage of the 386's virtual 8086 facility to multitask DOS programs in a gui environment.
At the same time, IBM shot themselves in the foot by coding OS2 for the 286, which could only support one DOS box.
In the early days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1, actual Windows applications were the exception. Most people used them to multitask DOS and *hope* that native Windows apps would be available soon.
The truth is, hardly anyone ever ran OS2 on a 286. If IBM had introduced OS2 1.0 for the 386, they would have lost very very few customers but would gain market dominence. There would be no Windows.
"The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design."
And a couple of years later, the Amiga was at the same point. And Beta was better than VHS, etc., etc., ad nauseum. It's not performance or technological superiority that guarantees success, but money and advertising.
Duh.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
The best thing Microsoft ever did was to get IBM to agree that Microsoft could license DOS out to third parties. IBM was under the impression that its proprietary BIOS would make third party compatible computers impossible. It was wrong.
Because of that blunder, Microsoft was able to sell a truly IBM compatible product to business, which were the primary buyers of computers at the time. It was the "IBM compatible" part that was of the utmost importance to business.
Apple NEVER had that "in" with business and any attempt to sell its OS separate from its hardware would have failed.
Also, by exerting control over both the soft and hardware, Apple is able to achieve a more stable platform. Sure having tons of peripherals and software to chose from on the IBM compatible PC was and is great. But more choices leads to more complexity. And complexity leads to instability.
Still, I wish Apple would release an x86 version of OSX. I've played around with it a bit and would really like to run it. Sure I could buy an Apple, but building yourself is just too much fun to give up. And it's cheaper too.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
..why isn't Atari with their ST the Microsoft of today? :-)
I think the point of the article is with respect to the PC. Cisco is successful in the niche market that is networking hardware. I suspect it's more difficult to program on Cisco's proprietary hardware, than say, something using x86 architecture.
Not to mention, I don't see anyone running a PC running IOS, which is what the "business analysts" claimed Apple should have done with Mac OS.
If Apple had opened its hardware up as IBM did their product would likely have sunk in mediocrity as M$ Windows did (it's getting better though). Opening up the hardware didn't really help IBM. How many computers does IBM actually manufacture and sell anymore. Not many if any at all. They buy cheap 3rd party knock-offs and re-brand them. Microsoft is the one that benefitted from the open hardware availability. Apple has almost always led the pack in terms of development and innovation, but when you only have 3% of the market, the only people who notice are the software engineers working for your comptetitor. If it weren't for Apple pushing the envelope, most people would still be using Windows 95, but it might be renamed Windows 2000 by now.
Why doesn't anything interesting happen when I have mod points?
"Except Apple did license the Mac OS to companies. And they nearly went bankrupt because of it. UMAX, Motorola, PowerComputing, Radius. They all had licenses. Apple's share just decreased even more rapidly."
That's because they were doing some things that apple wasn't at that time. It wasn't just about cheap computers.
IMHO I think Apple would make a killing and a serious dent in the desktop OS market if they released an X86-compatible version of OS X. I know it would be difficult to make it work with all the endless permeutations of X86 hardware and peripherals out there but even if they just made it compatible with the big ones, like SB, nForce, intel chipsets, etc. they would still hit a pretty big market share. I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
No they didn't.
Why did you take John's nicely formatted article and ass it up like that? Additionally, he's selling memberships to help pay for his site, I'm sure he'd probably like people to actually come to the site to buy them...
~jeff
Open Source Java DAO Generator
Ahhh, but Xerox sold the idea to Apple whereas Microsoft stole them. Didn't you watch Pirates of Silicon Valley? Remember Bill ranting "I WANT IT!" Contrast with the scene of Steve slyly asking Xerox what they wanted for their ideas and Xerox telling him to just haul it all away. Big difference.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
These days I suspect they would have died had they permitted the clones to continue, since they seem incapable of producing competitive, cost effective hardware, and would probably not have survived as simply an OS steward/manufacturer.
I have never used Macs for any meaningful length of time. They seem too expensive and have too small a software base compared to Windows and Linux combined. That is not an unfair comparison, given how common it is for people to have dual-bootable PCs.
Troll: Macs are for the same people who buy the pretentious new VW sedans and put single flowers in the vase on the steering wheel column.
I think the problem is that Apple was assuming that the things that *had* ruled the market before 1984 would *continue* to rule the market.
///, the Lisa, and eventually the Mac. Because conventional wisdom said that the Apple II line would be gone anyway and that people wouldn't value long-term compatability.
Until the PC came along, microcomputers did not have really compatable upgrades. Sure, CP/M stuck around for a while, but after they ran out of steam in the 8080/Z-80 systems, everybody migrated elsewhere.
Same thing happened with mainframes. There was all kinds of crazy incompatable mainframes, and *then* IBM made the System 360 series and suddenly stability hit.
This is why Apple made the Apple
I think the big thing not addressed in the linked article was the possibility of creating an "open" hardware standard, like the PC. Given that Atari and Amiga both followed with their own 68k systems, and Sun and others were making workstations out of them for quite some time, it's not entirely impossible that they could have produced a compatability standard.
Not like it would have worked, mind you. It's important to remember that, were IBM to have only been in the PC business, they would have been slaughtered by how the PC became an open standard. And it also could have happened that Microsoft, Amiga, Atari, or others would release a competing operating system and deprive Apple of the OS revenues.
I think the big thing is that Apple's decision made complete sense given the situation at the time. The big players would often try to sue or otherwise prevent their plug-compatable competition from stealing their business.
And there weren't Commodore or Atari clones, either, mind you.
In a certain sense, we only think that Apple made the wrong move because of the partially-accidental semi-open PC platform. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say. It is now possible to trust somebody other than IBM/Apple/Amiga/Atari/etc. for hardware, but it wasn't back then. I mean, when my parents purchased stuff for their Apple II, there was one Genuine Apple disk drive and one off-brand clone. But you had to have the Genuine Real Thing, Just In Case.
Gentoo Sucks
IIRC, Hercules was something like 720x348. And I remember it being a little bit of a pain to program. If you wrote the wrong value to a register when setting the graphics mode, your monitor would start making a loud high-pitched squealing sound (and probably bathed you in X-Rays). Ah, the joys of running fractint on a 4.77MHz XT.
Let's look at console gaming platforms. Nintendo and Sony have built successful platforms that are almost completely closed. Not only do they build and sell their own proprietary hardware, but they require third-party developers to obtain permission and to pay for the privilege of selling games that run on their systems.
He tries to use this analogy to show why the market doesn't favor open platforms. But he's showing two successful companies who licensed the ability to make games for their systems.
In other words, open. Sure, not in the way he wants it to mean (hardware). But you have to compare these guys to Sega who didn't license others to write games for their systems until it was too late.
Where is Sega now? It's out of the console hardware business.
Open consoles: In business.
Closed consoles: Out of business.
The exact opposite of what you the author was trying to say with his analogy. Brilliant!
The reason why Apple couldn't have caught on as a mainstream platform because it was too hard and too expensive to program for the standards at the time: initially, you needed to buy a Lisa to be a serious Macintosh developer. And even if you had that, the Mac application frameworks exceeded in terms of complexity what programmers were used to. DOS and early Windows were less capable, but they were of a complexity that programmers could deal with, and you could program them using cheap tools and cheap machines.
Apple's business decisions gave them one segment of the market, Microsoft's gave them another, and Sun got yet another. And none of them invented much of the basic technology themselves anyway: just like Windows was a stripped down version of Macintosh, so Macintosh was a stripped down version of the Xerox GUIs. And Sun's business was built on the software they had gotten from Berkeley.
None of those companies have anything to complain about: they made a lot of money with technology they got elsewhere, and they each got their market segment, to this day.
You left out the part of using monopolistic practices to prevent competition used by microsoft. Given the penalties extracted to date, it appears the crime did pay.
...not enough of another. Not quite fast enough to be a Mac, forgotten enough to be an Apple.
I actually went to an unveiling of the GS at a computer store in Vermont. I was totally impressed with the demo, but then I actually USED it. Then I happily went back to my Amiga.
I agree with the author of the article. By relegating their past customers to 'steerage' status, Apple managed to alienate much of their base. I know people that continued to use their trust Apple II's and Franklin's right up until the early 90's.
What should be learned here is: Never throw away paying customers. Since the only real competition was from the PC, and much of that was non-graphical anyway, it might have made since to at least made compatibility an OPTION. People invested a lot of money in software. And think about it: If you had all that invested and had to throw it all away, why NOT go with IBM?
At the time I kind of grinned about this since I was a total Atari/Commodore fanatic (a misnomer if there ever was one!) But even as a kid I could see Apple's misstep here - why couldn't they?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I wonder if the author is aware of how directly the PC BIOS maps to MS DOS system calls? That isn't to say that the Mac's ROMs weren't much more sophisticated, however.
http://neokosmos.blogsome.com
I don't think "purported" is the right word here. "Promulgated" would have been better. Any grammar experts out there want to weigh in?
If you are measuring dick size(which is what this is all about, after all), then the winner is clearly BG. Microsoft has more cash on hand than most countries, and BG has been the world's richest for how long?
In business, the only way to measure success or failure of strategy is by the bottom line. The rest is just conversation.
The problem with Apple licensing wasn't that the hardware was incompatible (though it was - the Mac back then had a huge ROM, 1MB or so, and most screens were CGA).
The problem was that PC users were dicks. Let me rephrase that - "mice are for wimps." The culture of business IT back then was "macho at all cost."
At the time, there was no client-server, no distributed systems. Computer people were basically mainframe guys. And what self-respecting mainframe guy back in the day wanted a GUI? Easy-to-use software? Interactive terminals?
Every computer that was easy-to-use was one more nail in the mainframe coffin, and a knife in the heart of batch job bozos. Would they actually buy something that made them obsolete?
Nope!
PCs were non-threatening things that they could turn into dumb terminals (can anyone say TN3270?).
Give an IT guy back then a Mac, and he'd freak out. It was only until Windows 95 that GUIs became "acceptable" to corporate users. Win 31 worked, and WfW sort of worked, but it was Win95 that brought the GUI to IT.
Before then, IT people would rather have eaten their left testicle than buy a GUI-based computer, much less a Mac. Let's get real.
If Apple had licensed the Mac, they would have tanked, pure and simple...much like the way Power Computing almost destroyed Apple back in the day.
It's amazing that people that cry "licensing" don't remember the times. It was 15-20 years ago, but still, you'd think that some of them would have exited puberty by then.
Beta player? What's a beta player?
And who uses memory sticks?
> Over 90 percent of the computers in the world run some version of Windows.
That statement proves that the author doesn't know what he is talking about, or he is careless with his facts.
Windows is running on over 90 percent of desktop PCs, but those PCs, and Windows, still account for only a fraction of the world's computers.
If you are counting by CPU, then the majority of the world's computers are embedded. Microsoft and Windows are very minor players in the embedded market.
Or, if you are counting by computing power, then the majority of the computing power still comes from mainframes and Unix servers, again reducing Microsoft to a few percent.
A long-time marketing ploy of Microsoft has been to pretend that the desktop PC market makes up the entire computer market. But it's not true.
The version of Word which killed WordStar 2000 and WordPerfect came directly from the Mac:
For the release after Word 2.0, the team merged with the MacWord team (then on release 5.1), and built a shared product called Word 6.0 (released in late 1993). That's why on Windows the Word version numbering seemed to jump from 2 to 6 - because the Mac was already on 5.x.
---http://weblogs.asp.net/chris_pratley/archive/2
So your hypothesis that MS owes it all to Word needs additional support, for, if all people wanted was a perfect processor, they could have switched to Mac.
By the way, Word was born for the PC, but did not go anywhere until it gained steam on the Mac. See the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Word
How Mac Word beat MacWrite... that's a mistery to me. I used to run a Mac lab in college in the '80s and the simple and elegant MacWrite was complex enough for people. Word was torture, when compared to MacWrite. I guess people are willing to suffer in the name of feature creep.
The next pasture is always greener
Moderators, this isn't Informative; this is Redundant. The site is neither /.ed nor registration required, and its formatting is a hell of a lot better than this guy's. Even worse, in order to read all of this guy's copy and paste, you have to click the 'read the rest of...' link. How is that any better than just clicking on the already posted link? At least this guy posted AC, but there is no reason for him to have done so.
The IBM MDA card which the author refers to was a text-only monochrome graphics adapter with an 80x25 screen, technically with a 720x350 pixel size. However, you could not write directly to the video memory.
Most people with mono monitors installed Hercules clone cards, which were the same 720x350 but they permitted you to do 4 shades of [green|amber|white] monochrome graphics in 720x350 resolution. This was in fact greater than the video resolution of the Macintosh (512x384), though of different shape (The Mac had a far more square aspect ratio until the Mac II, when the video adapters adopted VGA dimensions) (640x480x16 colors/grayscales, initially)
The IBM Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) is not significant to this discussion - in addition to having only a monochrome 640x200 or color 320x240 mode, it had horrid snow problems when drawing or scrolling. You wouldn't even attempt to use a CGA card for a GUI. (Windows 2.03 had a driver - using it was quite funny)
The IBM Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) however, was 640x350 in 16 colors, with a 64 color palette. While this might seem anemic by today's standards, it was quite usable in 1986 or 1987. Most games back then played best in EGA mode (at least until VGA came into true vogue a year or two later).
How about ROM? Well, the first Macintosh came with 128K of RAM and a 64K ROM with the Macintosh toolbox on it. The first Mac II (first color macintosh) had a 256k ROM and 1MB of RAM. Your average PC in 1986 would have 512k or 640k of RAM in it. It might even have an EMS board in it, if it was a business system. Plus, it was expandable up to 16MB (if you wanted) of extended (assuming 286+ here) that you could actually run programs with, if you wished. It's almost certain the Mac OS would have been made into a protected mode program - it uses a very clumsy form of software memory protection (zones) on the 68k which didn't support memory protection in hardware.
The article author seemed to be at pains to suggest how those horrible PC clones back in the 80's couldn't run a GUI. This isn't absolutely true. If a better GUI than GEM or Windows 1.x or 2.x were available, more would have run one. It just didn't seem worth it with that kind of crappy ass software. When Windows 3.0 came out, people jumped on it fast, even though it was kind of sucky still. They wanted a GUI.
The author is somewhat full of shit is my point. He's being disingenous about the relative capabilities of the machines of the day.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
First, he goes to a lot of trouble to explain that you couldn't run Mac OS on the PCs that were already shipped because they wouldn't have Mac ROMs.
.
Well, a computer company that licensed the Mac OS could include the Mac OS 64k of ROM on the motherboard with minimal difficulty; the whole 64k E segment of the first megabyte of memory was reserved for BIOS use, but was not actually used on any machines until the PS/2 came out. (Heck, of the 64K in the F segment, only 8k was used by the actual BIOS; on the original PCs and XTs, 32k were used by the IBM Basic and the other 24k were unused.)
There was no retail OS market at the time, but they could have been accomodated as well; ship an adapter card with the ROM on board, to be decoded to the reserved-for-adapter-card-ROM C or D memory segments. Heck, use the same adapter card to attach a bus mouse if you like . .
Graphically, he's wrong, too. A 1982 Hercules graphics card was perfectly capable of displaying 720 x 348 on 1981 IBM monochrome monitors. Sure, that's 36 pixels shorter vertically than the Mac display, but it's actually higher resolution (250,560 pixels vs. 196,608). When dealing with monochrome graphics, the computer neither knows nor cares whether the monitor uses amber, green, or white phosphors. And a 1984 EGA display, at 640x350, is just barely inferior to a Mac in resolution, and delivered sixteen colors.
There are other issues, of course, which may have made making a Mac out of the PC much more difficult. But Mr. Gruber clearly doesn't know what he's talking about when he opines on early '80s PC hardware.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
What the fucking hell. +3 for reposting the text? Stupid mother fuckers.
The reason that Apple didn't get a lot of market share was that they didn't price the systems right for that. The Mac was never sold as something that everyone would have, unlike either the PC or the Apple II. It was sold as something that could keep a company in the Fortune 500 with 4% of the market. Apple went for a strategy which could be (and was) successful with a very small segment of the market. Microsoft and a number of other companies went with strategies which demand a monopoly; of course, only one managed it.
If your plan is low margins and high volume, you have to beat everyone else who has this plan. If your plan is high margins and low volume, there's a lot more room for competition. Of course, in a market with a successful company of the first type and a number of successful companies of the second type, the first one has almost all of the market share, but that doesn't matter all that much. And as your margins get higher, the market share you need drops.
Apple probably could have done better by continuing the Apple II line until it could be folded into the Mac line, thereby keeping a foot in the low-end market and providing an upgrade path. They'd also have done better in the business market if they hadn't already orphaned a system, which makes users have to face the fact that they're using a closed system. But licensing the Mac to other companies would just have driven down the margins and made them need more market share.
At one time, Apple had the best hardware, the best OS, and all the big hit programs came out on the Mac first. IIRC even Excel came out on the Mac first. John Sculley decided to go for profit margin rather than market share and Apple made a ton of money. Unfortunately, shrinking market share caught up with them. Corporations buy on price. They don't care how easy a computer is to use. I remember a quote in a trade magazine where an IT manager said, "All the employees screamed when I replaced the Macs with PCs but I saved the company thousands of dollars."
People point out that when the IBM PC became a commodity Microsoft made a fortune. But look what happened to IBM. They got squeezed out of the PC business. The same thing started happening to Apple when they licensed the Mac.
Apple has many opportunities to be price competitve with PCs. In fact, beat them. They do that now in laptops feature for feature (but not desktops).
However, the policy, primarily driven by Gassee of 55% margins is what maginalized Apple. They never went for the volume that they should have.
The market can bear Macs being a little more expensive than the competition. But, for a lot of their history they were MUCH more expensive.
Thanks for that. I got a little chuckle out of "the niche market that is networking hardware." That was cute.
Right now Cisco's market cap is just over $135 billion. Apple comes in at almost $12 billion. I guess there's niche, and then there's niche.
I don't see anyone running a PC running IOS, which is what the "business analysts" claimed Apple should have done with Mac OS.
There actually are tons of "PC's" (x86 servers) running Cisco software. Cisco PIXes, Content Engines, NAMs, Call-Managers. I could go on. These are also "proprietary hardware" (they're mostly re-branded stuff from other PC manufacturers, but you still gotta buy them from Cisco, in the bluegreen boxes with the bridge logo on them).
But your use of Cisco as a parallel to Apple isn't that bad. If I had to distill it to a one sentence explanation, I'd say:
Cisco and Apple both went for high-end proprietary hardware, emphasizing good design over low price, but Cisco targets businesses who will drop millions of dollars to go from a 2% failure rate to a 1% failure rate, or to save their support staff 15 minutes of time in a crisis, whereas Apple targets individual users who don't have the same attitude towards how much money they should spend on their computer systems.
Quothe the article:Was you PC going "Blee-ble-ble-ble-ble-bleeee" so long that you missed the Switch commercials? That's kind of..........a bummer.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
You just paraphrased the sentence you quoted. Congratulations, you live up to your name.
He's right, and what's more - Amiga people know this drill the best.
Back before 'multimedia' was a phrase, Apple, Atari, and Commodore lived the dream. The problem was the business PC users who would actually say things like, "Ahhhhh! I don't need any fancy graphics or sound..."
Imagine that attitude today! Well, you don't have to - it still exists - it's called DENIAL. 90% of the time when people go to buy a replacement computer they say things like, "Well, we'll give the old one to the kids to play games on..."
Oh really? Say, why not give the kids a USABLE box since the old one is just FINE for spreadsheets and word processing. I'll tell you why - because they're in denial about the fact that they DO want the bells and whistles after all, but due to our culture THEY ARE AFRAID TO ADMIT IT.
How much more proof do you need than Compaq's internal sound being called, "BUSINESS AUDIO"! What the hell does THAT mean? It means you get to hide your addiction to Doom better.
Few non-geek types like to be thought of as a child. Children play games after all - not adults, and certainly not on a computer! This attitude has been slowly changing but in the 80's, this was the way it was.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
- Okay first the claim that Apple's "OS" and hardware was light years ahead of the PC is nonsense...sure all the pretty-clicky stuff was 10 years ahead, but the design (no multitasking/interrupts, user/system memory segmentation, etc...) was 10 years BEHIND!
- The first version of windows that didn't suck was not shipped in 1995, rather the first "pretty" version of windows was shipped that year. A version of windows that doesn't suck has never been shipped.
- Even if Apple had licensed their "technology" they would have been pounded into the dust because try as they might - nobody can play as dirty as Microsoft.
But your points are off.
1. Open Market
2. More companies developing. More competition => lower margins =>
3. Cheaper computers
4. More customers
etc etc.
It isn't any more expensive to develop games or periphrials for mac, there is just a smaller audience so you get less possible returns for your investment. And PC's aren't cheaper because of their open architecture; Everything in a mac box is made of the same materials except for the motherboard. They're cheaper because every random company drops their prices, forcing companies to sell hardware at a minimum of a profit.
There's definitely a feedback loop, but your connection between the open market and cheaper development is incorrect.
The reason why Apple avoided licensing the OS to other companies are because its primary revenue generator is its hardware division: when Apple licensed its OS to PowerComputing and Umac and company, its hardware sales declined, so the company started losing money. Apple's software sales were and are essentially meaningless to its bottom line because it is selling an OS that can only be used by computers that Apple itself is selling.
Apple was and is really a hardware company, not a software company. The motorola platform would have had to supplant the x86 platform in order for it to be successful, and indeed, there's a rumor that there was such a port created at one point in Apple's history, but Apple simply wasn't willing to lose its hardware revenue.
I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
Most of those users are liars. H/w makers like Dell are switching components all the time. It's hard enough for Microsoft trying to corral this mess, and the PC trade rags would crucify Apple for each and every h/w compatibility issue out there. "Sure, it's pretty, but it's so limited." The moment the people you're talking to found themselves having to put out as much effort to get things rolling as they currently do with Windows, they'd bail.
Anyway, as has been pointed out any number of times, Apple makes it's bucks on h/w. For it to generate the profit in s/w-only that it current does selling the whole package, it would have to sell - say - five or six times the number of OSX licenses than it does computers. And, it would need to make this happen in two or three quarters max or their stockholders would slay the board of directors in their sleep.
Hmm, increase OS market share to 15 or 18% in six months? Yeah, right.
Luke, help me take this mask off
You win!!!!!!!
Please pick up your year's supply of Rice-a-Roni at the door. And thanks for playing.
While interesting and informative, it is also interesting to note one *huge* point that is left out in the article: The price. Mac have always been more expensive than PCs. Not that they are a lower value, but they are almost inexistent in the "entry-level" personal computer market. And they have always been.
Hence, the entry-level investment has always been higher for a Mac. You couldn't say "I'll buy this crappy one, and if I like it i'll upgrade later". Or simply speaking, if you had a thousand bucks to buy a machine, there was no alternative.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
3.5 or so, cost cutting reduces quality The only thing Wintel has going for it is games. And with World of Warcraft being released for Mac, I think I'd prefer to upgrade my iBook to a TiBook that I can use for other stuff than dump more money into Wintel junk that will fail two days out of warranty. -- bje
This has been said ten billion times I'm sure but...
.
Apple probably doesn't really care about catering to the lowest common denominator, but if they want more people to buy their computers, they have to make them sensibly priced. I'm not talking laptops here, desktops.
Here is a situation, I need a new desktop computer. I have a nice laptop already and I have 2 nice 17" LCD displays
Ok, lets go to the Apple store and see what I can get. The cheapest desktop is $2,799.00 CAD. That is assinine. Dual 1.8, 256MB(?!!?!?) of RAM.
Yes, it's a sweet computer and yes it comes with nice unixy OS with a nice GUI, but it's about $1300 over my budget.
I guess Apple doesn't want to sell computers to guys like me. Whatever.
I found the article rambling and self contradictory. I often wonder why Apple people are so defensive about this. It's OVER. You can't go back. Your mission, should you decide to accept it is to figure out what to do from here on out. The article DID get one thing right though:
"The fact is that the Windows monopoly is an anomaly, and exists only because of IBM's decision to license the DOS operating system from Microsoft, rather than buying it or writing their own from scratch. Microsoft didn't choose or decide the "open" nature of the IBM-compatible hardware business -- they just went along for the ride and then took full advantage of their fortunate position."
Which makes the other considerations moot. The good news, is that Microsoft won't get another free pass dumped in their lap. They have to either produce better software, or cheat to stay ahead, and their ability to cheat is being rapidly cut off by the international market as well as enlightened IT managers here in the States.
When Jobs took over Apple again and began work in earnest on a UNIX-based MacOS, I thought that Apple should have bought SGI. At the time (er, still) SGI was in the toilet, but still had a wealth of valuable visualization and CG technology, not to mention some "real" industrial server platforms.
The useful bits of IRIX could have been merged into what became OSX. Apple could have gained some machine-room credibility, SGI could have obtained some valuable consumer end applications. I kind of envision a software-unified product line with Apple's ease of use and SGI's CGI muscle.
The finished product could have been a networked computer system with Macs on the desktop and SGI servers in the machine room, with apps running NUMA-style on whatever CPU they needed.
I had a similar fantasy about a Sun/Apple merger as well, but instead of focusing so much on media/visualization, it became the uber-alternative to Microsoft -- great, easy to use desktops AND servers you could build a total enterprise business out of, with the PHB's approval, all with a unified OS.
This last one could be an IBM fantasy, too, since it might be easy to build "fat" binaries that would on on Power and Apple's PPC variant at the same time (CPU pedants feel free to correct me).
Most people slap me down when I post this on Slashdot, with the idea that Apple is a "consumer company" and doesn't want to compete in the business space, but why bother with Xserve and other server-type techs if that's the case? There's enough interest in Mac-only solutions that a merger with someone who has industrial computing experience could create interest outside of boutique shops that run on Mac-only setups.
Wow. How do I mod an article as flamebait?
I don't think Apple could have been bigger nor should it be bigger. As an innovator, Apple is necessarily relegated to a minority market share. And I think that is OK. I put more detailed thoughts on all this in my blog entry on the topic.
Answer: It's not.
Apple's real problems started after the ouster of Steve Jobs by his hand-picked protege, former Pepsi executive, John Scully, in 1985. What followed was a decade of mismarketing, management reorganizations, engineering chaos and declining market-share. It was Scully and Spindler that refused to license Mac OS (and that squandered years of profits on aimless persuit of countless technological fantasies). It took a half-dozen reorganizations, three changes of top management, and the loss of more than half of Apple's market before the morons that hijacked the company were finally willing to try licensing. By then it was far too late: Apple no longer had the market position or resources to survive the transition.
Maybe licensing would have been a success in the late eighties or the very early ninties, but, by 1995, it was too little too late. Could licensing work now with Mac OS X? Probably not: Apple still doesn't have the resources to survive such a transition and the advantages of Mac OS X over competing products (including Windows and Linux) is not great enough to ensure success.
On top of this, Steve Jobs has some experience with producing an OS for the IBM-compatible market that suggests support costs would likely bankrupt the company (they barely have the resources to support OS X on just the recent Mac models): in the mid-ninties NeXT ported NeXTSTEP to x86 and sold it for general consumption. The Achilies heel of the strategy was that NeXT could not possibly support the full range of hardware in the IBM-compatible market. Essentially the same barrier stunted the early growth of Windows NT and actually killed IBM's OS/2. Even Microsoft can't muster the required resources: they rely on market position to persuade other manufacturers to do the development and maintenance for free. The problem is, once the third-party manufacturers have invested in developing Window's drivers, they don't have the resources or will to develop much of anything else. It's a classic network effect: once MS had the largest piece of the market (even without having a majority) all the manufacturers jumped on the MS bandwagon.
Overcoming the network effect at this late date is nearly impossible: you would need nearly unlimited resources, and it would still be an uphill battle (as the Linux/FOSS community, which happens to have such resources, is finding out). Apple hasn't got anything close to adequate resources for that fight and they know it. Instead they have cut their liabilities and are choosing their fights very carefully. It may not be a plan for sure fire success, but it's the best plan given the circumstances.
Better yet, why did this waste of everyone's bandwidth get modded up when a link was already provided.
If apple licenessed its software hardware, it woudl find itself in the same position that MS is in today. They would have the same problems with compatibility and realibility because of the various configurations and hardware allowed to run their software. The amount of programs and users using their system would create bigger system holes, and the shere number of computers would make hackers exclusivly focus on that OS instead of Windows.
In otherwords its a double edge sward the bigger you are the bigger the target you become the more flaws there will be in your system. Its not even a game of good software vs. bad software, its just statistics.
As far as what type of inovations apple would have broght to the table vs. MS, i think its relative, but they were ahead like the article points out 10 years ago. There could have been great things, but than again we will never know.
From the article:
Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac.
Then my Amiga, and the GeOS package running on my C64 were figments of my imagination? Or was the author of that article still in the alternate universe?
Apples and oranges. You can't name one enterprise router/switch manufacturer that doesn't use proprietary hardware. But there is certainly no shortage of manufacturers building hardware to run any given desktop OS....of course with the exception of Apple...
When I saw that you couldn't even keep your computer running, I lost all respect for what you had to say.
The original Macintosh was a work of art. Both the hardware and firmware/software were optimized as well as possible. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
BYTE Macintosh Preview.
BYTE Macintosh Team Interview.
I have a collection of most 68000 compact macs and play with them every now and then, they're quite fascinating little machines. I can feel the amount of bloat between every release. System 1.0 boots in 2-3 seconds from a floppy! (System 7 takes about a minute from a hard disk on the same hardware). Some of the difference is of course due to the few features but mostly it's the difference between compiled C and hand-tuned ASM.
"It's better to be a pirate than join the navy" -Steve Jobs
Although the idea of licencing its OS or harware would be impossible today (OSX on x86 would have no software), and Apple's foray into clones in the mid-90s almost killed them, they could possibly have created a large market for clones if they had done so earlier.
The question is more that they would have had to charge high prices for the licences of the MacROM (prior to the neworld machines that had the ROM in software) and/or the motherboard design in order to offset the loss in marketshare of their hardware.
If Apple had stuck to three basic designs - one desktop, one laptop, one tower - plus perhaps reserving special stuff like the iMac as Apple only and made sure that the quality of their machines were absolutely the best, I'm pretty sure that sales would have been high enough in the professional Mac sector in order to let the clones live and hopefully raise overall MacOS marketshare. I refer to the quality as important because Macs used to be the most qualitative computers around, but over the years have dropped slightly in order to reduce costs. I mean, IBM's Thinkpads sell extremely well despite their high price chiefly because of their quality, and this in the cut throat PC market where most stuff is dirt cheap and dirt crap, quality wise.
Apple invests a large amount in R&D and would need to basically finance that in order to grow and survive. If Apple had continued on their way, iMac and iBooks (both with looks copyrighted or patented), iPod, OSX (free on Apple's machines, discounted as OEM to clones but still with a price), excellent software division (FCP, shake etc) they would have possibly less hassle today than they do, and a higher marketshare to boot.
Not only that but a higher marketshare would bring CPU prices down.
Thank you Mr. Trebek. I'll continue with OSes That Don't Suck for $400.
..was Quality of the hardware mainly. That and and the availibility of excellent software [text, graphics, audio, movie and development tools].
" It's not performance or technological superiority that guarantees success, but money and advertising."
By that argument. We would have never had the ballpoint pen.
Excel was released for the Mac in 1985 and the first Windows version (1987) was therefore version 2.0
---http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel
Your corporate clients knew Excel was the right took. They just never dared not buy IBM-compatible. Wimps. Just like today they do not dare buy OS X.
The next pasture is always greener
But the gist of it is pretty much right.
I've owned Macs since junior high, and I can't remember a point where they weren't "the alternative." I mean, wasn't that what those 1984 and Lemmings commercials were about? Wasn't the computer always aimed at, or at least embraced by the various creative fields? I can't tell you how many offices I've worked in where the art department used Macs, and everyone else used Windows. So, yeah, they're "the alternative", which usually implies a smaller but cultlike following as opposed to "the popular." Mac users are kind of like the Goths and Punks in the corner of the lunchroom sneering at the Preps and Jocks.
The Mac has its lot in life. And it's not a bad one. It's possible Apple could've done something different and sold more computers, and from a business standpoint they could be considered a failure because they aren't worth ten times as many billions-- but they are still worth billions, and that's saying somthing. Apple also has something that Microsoft never had and never will, millions of loyal users, many of whom border on the fanatical.
Me, I'm happy with where they are and where they're going. I mean, look at DVD Studio Pro 3 and Final Cut 4, Shake... The soon-to-come Motion... But then, I'm an animator, so my needs aren't everyone's.
Having been an employee at NeXT and Apple between the years 1996 and 1998 I can testify that not only was the 1999 modest but in fact, in 1997 Apple had only 3 months worth of working capital on which to run the company. One of the most necessary and drastic actions Steve took was to revoke the Sabbatical Program. Nearly 1/3rd of the entire staff had earned up to 12 weeks of paid vacation. Not to mention the merging of 20 some odd separate marketing departments into the vaunted "Think Different" single marketing department. Or the over 500 staffed IT Department costing the company over $45 Million annually to run with over 180 in-house applications that had yet to be sold to consumers? Steve gutted that group and what useful software has and continues to be adapted to current and hopefully future software from Apple. We all found the gluttony within Apple to be disgusting (meanwhile during the merger Apple Engineers were pissed with our free variety of beverages perks and how upbeat and enjoyable the NeXT headquarters work environments actual were). My personal favorite change was when Steve gutted the outside Latte/Espresso vendor from within Apple proper along with the Cafe staff. It sent a storm of posts on the internal web anonymous bitch section (employee feedback section) until the day arrived when Steve was praised because he introduced everyone to the newly revamped Cafe with free Coffee/Lattes for Staff. It just reminds me how speculation can sure create wild stories, and how experiencing it in actuality helps calm those storms of BS.
We only had 12 weeks in which to effectively redefine Apple, trim the exhorbitant costs that it was taking just to keep the company afloat, and more importantly market products to get Apple back on track. It was then early in 1998 we all were asked to head off campus to what would be the unveiling of Apple's Future--iMac.
I agree the clone licensing campaign that Steve revoked was necessary for Apple to survive. Steve learned well with all the grandiose ideals at NeXT and was not about to make the same mistakes back at Apple, now that he had one last chance.
How many people realize that a stroll around Steve's neighborhood with an Executive of Microsoft turned into the $150 Million non-voting shares investment from Microsoft back into Apple and how when that was revealed in Boston that most folks hadn't a clue how important ending that feud was to Apple's future bottom line.
As pointed out by others in 1984 IBM compatible video cards could handle the graphics.
But if we assume they couldn't, as the author believes here is what Apple could have done.
1) Build an expansion board for the IBM PC, that could handle the necessary graphic capabilities.
2) Include a ROM with the necessary system functions on the same expansion board.
3) Release the OS and the board as a package, it wouldn't be to much of a stretch for Apple to do.
If Apple didn't want to use a custom video card they could have released a expansion board to control the mouse and added the same kind of ROM to it. I mean if Microsoft could produce an expansion board for the Apple II so it had and x86 processor, Apple could have made a board with a ROM on it.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
The point about the apple having a bitmapped grahics display does not differentiate it overly form the IBM PC. The CGA cards were available eraly on, and of course the Hercules graphics card gave an even superior resolution than the Apple.
:-(
Also the point about the Apple O/S being in ROM is also a red herring - if you remember the IBM PC they came with a largely useless BASIC ROM chipset that was removable. My original clone XT came with several empty sockets that could take the stock BASIC ROM's or something else.
There would have been few obstacles on the hardware front to implementing the MAC OS on the X86 platform back in the late 80's - the graphics hardware eas definitely available, and supplying the O/S on ROM as a dropin/swapout unit for a PC was not unreasonable. Back in those days IT support did involve swapping chips on PC's (ever chased a parity error on an IBM PC - you could use the diagnosic code to work out which specific chip was faulty).
It's just a shame
Now maybe if Apple licensed OS X for the Pentium II before MS can get its act together with Longhorn...
The computer that's just a step below premium is the PowerMac G4 and you can get it from MacMall over the phone (international) for $1,299.
Sorry Apple won't cater directly to you, but it's not like they have a role reversal with Dell. When the sales show the need to diversify, Apple will. Look at the avalable power book models!
We could sit here and debate the fact that Apple could have been Microsoft. However, even if Apple would release OS X to run on x86 hardware. It would be beautiful.. and a viable contender.
>I'm not saying this was a mistake; I offer it only as the explanation as to why Apple earns millions per quarter while Microsoft earns billions.
Why make billions when you can make millions?
Muhahahahahaha
The previous generation G5 is available in single processor 1.6Ghz flavor for $1,594 at MacMall as well.
This is one of the more insightful articles about personal computer history that I've read. With Apple being essentially an innovative hardware company is it any surprise they have had the revolutionary mentality rather than Microsoft's evolutionary mentality?
Apple were never about fitting in with anyone else; Microsoft were prepared to find any niche with any platform to survive. You could say that Apple are invested in their corporate personality, whereas Microsoft never believed having one was useful. And yet it's ironic that both companies are so dependent on the personality of their founders.
All this might sound peripheral but it translates into very real strategy. Apple are addicted to inventing hardware. Microsoft is addicted to destroying competition. There are echoes of their origins in that strategy also: Apples compulsion towards UI design (like those cool iPods), and Microsofts compulsion to outdo IBM (they really have a thing about IBM).
The article's point about Apple successfully avoiding direct competition with Microsoft shouldn't be taken as some sort of ideological cant, either. Look at Adobe (who have had very profitable dealings with Apple not coincidentally), or Cisco. Even when Microsoft decided they were competitors, these companies kept their focus and ultimately kept their mindshare.
Now that the tide is turning again, who will survive into the next decade?
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
"the cloners got the rug yanked by the same man who held the Mac near and dear to his heart... yup, Mr Jobs."
His Karmic reward was to get cancer, proving there is a god.
I just ran in to this when I purchased my PowerBook. I could get a Dell for $1799. The 1.5GHz PowerBook was $2499. By the time that I got the systems configured to the level that I wanted, the Apple was $3,200 and the Dell was $3,600.
The difference is that Apple sells their systems with base models that are usable configurations. When you look at the Dell (or HP, Sony, etc), their base models have too little RAM, to small or too slow of a hard disk, etc.
The PC companies know 1) that you look at the initial price, and 2) once you have seen that price, you won't question the price of the options. The options are seconday.
This is how Dell makes tons of money. Ever seen their prices for video upgrades, more memory, larger hard disks??? Their add on cost is higher than what the part goes for at Fry's.
Point is: When you look at a configuration that you will actually use, the Apple systems are extremely price competitive.
These OS's were very unstable; OS 8 was like Win 3.1 in stability.
Even today, on my kids iMac's, I have to reload the OS every year because all the drivers and software screws up the OS until it won't print or do other normal stuff. No way to figure out why, because there is no error log, it just pretends to do it and won't.
OS 9 will lock up suddenly until my son has to crawl under his desk and pull the plug, it gets *that* locked up.
OS X, lets face it, was 10 years overdue. If Apple would have had any balls, they would have pushed hard on AUX to become more mainstream, because that's pretty much a blueprint for what they did with BSD and finder and called it OS X.
No, apple screwed up big time, taligent, pink, darwin. 10 years for nothing. Pathetic.
Meanwhile OS 8 and 9 still suck, but X won't run on an iMac with 256M of memory. So we're fucked because I'm not spending 4 grand to replace all 3 iMacs.
Maybe I should just get a bunch of Dell's for the kids...
The "recent" BoA securities study is 9 months old. It predicts a stock price of $21. The current stock price is $30.
Since the study was published, Apple stock has risen 9 bucks.
Steve Job was not diagnosed with terminal cancer-- in fact, the surgery was successful enough that chemotherapy and radiation will be unnecessary.
Apple reported a profit of $61 million last quarter.
"the thousands of flakey, low-margin, made-in-Taiwan chipsets"
....
... so... NEANDERTHAL!
Name 3. Oops, you can't, because there aren't thousands of chipsets.
There's VIA, AMD, Intel, nVidia...
Or perhaps you meant motherboard makers? All those flakey ones like AMD, Intel, Soyo, Asus,
No, what you're whining about is that not all x86 PC's have recognizable names on the front. That's okay. THat's what makes a vibrant market. You can go for safe (Intel), or get one that you can trick out, make it go fast, do all sorts of things.
You like your PC to be like your car... Saturn. Sure, its boring, has middling performance, and isn't all that inspiring. But hey the company has a vision, the dealer treats you peachy keen, and its like you belong to a family.
Not like all those icky car dealerships where you have to bargain and just act so
Life's a bitch.
From the article. . .
.
"The Macintosh was indisputably years ahead of every other PC platform in terms of user-interface design. The mouse pointer. The desktop metaphor. Overlapping windows. Icons. WYSIWYG word processing. Ten years later, every desktop computer in the world offered similar features; but in 1984, they were only on the Mac."
How many years ahead of "every other" platform was the Mac? Macintosh introduced all this GUI goodness at the beginning of 1984. Around early summer of 1985 Atari began selling the 520ST with practically all of the same features, while the Amiga 1000 shipped only a few months later.
In short, it took other companies (aside from Microsoft) about 18 to 24 months to imitate the "revolutionary" features of Macintosh. It may have taken Microsoft upward of a decade, but you know. . . That's Microsoft for ya.
Also from the article. .
"It's generally agreed that the first version of Windows that didn't suck shipped in 1995, a decade after the arrival of the Mac."
Personally, I think the first version of Mac OS that didn't suck shipped in 2001, when Mac OS X hit store shelves. (And if you want to get really technical, Mac OS X isn't a version of Mac OS at all. It's just what Apple imported to replace Mac OS after finally realizing they could never transform it into something that didn't suck.)
OK, so the article argues that if Apple had licensed their OS then they wouldn't have necessarily made more money, because it's the model their businesses customers would have preferred and...er...umm...stuff.
I think the author of this article confuses the (Apple licensing the ability to rip off their UI to Microsoft was a mistake) argument with the idea that Mac OS should have been running on Intel hardware.
Should Apple tried to put their OS on all hardware? - No.
Should Apple have let Microsoft rip of their UI in exchange for having some office applications written on their OS? - No.
Apple does have few interesting plays in their back pocket:
1) They have a fully functional GUI on top of an open source OS
2) their open source OS is still building on BOTH Power PC and Intel platforms.
3) a version of Microsoft Office (like it or not, this is a huge advantage that the Mac has over other Open Source OS's)
I don't have insight into why Apple continues to do Intel builds of Darwin. It could be for no other reason than to keep IBM in check.
It would be interesting to see how Microsoft's reaction would be if Apple took that Intel build to market. Microsoft needs Apple to remain in business, but how badly? Would Microsoft do another build of Office to run on an OS X for Intel platforms?
The future could be interesting.
Like others who have posted here, I'm a "switcher" with no regrets, only positive experiences to share. I'd known since I was probably 12 that I preferred Macs to PCs, but at the time my family only had an old IBM clone, so I didn't see the need to mention it. I didn't know any Mac users growing up, except for my uncle and his roommate in Massachusetts, and I hardly ever saw them.
My parents were never very technically inclined. They probably never noticed my complete lack of interest in using our PC, even when in junior high I started writing my papers in longhand, on bonded paper. I think they only started to catch on after my dad caught me reading MacAddict in the magazine aisle at Kroger's. He pretended not to see me, but that Christmas my parents got me subscriptions to PC Week and BYTE. Subtle, huh?
Anyway, once I went off to college in the "big city" I found that there were a lot of people who, like me, had been raised on PCs and were now keen on discovering the Mac. I joined a few campus organizations right away, though it took me until my sophomore year to finally purchase my first Mac (clamshell iBook, orange). By then, it came as no surprise to my family and friends back home, and much to my relief, they didn't mind at all. In fact, my best friend from high school revealed that he, too, had gone out and bought an iBook--the exact same model as mine!
So here's the point I want to make. Yes, it's hard to come to terms with Thinking Different(TM) in a society that assumes every computer is running Windows, and goes out of its way to exclude the few percent who deviate from the so-called "norm." But every closet Mac user out there should know that they are not alone; we Mac users are a proud and happy community, and we're here to support you. What OS you use is your choice and yours alone. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
--
"Dude, I'm about to do my thing, with the thing, here."
...is somehow "novel." Paper does this all the time.
Uh, yeah. The black text on white background was intended to emulate the appearance of paper. The novel aspects of the GUI were not the use of interface elements that nobody had ever seen before--it was the use of familiar elements like black text on white, file folders, wastepaper baskets, etc. etc. in the context of a computer interface.
Sevceral times hye uses the phrase "wildly popular Apple II". One of the biggest reasons it became so was third party support. Apple did what they do best with the Apple II, and let others build on that and make their own fortunes.
One of those others was Microsoft. Besides producing several programming and software packages for the Apple II, they wrote a portion of the machine's ROM. Look inside an Apple II; the ROM chips have a Microsoft copyright.
Apple couldn't "be" Microsoft. They could have, however, maintained the sort of relationship they'd had, and used Microsoft to continue support and further development of their line. Unfortunately Jobs saw fit to take yet another opportunity to try to prove Woz wrong. Now, Apple has a small fraction of the market share they did before Jobs did so.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
For those of you who weren't there, it's worth a look back at the early Lisa/Mac era. The Lisa was a usable machine, with a hard drive, a good GUI, and a protected mode OS, but it cost $10,000 in 1983. (Part of the problem was that Motorola was years late with the MMU for the 68000, and the Lisa had a MMU built out of register-level parts on a board. This ran the cost way up. Another part of the problem was that Apple's hard drive, the LisaFile, was both slow and unreliable.)
The original Mac, on the other hand, was a cost-reduced Lisa. One floppy, no hard drive, no MMU, 128K RAM. Most of the user's time was spent changing disks and looking at the "watch" icon. It was a failure in the marketplace. Not until the Mac was built up to a Lisa level (a hard drive and more RAM) did it sell. Apple actively resisted successful attempts by third parties to add a hard drive to the Mac. Being late with a hard drive was probably Apple's biggest mistake in the early Mac era.
The product that saved Apple was not the Mac; it was Apple's laser printer. That's what made the Mac a success and gave Apple market share in the desktop publishing industry.
It's also worth remembering that there were competitors to Apple other than the PC - and they ran UNIX! There were quite a number of UNIX workstations in the early and mid 1980s. Some of them were price-competitive with Apple's machines. (Anybody remember the AT&T PC?) In terms of price point, Apple was playing in the workstation market for a while.
The MacOS itself had more in common with DOS/Windows 3 than with a modern OS. Underneath, it was way too much like DOS - not reentrant, no threads, no processes, a dumb file system. The GUI part was fine, but the underpinnings were crude. This reflected the terrible memory limitations under which the original version was built.
On top of this was built, over time, something that looked like a multi-application OS, but wasn't really. Mac programmers knew this as the Mess Inside. (I've written drivers and applications for the Mac, so I know what I'm talking about here.) Apple actually tried to fix the Mess Inside several times before MacOS X. But the PowerPC transition set things back. Much of the OS was running in 68K emulation mode for years after the PowerPC transition. One big problem was that the MacOS was so low level that applications prevented interrupts. The PowerPC had a completely different interrupt model than the 68000, and making those play together resulted in some horrors.
Arguably, Apple would have been better off encouraging Motorola to develop bigger and better 68000 type machines. There's nothing wrong with the 68000 architecture; it could have been brought up to the speeds of today's machines. The whole PowerPC thing was an unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with IBM. IBM was supposed to sell MacOS machines. Remember?
Another technical problem occured at the PowerPC transition. The 68000 had 80-bit floating point. The PowerPC had only 64-bit floating point, because IBM mainframes had 64-bit floating point. So, to avoid truly appalling benchmarks, Apple chose not to emulate the 68000 FPU on the PowerPC. All the engineering applications stopped working. (Yes, there was the third-party "SoftFPU" patch, but it wasn't enough.) The engineering companies dumped the Mac at that point. No more AutoCAD, no more EDA. Market share in the PowerPC era never reached that of the 68K machines.
Apple's third major attempt at an OS rewrite, Copeland (the original MacOS 8) hit a wall - Microsoft refused to rewrite their applications for the new OS. That's what resulted in the return of
I find it ridiculous that the author compares the console market to the personal computer market in justifying the notion that any computer market could be a closed system. This is nonsense. The author is overlooking the obvious; computers are inherently open systems because they are PROGRAMMABLE, consoles are not (haxxors excluded of course).
There is no way that ANY computer OS or hardware standard could be a closed system (and demand licensing fees from software publishers) unless there would be a way to block homemade code from compiling or running on the system itself. Which, of course, makes that system no longer a computer, but a box that runs programs.
If the business model of "non-gaming console" (which is what the author is suggesting) were feasible, then we wouldn't be discussing PC vs. Mac but CD-TV vs. CDI or 3DO vs. Pippin.
someone got the story right.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
According to Barefeats the Opteron and G5 are basically neck and neck.
http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html
-- thinkyhead software and media
Because we all know that tires are both a significant fraction of the price of a new car, and frequently outlive the usefulness of the car....
Hey, did you have to go to bad analogy camp, or is it just raw talent?
Apple OS up until OS-X was a pile of crap. I know because I developed for it.
Now it's too late and the choice is between Windows XP (which is damn good by now) or some Un*x flavor (Linux, FreeBSD, or OS-X).
Best Buy can have you arrested
These days, I think that looks and the want to be different are teh two main reasons people buy Macs. Back in the day, MacOS really was as good or better than Windows at everything (compatibility aside since that's not relivant here). MacOS really did do graphics better, it did have a more usuable GUI, it was more stable, etc.
/., Windows XP is quite stable, PCs have the latest greatest in graphics, both have easly usable UIs (some argue that OS-X is less usable than OS9, but it's still quite usuable) etc.
These days, it's pretty much a wash. Despite what people like to crow about on
So you've got a platform that costs more money, doesn't run all the games as you noted, and doesn't offer any real noticable improvements to your average user other than eye candy both on and off screen. Means that the eye candy crowd is who you are going to attract.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Market capitalization has nothing to do with the market that something deals with, it is simply the number of shares times the current theoretical value. It has nothing to do with the amount of assets of the company and it has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of stuff they actually sell, or can sell. It isn't even a realistic assessment of how much the company could actually be sold for, because share values change when they are sold in any reasonable number. If you want to actually measure the size of the market to assess whether it is a niche or not, you should look at gross earnings, or even better, the total gross earnings of the company and it's competitors.
I agree that networking is not a niche, but I would really like to see some better statistics, not just throwing the market cap everywhere like a now-bankrupt 80's entrepreneur.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
DP as in DTP as in Desktop Publishing.
THE NERD IS THE COMPUTER.
The article mentions Sculley's Newton and how it barely interacted with the Mac and was instead intended to supplant it. A few years later the Palm Pilot would clean up because it integrated with the desktop so successfully. Similarly, one of the the key selling points of the iPod was, and continues to be, its tight integration with iTunes, an application that people really like.
Further, the author goes on to sketch a vision of how Apple could have been Microsoft through evolutionary improvement - first with backward-compatibility from the Mac to Apple II software, then the Newton as a peripheral. He points out that this would have involved Microsoft-style parlaying of dominance in one platform into dominance in another. This too is exactly what Jobs is doing, with the popularity of the iPod promoting the use of iTunes Music Store, to the point that almost 2% (!) of legally sold music in the US is sold through iTunes Music Store.
Not to sound like an Apple Fanboi, but recently, both the emac and the ibook are very competitively priced. $799 for a complete system, including monitor, is not bad.
$1029 for what amounts to an nice portable system is very good.
...I have a Mac SE that I want to use as a dummy terminal like a VT100, does anyone know how I could pull this off?
Sig: I stole this sig.
The best Interoperability of any system, before I switched to a Apple notebook fulltime, I had to have a pc for linux/windows apps, and another mac for testing. With OS X I can run linux and apple apps natively, and can get decent emulation out of VPC for Windows. If my windows emulation state goes south (as Windows sometime does) I copy over my vpc backup file from another folder.
It seems like every time I update my kernel on my Linux laptop something stops working and I spend the next 8 hours fixing, or I have to make a compromise on having some of the hardware or software working. Sure it's not necessarily "Linux's" fault when my hardware mftr doesn't release OSS drivers, or my vmware won't work with kernel X, but when I working, I don't care who's fault it is, I just want it to work. I'm not a developer, why should I have to be to get a decent OS. With my mac, it just works, as corny as that sounds, and I can focus on what I get paid to do.
The OS works perfectly with hardware, no dinking around trying to get my wireless working. I can do linux just fine, but sometime I need to do work, not edit a configuration files to get my video card to to dual monitors. No worries about spyware and the majority of virus's. And the plus side, if I feel like dinking around the *nix side, I still can.
Not to mention I still get the a nice user interface, that for me, is years ahead of either Linux, or windows.
I don't play games, I have an Xbox for that.
SiS Chipset.
PCChips/Soyo chipset.
NatSemi Geode [integrated] chipset.
ServerWorks (Broadcom) chipset.
You, sir, are a jacktard, and I just made you look like one in front of ALL OF SLASHDOT, ha ha ha.
Thank you for illustrating my point. A computer for $299 Here and a monitor for $79.99 Here.
So if you have just $380 to put in a computer (think student here, his very first computer, the one that'll start molding his brain), then what could you possibly choose?
And keep in mind that outpost.com was the first website I tried. There _has_ to be less expensive. But we are already at less than 50% of the price of the lower Mac!!!!
Write boring code, not shiny code!
What a load of crap. I called Apple to get the iBook 800Mhz two years ago in the basic configuration with 128 Mb RAM. The Apple sales person told me (and I quote): "128 Mb is not enough memory for this computer, it will barely be usable".
They have since upgraded memory for their bottom line computers, but they are in no way better than Dell in this area.The reason Apple only have a tiny market share, is that you can't buy their computers. Sure you can pay for them, but you cant buy them.
Case in point - January 2004 - I took out a loan for a DP2.0G5 - "Noooo" community said - wait for the "rumoured speed bumps"... so I waited.
April 2004 - still no new G5's, may as well wait for the promised DP3.0 which was promised by Steve Jobs himself on stage at WWDC2003.
9th June comes... and... no DP3.0 "anytime soon" but here's a liquid cooled DP2.5.... *order* *order*
Confirmation email - "Thankyou for your order. We expect to ship your G5 on or before 2nd AUGUST 2004". Bugger.
*wait* *wait* one business day before 2nd August - "Demand has been phenomenal... we now hope to deliver on or before 20th August..."
After all of that I got so annoyed I cancelled. Couple this with the fact whenever we order any Mac's at work and they seem to take three months minimum to deliver, then we tend these days to just look at Dell.
Message to Apple - you make good products (well the build quality lately sucks but thats cheap middle east manufacturing for you - look at IBM hard drives) - perhaps consider actually shipping them when you say you will along with keeping your customers informed. If you had told me in April "due to chip issues we cant make a DP3.0 but we should have a DP2.5" then I could have made my decision right then rather than waiting to be let down.
Incidentally I went and bought a DP2.0 off the shelf so it's not all bad, however I could have had this system back in January and not felt hard done by. As it stands, my perception of Apple is one of "Nice products, shame about the customer service" and considering that professionally I am the person that would choose if our organisation buys 50 Macs or 50 PCs, I'm not the type of person you want to piss off really, but too late.
outpost.com sells refurbished junk, fool
You wouldn't be referring to the fabulously stable (sarcasm) system 7.2 - 7.5.5 would you? At the time I was using that I was using W3.1, and I can assure you that in terms of reboots/day there was little to choose between them.
The advantage of W3.1 of course was that eventually you could figure out exactly what thoughtcrime had been committed, whereas the little Mac bomb obeyed its own rules.
If you don't believe me set up a PC with W3.1 and an SE with 7.5.5, and try and use either!
7.1
If it was so critical, how come after the merge, NeXT employees got sabbaticals based upon their time served at NeXT (which didn't have a sabbatical program)? If sabbaticals were crippling, why did Steve's buds from his failed company get them?
And the number of people who had earned the sabbaticals was stated in the comm meeting as 1/5th. I know, I was there. Yes, 1/5th, as in you get a sabbatical every 5 years. This seemed every bit as Dilbert's "40% of sick days are taken on Mondays or Fridays" joke statement.
As to gutting the Coffee bar, I was good friends with the owner of the coffee bar. He had taken it and made something of it. Steve decided he had to take it away and give it to one of his cronies. This was months after he changed the cafeteria, which was pretty much a good thing, except for losing Jaime at the grill.
I have no idea what your comment about 180 in-house applications is. We have almost as many in-house applications now. And those in-house applications were never supposed to be sold to customers in the first place, so to say they were languishing is ridiculous. Finally, if you think we have fewer than 500 IT people at Apple now, you really need to get a better count. Have you been upstairs in Valley Green 6? How about the music store folks? That department is all IT.
I've was at Apple in 1991, 1992-1993, and 1995 to present. And the number one thing that burns my behind is the NeXT wingnuts coming in and acting like they saved Apple. NeXT didn't get where it was by knowing how to do business. And the engineering is horrid. No one at NeXT had any idea about release to release compatibility. Have a new OS coming? Just call up your 12 devleopers and get them to release new versions.
The X folks in their wisdom threw out everything that Apple had developed to make the machine easier to use. Amazing how with Rendezvous now you can just open a browser and find your printer! Heavens! Perhaps with future enhancements you'll be able to find them on other subnets! The Mac could do this in 1986, but the NeXTies threw it away. Then they can rediscover it later and look like geniuses.
How about the ability to share a folder on your hard drive over the network? Mac OS 7-9 could do it. Windows can do it. Mac OS X still can't do it. You can only share a certain folder in your home directory.
It's all stupid. Apple wouldn't have survived the idiocy of the NeXT OS crew if it weren't for the improvements in the hardware org that were made at the same time. Killing the 20 machines Apple made and releasing good ones using commong chipsets really saved the company, not MACH.
Or mediocre?
I am for smaller and independent voices being heard over traditional media sources. But only when its GOOD or throught provoking.
There is nothing thought provoking in this, and it isn't well done. I like my fuzzy logic in artificial intelligence algorithms, not what I read. Not even apple.slashdot.org material, never should have made the front page. I do not say this because I disagree with his position. I say this because his position is so ignorant and redundant there is no point.
Someone could submit a story about the moon being made of cheese and I would learn stuff from the comments debunking him, but it still makes the person ignorant and just posting gives it credibility it does not deserve.
I propose slashdot adds a site karma features, so we can rate the source along with the link. Enough negatives votes and we do not see stories from that site. Enough positive votes and we see them.
I also propose we are warned when the link goes to white text on a grey background. I have seen white text on a black background. That is bad enough, but gives contrast. Gray links and tiny white type on a gray background takes gall. I do not like having to copy and paste an article just to read it, so I may be pissier than I should.
Am I being unduly harsh?
+ Redundant and retreaded subject
+ Obviously biased*
+ Hard to read
+ Dry and boring and badly written
+ Fuzzy logic that only a zealot would accept
+ Ignorance about the basics of the sitation he is "debunking"
*this is fine if it is thought provoking
He's referring to the "Reverse Takeover" theory. Apple provided the money, but NeXT provided the (originally, acting) CEO and the technology. It's a slightly lame insult to use against Apple, but since they've ended up as a stronger company I'm sure they don't mind.
It works like this.
Back in the early days when Macs were a serious competitor to Dos, anybody who knew anything about computers knew that Macs were better than PCs. That essentially accounted for about 5% of the population.
Another 15-20% of the population knew somebody who was willing to tell them that macs were far better than PCs.
The other 75%-80% of the population would just go look up computer consultants in the phone book. That's where the Mac fell down.
You see (and just about everyone here knows), the mac was so well designed and easy to use, that the average Mac consultant could handle about 5 times as many customers as the average PC consultant. This means, that -- even if Macs had half the market, there'd still be 5 times as many PC consultants... That meant that the vast majority of sad sacks who wanted to get a computer would end up randomly calling a DOS consultant.
Now what software do you think that a DOS consultant is gonna suggest to a know-nothing would-be customer???
Thus began Apple's death spiral.
para-Quote from a friend of mine (circa 1995).:
(sigh....)Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Many people at Microsoft, especially the top officers, genuinely believe that they're idealistic, and that they're changing the world for the better, doing revolutionary things.
Two of the biggest names in computer graphics, Blinn and Kajiya, are working for Microsoft Research. Microsoft, like IBM in the day, does a boatload of great research, even if like IBM they don't use any of it. Where else is a researcher to go? The national research labs are dead and dying, and even when they were vibrant, they paid about 40% of what industry pays people to do less work.
PC-DOS was the Microsoft operating system for the IBM PC. MS-DOS was essentially the same thing, but with a different ROM and a different name for legal reasons licensed to companies like Zenith. (Who indeed had a better product than IBM, which a color pixel screen that could easily have supported a Macintosh-like OS. I know coz' I implemented a QuickDraw clone for the Z-100). All this at about the time the Mac came out.
The third one does, and but only in the context of dragging icons and double clicking them (in the June of 1981 line item). It comes up tangentally later in the 1988 and 1991 sections amount Microsoft. That particular line item in June of '81 I believe is referencing a computer made by Xerox not Apple.
Any chance you'll point out the specifics of the text that clarify that the Mac's didn't specifically take the concept of Icon's from Xerox? Or that Job's inspiration for developing a GUI based computer didn't come directly from his visits to PARC.
Heck, even Jobs openly admits that at PARC, they showed him three things, and he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't even notice the other two (OO programing, and networking).
http://www.pbs.org/nerds/part3.html
Search for the text "three things". It's right there. Now, Raskin did work there for a little under two years before the PARC visit, but unless it's the "PITS" thing, I don't see anything that leads me to believe that Apple didn't get the idea of a GUI directly from PARC. Raskin might have had the concept in a design 15 years early in his Ph.D, but PARC appears to be the one who shocked Jobs into realizing it was a revolutionary idea. So in the end, it appears PARC deserves a lot of credit you seem to want to deny them.
Back in early 80s, IBM chose to make a personal computer out of spare parts anyone could buy at Radio Shack. And they chose the Intel 8086 processor, a very dump motherboard used for microcontrollers having only 8 interrupts, a very stupid bus architecture that was only marginal better than C64...If they have designed the damn thing, they would have chosen the 68000, which is arguably the best CPU ever (not technically, but marketwise), and then it would be possible for Apple to run their O/S on the IBM PC and become the dominant forces in the industry. And we users wouldn't have spend 20 years dealing with the problematic Microsoft GUIs and the stupid limitations of the PC! A stupid decision by IBM execs set the IT industry back 20 years!
its easier to find pirated software for PC.
I agree with you completely. The author started out with an opinion, and then crafted the facts to fit. It's a lame article. In fact, the reason that Apple had such high margins is that we couldn't make Macs fast enough in around 1990, so we charged what the market would bear. In retrospect, the right manufacturing partners with the right business arrangement (such as HP or IBM) could have put Macs everywhere. The author's assertion that businesses wouldn't use Macs is simply untrue - many did and others would have if they were from IBM. At that point Apple's market share was approaching 20% (although it was still single digits in the corporate markets.) I think the main reason Apple didn't do licensing is that while gross margin would have gone up, total revenue would have dropped, and they didn't want to explain that to the markets. The later Umax deals et al were too late - the margins weren't there anymore to allow another manufacturing tier, and IBM and HP had moved on.
"was a closer to System 7"???
I'm not sure what that means either.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
I would say that Windows was already better since Win 3.x in the early 90s. The biggest difference: on a typical Windows machine you got a full size colourful screen, while a typical Mac still had that tiny black and white screen. I think that little screen is the one thing that hurt the Mac the most; even when bigger screens were available for it the image of the Mac was still that of a cute PC with a too small screen you wouldn't want to do any real work on.
There are lots of PC manufacturers who built PCs to last. Apple never needed to, because every major new release of their OS seems to obsolete any Apple hardware more than 4 years old.
For shits and grins, I cobbled together an old 7100 (first gen PPC, 1994) and I installed OS 9 (2000) on it. I use it to play some old games that don't seem to run on newer hardware. Boot up is slow, but after the OS is loaded, the thing is quite functional. Now, why don't you try running Windows 2K on a PC from 1994 and tell us what the results are.
Maybe you do, but I want to do my work as time-effectively as possible, which, surprise!, ends up being cost effective as well. For me, this has meant using a Mac whenever possible.
Hey, I can understand being on a budget and not being able to afford a Mac. My first two computers were PCs (an XT and a 486). My third computer was a Mac Quadra, and every computer I've bought since has been a Mac.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Do so because it's pre-installed, on a cheep PC.
Most PC's Come with windows pre-intalled because the everyone writes windows compatabile software and hardware drivers.
PC's can't come with Mac OS installed, bacuse Apple played the propriotry card.
Most games run under Windows, because most PC run Windows because of the above.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The thing is, far from Apple having a revolutionary new model, they're just stuck at a model that existed ever since the first computers.
In fact, in the beginning, there was no software market at all. When you got a computer, say, from IBM, the _only_ software you could ever hope to get was also from IBM. That included the OS, assembler, compilers, utilities, _everything_.
And chances are you couldn't plug in any peripherals that your vendors didn't sell, either. Some vendors went as far as to patent the connectors, to keep other people from undercutting the price of their ridiculously high priced peripherals.
That kind of a lock-in isn't new, and isn't to keep the customer happy: it's most marketroids' wet dream come true. It's pretty much like having a captive market, sorta like the 17'th century colonies. Or like having serfs paying the yearly Sun/IBM/DEC/whatever tax.
Except this time the fear was not of the King's army, but of the costs of rewriting everything to a new platform.
Even when Unix came and (theoretically) gave the proprietary OSs a kick in the pants, ever wondered why the Unix fragmentation happened? (Which in turn paved the way for Microsoft's defeating them all.) No, seriously. Because noone actually wanted to have a compatible platform, which would break their customers free from the vendor lock-in.
A truly portable Unix and tools, would have allowed you to just take your programs off that DEC mini and move them to a Sun. Or viceversa. Pretty much forcing a competition strictly on price/performance, instead of a cost artifficially skewed by the migration costs.
So what did everyone do? Made their Unix version slightly different. Made sure that although theoretically they were all Unix and all ANSI C, you couldn't really just take your programs and scripts and move to a rival's computer.
It's not even limited to whole computers: see how 3DFX guarded Glide jealously until right before the end. They wanted people locked into needing a 3DFX card, instead of free to get anything.
Or not even limited to computers at all: see, for example, how Apple doesn't want Real being able to sell tracks that can be played on the iPod. They want you locked into having only one vendor of DRM-ed music for your iPod.
So basically, again, Apple isn't really doing anything new. It's just doing the same old crap of trying to lock the customer in.
And if that's the great liberation from Microsoft's tyranny... well, count me out. I'll stay here where at least I still have _some_ choice. I can at least understand the Linux crowd to that end, since Linux _is_ free of proprietary crap and vendor lock-ins. But Apple? Gimme a break. They're twice as bad nowadays as MS and IBM put together ever were.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The above was al least informative. What an insult that it was modded zero at my time of reading.
What a lot of absolute crap that is. Cisco products are incredibly flexible and beautifully engineered. They are reasonably complex devices though, and are not designed for simpletons.
because the clone makers only marketed to current Mac users. Look in any Macworld magazine from that era and the first ad you see is Power Computing. The cloners did not try to expand into new areas and create their own customers, they simply stole Apple's. That is why Apple pulled the plug. If Motorola or Umax had made inroads into corporate America or overseas markets then there would still be clones today.
I had to stop RTFA because the opinions in it are just as flawed as the opinions it tries to dispell.
Remember, this was 1984. IBM was just introducing the IBMPC-AT. This had a new hardware design, using a 16-bit expansion slot, backward compatible to the existing 8-bit PC-XT slot. New hardware would be needed to take advantage of it. Compaq had just started gaining ground as the first successful clone of the IBMPC. IBM had not yet decided to change the hardware architecture of the PC with MCA. There was no VESA localbus, nor PCI. The IBMPC-AT used the new 80286, which had bugs in it at the top end of its address range (the phantom 64K thing, HMA). It was mostly compatible, but there had to be patches of software to fix it. There also had to be new versions compiled to take advantage of the new features of the chip. In short, the PC industry was still new.
The TRS-80, Apple II, Amigas, and their clones were still around. The Apple II was old and tired, being 7 years old. Introducing the Mac was a breakthrough.
If Apple had made the hardware open, and licenced the software OS, there WOULD have been clone manufacturers to appear to fill the need. If that was the case, then we all could be using Macintoshes today instead of the PC, and they would be as cheap as today's PC's. The trick was to do this early, before the world settled on one particular architecture.
The article referenced here is just presenting another opinion, and one that, in my opinion, is wrong.
The trolls are out in force today.
Karma Schmarma
And a Kia costs less than a Lexus. You could buy a 486 on ebay. A $380 computer is going to be crap.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
Apple and Microsoft have had and always will have two different visions:
Apple is about creating the most useful computer possible. Apple's forays into software always have been to create the tools they need to achieve this goal.
Microsoft is about selling the most needed software to hardware manufacturers, large corporations, and end users in that order.
I've always respected Apple for sticking to what they do well. Remember, back in the early-mid 90s, NeXT started to be a better apple... then quit the hardware business and tried to become and OS vendor. It was a miserable failure and was eventually folded into Apple.
-- $G
If the clones just ate up Apple's share of the existing Mac market then killing them was the right thing to do. If on the other hand they were growing the market by providing reasonably priced Macs then Apple was foolish. This would have been the point to bow out of the hardware game and provide the OS while Power, Motorola, etc beat each other up trying to sell the fastest and cheapest hardware.
You know what they say...
if only my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle.
"If onlys" are stupid.
It's no surprise that the author and rest of the large unwashed bokanovskified masses haven't thought about what's running in their high tech vehicles or other devices. Odds are its qnx, tron or some other non-MS OS.
But let's put a bullet through that myth: 90% of the worlds computers != 90% of the world's desktop computers.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Whoa, what an incredible flashback I just had. The first IBM PC that I was able to get my hands on at work (had a broken "hard-card") so I told the user it "had to go into the shop", brought it back to the office, stuck in a 3270? emulator card, plonked it down on top of our IBM 5520 dedicated word-processing mini, plugged in the twin-ax and fired it up as a terminal. HA!
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
The the author made the point that licensing would not work because PCs were incapable of running the mac os. What about making mac clones? What about modifying the pc to include video cards that could run the mac os?
At that point, I decided that the author didn't know what he was talking about, and quit reading...
I note the article makes no mention of Xerox or Star.
The question is, if Xerox had tried to mass produce Star, rather than renting it out for an extreme cost, then would we even be considering Apple/IBM PC computers.
It was only really after it had failed that Steve Jobbs was shown it at PARC, giving him the inspiration (and the court cases tried to prove even more) for the Mac.
And let's review, kiddos: has Microsoft "gotten" this extraordinarily simple idea -- the central insight behind the 1984 Mac OS release?
Does the standard Windows API include dialogs that handily address 99.7 percent of all the situations you need in something like, oh, a Word processor? Or are your applications littered with shoddily-written, badly-contructed dialogs that force the user to wade through double negatives and ambiguous choices in order to do things like save a .csv file from Excel? How consistent are the menu options you get?
This isn't just a matter of Apple having the control to make its OS for a limited range of systems. That Excel example is real: the choices you get when saving to any format other than Excel are ridiculously muddled, and have been for several generations of the program. In Word, the outline features have always been at war with the style features -- and we never, never have any sort of consistency across the basic Office products in how they do stuff. This is in Microsoft's flagship products.
Do a mental tally of how many developers you think truly understand and accept the importance of consistent API. They're impatient with it, by and large. To wit: Linux. Apple really does understand this, and seemingly very few other companies do. Heck, big brand software makers bring in scads of money just changing their interface and releasing new whole-number releases. (We know where you live, Adobe.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Suppose, just for a moment that Microsoft, not Apple, is the odd company. We all like to think that phenomenal success is our American Birthright. But how common, in business, is it truly? I'm not given to believing in "natural monopolies" so I'm less forgiving of MicroSoft that the Ashcroft Justice Dept.
Building a business, and doing it on your terms, is a crushingly hard thing to do. Apple has done this.
Microsoft has not so much built a business as slashed their way through the competition and many laws: being a monopoly -that is to say, flouting capitalism, the free market and the legal system- is a relatively easy thing to do if you are greedy, rapacious and possess little scruples.
So the question isn't "What rational decisions should Apple have made to be like MicroSoft?" That just gives MicroSoft a pass on their criminal behaviour (crimes proven in a court of law and never disputed) because it assumes that MicroSoft did not commit crimes and deal underhandedly to get where it is today.
For Apple to be as successful (sic) as MicroSoft they would have had to fight as dirty and be as ruthless as MicroSoft. They would have had to commit the same crimes.
While MicroSoft was busy perfecting corporate weapons and tactics, Apple was busy perfecting engineering. Apple deserves to be successful on those terms. They are.
Just do what you do best
Arnold "Red" Auerbach.
you misspelled "Steve Ballmer."
Apple is a publicly held company. As such its mission to to return value to its shareholders. Size, marketshare, dominance over MS are irrelevent as long as the company achieves value for its share holders.
Apple at 2% of the PC market providing a 20% gain to its shareholders is a more successful company than a hypothetical one with 80% market share and only 10% return to customers. Thats a simplified example. There are lots of other variables to shareholder value, but the analogy holds.
In fact, shareholders don't care about Macs. If Apple were to be a better investment as a IPod/content distributor than a computer maker, then the shareholders would force the company that way.
Back in the "day", for X $$$ a Mac was SO much slower than a PC it was pathetic. I used to do support for a mixed Mac-PC lab and I always thought the Macs were broken they were so slow. I hated them with a passion. When they WOULD do something it was what they thought you really wanted them to do, not what you actually typed/clicked.
If you force your software into every desk computer, and then fail to patch it, you are screwing people, they lose money, and services they paid for.
It is really evial, especially considering there are people running critical systems on Windows, because of great marketing that convinces them they can.
The references I gave talk more about the general GUI concept as popularized by the Mac, but we can talk about icons specifically. First, what do we mean my icon? For this post, when I refer to an icon, I'm talking about a graphical representation of an object (file, text, etc) that can be maneuvered and manipulated using the mouse. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Xerox used icons to represent "actions" rather than "objects" (kinda like a toolbar). Unfortunately, I can't find the reference right now.
This source claims that " the Apple work extended PARC's considerably, adding windows that can be overlapped, manipulable icons and..." This source quotes an unnamed Lisa developer: "[the Xerox Star] didn't use icons at all..."
Now that's not to say the Xerox didn't come up with, and develop, the idea on their own - I'm just supplying evidence to counter the convential wisdom that Apple got all of their GUI ideas from PARC. I believe that Raskin, Tessler, and a lot of the PARC/Apple GUI people knew each other before the formation of PARC and Apple, and it was likely that they were all working off concepts they had researched in the 60's and early 70's. (of course that doesn't mean Apple didn't think they were stealing ideas - supposedly Mac programmers spent lots of time working on overlapping/self-repairing windows because they thought they saw that at PARC, but it turns out they didn't:)
Heck, even Jobs openly admits that at PARC, they showed him three things, and he was so blinded by the GUI that he didn't even notice the other two (OO programing, and networking).But you have to look at the context of the trip: the GUI was new to Jobs, but not to Raskin. Raskin convinced Jobs to go on the trip, not to "discover" the GUI, but because Jobs kept trying to kill the Mac project, and Raskin wanted him to see an implementation of a GUI so he could see for himself that it wasn't a waste of time.
You also have to look at the context of the interview: Jobs was cementing his status as "Father of the Macintosh." Raskin had a few comments on the interview (Search for "Raskin" and then scroll up a little bit), and later Cringley acknowledged Raskin's contributions.
I don't see anything that leads me to believe that Apple didn't get the idea of a GUI directly from PARC.Go read Michael S. Malone's Infinite Loop:How Apple, The World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane . It goes into great detail about the origins of the Mac.
So...there IS a market out there for Apple hardware, that isn't necessarily assoc. with their OS.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Depends. Processor speeds have been stagnant for a long while now, and hardware prices are quite low. With the exception of a high end video card, there's no reason to believe that a business couldn't put together a reasonable system for $380, especially buying the parts from a commercial supplier.
It's been a long time.
That apple wouldn't have been MS if they had licenced their OS a very defendable position. In fact the OS was SO stable compared to early version of windows BECAUSE it was designed for very specific hardware. Trying to make it run on clone hardware (with plug and pray in mind and also the computer-illiteracy of many early mac users) probably sound simpler than it sounds. Stability would have had to suffer.
The most important part I think was not the licencing question, but the fact that the "look and feel" was not copywritable at the time. Just think what would have happened if Apple had had the patent on the "windowed gui application browsing system".
Nicely formatted except for parenthesis within parenthesis, typing "quote unquote" and "so thus," and putting punctuation outside of quotation marks. Dude needs to take a grammar usage and style class.
Sure it is. So? The point is that Apple does not compete in that market, and shows no interest in doing so. There are a lot of people I would recommend a $380 computer too, because they don't need anything more. (Well, they might need to run a current version of Word...) Apple is intentionally keeping itself out of that market, which can be a gateway market into faster computers.
This may be a good business choice, but it is definitely a limiting one.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I've done a few stints in Apple QA, and it seems to me its "mission" has changed dramatically since the second coming of Jobs.
Prior to that, the ethos was "get it right", so OS delays could (and would) stretch for months. But when I returned to a re-Jobsed Apple, I immediately noticed the difference - the ethos having changed to a "get it out" attitude. "We can fix it later".
Now, normally, I'd have thought that's a piss poor attitude to take for QA, but in truth, it's served Apple well. They've had several projects (the words "Power Express" still cause much gnashing of teeth in Cupertino) which meandered their product cycles being perfected and refined, until they were ultimately cancelled. There's a lot to be said for a short, strict project schedule. Apple have promised Tiger for 1st half 2005, and you know what? It'll ship in the 1st half 2005.
That said, I'm always staggered at the attention to detail in their QA. I remember a bug report being logged against Copland because it was thought its blinking smiley Mac might cause offense in some cultures. Not many companies (especially in the consumer marketplace) exhibit that kind of pedantry.
Compare the specs of the emac and then that POS and it's a no brainer. That was such a ridiculous example it's funny. Most students I know would rather spend a little extra to get something that's not going to die on them 3 weeks after they bought it, in the middle of writing a paper.
I haven't heard of that one before.
"Form should follow function...unless it's just plain ugly."
In 1988 I had a system with an ATI EGA Wonder 800 card. This card could do 800x600 in 16 colors, which was significantly beyond what the equivalent Macintosh hardware could do, which was 1 bit monochrome in 512x384. This card was nothing special.
The first color Mac was introduced in 1987, and the second model (IIx) didn't come out until September 1988. Incidentally my system was about $700. The Macintosh II would have run close to $4k in that time frame. The max resolution was 640x480x256. Of course, you could just as easily have bought a VGA card that supported high resolutions, if cost were no object. Virtually no one owned the above - let's compare apples to apples. (heh heh)
Where does this 'square pixel' shit come from? Because at low resolutions they were blocky looking? That applied to both a Macintosh and clone PC. Are you trying to imply that Macintoshes had round pixels. Please...continue...entertain me.
Most Macintoshes had sucky video compared to PCs, the IBM compatible systems just didn't know what to do with it.
System 7 was a buggy piece of shit and didn't settle down for a long time. You're welcome to it. I liked 6.0.x - or 7.5.3, far better. By the time 8 came around, I gave up on Macintoshes.
GEOS for the PC was released in November 1990, sadly after Windows 3.0, which had already taken over the PC GUI world by then.
Bzzzzt. You lose on the facts, dude. Mac zealot.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
There is a reason, and it's explained (rather well) in the article. If you're intelligent enough to grasp it, I encourage you to read it.
Other posters (posers?!?) have come close. The success of the Apple ][, Word and Excel. The original article was close. Until the IBM PC the PC market was populated by enthusiasts and hobbyist, how many Apple ][s did you see at work?!? IBM gave the PC credibility, and since it was from Big Blue it was a 'safe' choice for businesses to purchase. From this point forward it was corporate America that drove the PC market.
I am not sure what Apple's strategy was for the Business Market, but thumbing their nose at them with the 1984 commercial did not help. Nor did their significantly higher prices, irregardless of how superior the Mac was to the PC, which it was vastly so until Win 3.11. Apple's Education Strategy was excellent but the American Education system could not compete with Corporate America, especially since so much funding came from Corporate America
Corporate Manager, do I buy 1000 PCs from IBM or from some hobby computer maker called Apple... oh and the ones from Apple are significantly more expensive??
The bitter Irony of so much of this tale is hard to take. The Mac was the computer for the 'people', it was so easy to use, so user friendly, so much easier to use than PC DOS. Of course Apple stole the GUI from Xerox but hey let's not quibble. Word and Excel were originally Mac products, and in fact became the dominant Word Processor and Spreadsheet on Mac well before the PC.
It wasn't Open vs Closed, hell the average person making the purchase decision did not even know what that was. It was safety (IBM vs some crazy company started in some guys garage) and price, but mostly price. If the IBM PC and the Mac were the exact same price in 1984 and Apple had aggresively pursued the Business Market instead of thumbing their noses at them I would be writing this on a Apple product right now.
You just totally missed the point. I'm not saying that a $380 computer is as powerfull as an iMac. They're not competing on the same grounds.
But fact is that Apple is not competing on $380 computers, and have never shown an interest in doing so.
This low-level entry point exist only for PCs, and is certainly is a gateway for more expensive PCs. I mean, being a student and having $500 to put in a computer, I'm going to buy that one. It'll give me poor performances maybe, but I will learn and get my first computer experience on a PC. What do you think will be my next computer? Will I want to re-learn everything from scratch by changing platforms? Or will I go through the path of least resistance and just "upgrade" to a faster PC?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I think your sale person just wanted the extra commission.
I've went through two sys upgrades already on that 512MB of RAM and I'll probably do another with Tiger coming next yr.
So I will dare to say the Apple Basic Config is usable.
... I already did that to one of mine:
:)
My MacQuarium
Sig: I stole this sig.
Take a mature desktop package of Linux and you can install it without ever needing to look at a CLI. In fact, if you're doing a vanilla installation, or you don't care about losing the OS on your machine, you can do it without even knowing about things like disk partitioning.
I'll use SuSE as an example (although there are other distributions that are equally comptetent in this area). You can walk into a shop, or go to Amazon and buy a boxed copy of SuSE Personal Edition 9.1, with nice friendly manuals, then go home, stick the DVD (or CD, both are supplied) in your drive, and be up and running with a nice, friendly desktop, in a little over an hour. You can install software off the CD, or via RPM, without ever seeing a command line. You can do pretty much any normal day to day function without ever seeing a command line. If I took the shell icon away from any of the fifty or so people I've installed a linux desktop for they wouldn't even notice.
However, the reason you'll see most *nix gee - er users regularly gazing at a command line is because we like it, and quite frequently it can accomplish things much quicker than using a GUI.
Oh, remind me how I quickly find the IP address of a Windows XP machine again? Oh, never mind, I remember, [Windows Key]+R, cmd [enter], ipconfig [enter]. Command lines will always have a place in any decent OS, because they are useful. If they weren't, they'd have disappeared with the advent of the GUI.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
I was already a Unix geek in the mid '80's and that is how my fellow Unix geeks felt. Except we felt if it wasn't X11 we didn't want to touch it.
There is no "Windows world", there is only the real world. Who competes with Microsoft's OS? Apple does, with MacOS. So do the various Linux and BSD vendors.
On the hardware side, Apple competes with Dell, Compaq/HP, Gateway and the rest. On top of that, Apple also competes with Adobe (and others) for application software revenue.
So, rather than competing with nobody, it looks like Apple is competing with *everbody*.
[ReidNews]
No your missing my point, Most new computer users are not going to search out the best deal on some website like that, their going to go down to their local retailer. Compared to what the other mftrs are selling on the shelf, the emac is very comparable. Sure you can find a cheaper pc if you look hard enough, but that's not the entry level pc that Apple is competing against. They are going against entry level machines from emachines, dell, hp, compaq etc, not some off brand. Not to mention most college students I know have more disposal cash, and are more then willing to hit the parents up for cash for a computer, or the parents are going to buy it for them
Well, at Amazon.com, eMachines start up at $400, Compaq at $315, HP at $500 (with a screen). So I guess your $699 iMac is still way out of league.
Of course, I'm only comparing stuff above 1.3GHz.
My point still stand. With a 1.3GHz Athlon and 256MB RAM, you still have a system more than capable. Apple don't do it.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Also Keep in MInd ... How many companieshave competed against: IBM, Microsoft, Intel, HP, Compaq, Kaypro, Tandy, Zenith, NEC, Sony, Toshiba, Packard Bell, AMD among others AND is still standing?
So, if Apple licensed, they still would've competed against them and may have still 'lost.'
At least this way, they had their crown jewels to live to fight another fight.
Link please, because the cheapest new one, in stock, I see there is $449. Add in a CRT that's comparable to the one on the emac and your still talking between 600 -700. A 100 price range is not a deal killer, even for a "poor student." Also remember that a 1.25 GHZ G4 is comparable to a 2 ghz P4 or Athlon 2700, none of these duron crap. I said it's priced competively, now quit showing me the cheapest crap out there and show me one with the comparable specs. Make sure it has the same amount of PC 2700 RAM, hdd, firewire, PC, Speakers, Ehternet, Modem 2700, comparable bundled software (no OS only deal) Also let me know if theirs aby rebate forms, as the $450 emachine I see does have one. Good luck getting that back.
I feel almost silly pointing this out a day late, but...
There was a NeXTSTEP for Intel. At some point NeXT decided they couldn't make it as a hardware company, sold off their plants, canned their hardware design folks, and ported everything to the PC. It worked really, really well, except for the sales part.
You could even buy it pre-installed on some ( Compaq?? ) PC-maker's boxen back in the day ( like, 1993?? ), before M$ exclusive licensing deals helped kill it off.
Seriously. Where the hell where you? Why didn't you buy it? It was freekin' great. Everyone was too busy talking about this "awesome" WindowsNT thing, so I didn't get to start programming Objective-C again for another 10 years...
If y'all are wondering why Jobs is so hesitant to push out Yellow Box ( aka "OS X for Intel" ), you might look into the history of NeXTSTEP for Intel to learn why.
As for education OS, my university's computer music program was where I first saw NeXT machines, but I guess the very fact that they had a computer music program points out that it wasn't your typical fund-starved school, perhaps...
My bad for the prices, that was used ones ;-(. As for CRTs, you can find some for around $120 (Here).
eMachines at $400
Compaq at $430
HP for $530
So that sums up to $520 for the eMachines one. Oh! And where do you find iMacs for $699? I'm just out of an Apple store and the iMacs start at $799 (as you can see Here).
So that rolls up to $280 difference. More than half the price of the PC.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I said it's priced competively, now quit showing me the cheapest crap out there and show me one with the comparable specs
That's not the point. The point is to prove that you can buy a PC for less than a Mac. Of course, the PC will have lower performance. But the point is, the entry-level PC market begins lower than the entry-level Mac.
At equivalent prices, you will have equivalent performances, bundles, etc... Nobody pretended anything else.
The point is, if I have only $500 bucks, I have no choice but to go with a PC. Then, from that point, I am molded to the PC interface and my (me, dummy user) next machine will most likely be another PC, because I'm lazy by nature.
This just tend to indicate that these lower-end PCs can help getting users to go the MS route instead of the Mac route. Hence, more dynamic for the PC.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Only the HP you have listed is really comparable and the true out of pocket cost is $579. (Good luck at actually getting that rebate fulfilled) Now Add in a 17 inch Flat Screen CRT, either using your price of 120 for an Offbrand KDS, or the price of a Comparable HP from the same site for 180, and your looking at between $700-780.
I never said you could get an Emac for $699, you did. In fact in my 1st post I very clearly put the price at $799. I never said you couldn't find a cheaper pc, I just said that apple is very price competive in these 2 areas. Hell I would dare say all areas, if you were actually willing to compare specs, and not just throw any old trash up as your evidence.
Entry level does not mean cheapest. In fact I would argue that your sub 300 pc's are not good for entry level, but rather 2nd or 3rd machines for experienced users, because more then likely they use no standard hardware, funky drivers, crappy restore routines etc. They might be fine for you and me who knows how to twist their arms to make them work, but for grandma.
Now that we've put the desktops to rest do you want to compare notebooks? I will say it very clearly for you, both the Emacs and the ibook are matched very competively for their specs. Heres a comparison on 12 inch portables from compusa, Look who has some of the most inexpensive notebooks in that category:
http://www.compusa.com/products/products.asp?N=200 006+502423+4294958206&Ne=301257&CusaNe=200004/
In fact the only PC cheaper than Apple in that list is an off brand.
So Microsoft (ONCE) releases a major update for Windows XP, and suddenly it's a saint.
That's fine. Apple's 10.1 was free to all users of 10.1 (although if you weren't lucky enough to be able to drop by a computer store that had the CDs to give away for free you might have had to pay $20 for shipping and handling.) Another one-time major upgrade. And that's even assuming that you don't think that all of the updates between 10.3.0 and 10.3.5 constitute as much of an upgrade as XP and XP SP 2.
So what do I win?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I'm tired of saying the same thing 100 times. See here
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I know which I'd prefer, but hey, I can't rule either possibility out.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
First, where i come from. Best OS out now. Mac OS X, will I ever buy a Mac to use it NO. I didn't bother finishing the article because it seemed off from the start. Now to explain these things. MS will probably be the only Monopoly in history to have such control and then lose it through incompetent management. MS did not beat Mac.IBM GAVE it's x86 architecture to the world. Why? They don't sell many PCs now. Maybe they forsaw that a market like the current competitive x86 hardware market would evolve at some point. So they free x86. Clones start appearing and prices drop. Businesses buy x86 PCs because they are cheaper and a Spiffy GUI with awesome multimedia isn't required. Geeks also use x86 because it is cheap and oyu can get the software from someone for free. (Up to today . . .) Apple tries too late to allow clones and from another post I see they changed their mind and dumped the idea. It was probably too late anyway.MS rides unchallenged atop the x86 PC surge and we get the pitifull state of the world today. Simple.
OS X is the best. Strength of a posix based architecture allows for stability, secure networking, reliable servers. Postscript based Gui user friendly and preforms very well graphically and is condusive to printing.Can run Linux/Unix apps plus Apples own formidible softwear. Maybe the GUI is to easy for some (me) but it can run KDE!
I will never buy a Mac. Even though it is the best, it is too expensive, and . . . that's pretty much it, and I can't try it on my PC now can I? In all actuallity, NeXT ran on x86 hardware, OS X should be able to also. Aperantly Apple doesn't want it to.
Plus X will help linux grow as 3rd party vendors might as well make their apps run on Linux if they develop for X. Not much of a step.So in the Future I'll be able to run Linux at a level equal to the Mac in some areas, and exceeding it in others. Finally, I wouldn't want to hang out with all the Mac Zealots. Self righteous design majors make me wanna kick em sometimes.
Mac would never have been MS. Because MS was there, it probably would have been better for the world. Healthy competition would have given us over all better products at lower prices. Perish to think, MS might have even started making good product! Mmm, . . doubt it. It would probably end up the cheaper solution. (Get what you pay for) I think Mac is happy in their niche. Hell, their fans are more loyal to Mac than thier own parents, maybe even their offspring . . .
Finally, compare Mac to Cicso? Please, might as well compare it to watches, game consoles and real fruit.( would oranges have been as popular today it they had licenced pulp? Bu they did! Some prefer the grapefruit!) Apples and Gas Giants baby. (couldn't think of anything more different.)
Apple always competed in the highend/cutting edge areas of the creative world. There's not one graphic design firm in the country that's not running Macs. When dektop publishing became feasible it was on the mac first. Same with desktop video editting. If it weren't for Adobe and Quark apple wouldn't be anywhere. of course without Apple's hardware neither would adobe or Quark... Anyway all this blathering that apple is only marketed towards "people who want to look cool" is ridiculous. And now that final cut pro is doing well and apple owns shake, it would seem that Apple's positioning itself the way SGI was in the 80's in term of video industry market share. People buy Macs for the software they run not the pretty interface.
Had Apple licensed 10 years earlier they may have had better results. By the mid-1990s people had chosen their sides.
During the mid-1980s, if you wanted a nice GUI on a PC, you needed GEM from Digital Research. It was quite popular at the time. GEM didn't offer the user anything except a Mac-like GUI. (No benefits in terms of compatibility, etc.)
Developers accustomed to text-based interfaces were terrified of GUIs, though, because the APIs were so huge, compared to the interfaces they were used to.
In the late 1980s, there was huge demand for a GUI on PCs. It was being partially met by text-based windowing, which developers were able to produce using products like Borland's Turbo Pascal.
In 1989, Microsoft came out with Windows 286, which was a pretty lousy product all round, but it showed some promise. In 1992, they released Windows 3.1. It was a bit flaky, and nowhere near as good as MacOS was at that time, but Microsoft gave away a huge number of copies in order to create an installed base, and Borland released Windows versions of Pascal and C++ with a library called OWL, making it reasonably easy to develop for the Windows API.
Then Microsoft came out with Visual Basic (a bought-in product, interestingly), and suddenly it was easier to program for Windows than it had been for DOS. GUI programming was no longer frightening! Within a short time, the market was flooded with useful Windows applications (none of which were portable to any other OS), and Apple was doomed to also-ran status.
What I think is that Apple should have ported its APIs to the PC and created an Apple-look-alike OS for Intel machines by the late 1980s. They should have made sure that the PC version worked well with Apple floppies and file formats, and looked as much as possible like the "real thing". It wouldn't have had to be as good as the OS running on Apple's own hardware - just better than all the GUIs and GUI-like interfaces running on Intel PCs They should have licenced that OS freely, to make sure they dominated in the PC GUI market (which would have been easy for them, because of the strength of their brand).
If they had done this, they would have raised the bar of entry for Microsoft high enough that Windows 3.1 would not have been ready for the market in 1992, (and probably not 1993 or 1994, either). Alan Cooper would probably have prototyped Visual Basic on the Mac OS, instead of on an early version of Windows, and the rest would have been Alternate History.
I reckon if Apple had followed the above strategy, the most likely outcome is that they would completely dominate the desktop today: 90% or more of desktop OSs and 10, 20% or more of hardware. They would also be able to sell components to PC OEMs to make their (the OEM's) products "compatible".
This isn't hindsight. It's what I used to tell anyone who would listen at the time (not the predictions of 90%, etc., but the suggestion of licencing a version of MacOS on Intel).
I wish they had just got Apples, that way they have a much diminished chance of getting a virus simply by checking movie times online or whatever. And i would have spent a lot less of my valuable spare time removing viruses or rebuilding PCs
I own a XP machine that I use for gaming, but I use my ibook for important work, as I don't have to patch that nearly as often to keep it safe online.
I was a systems programmer in 1986 on an IBM 4381 and bought a Mac + and an AppleLine 3270 - made my mac into an IBM 3270 terminal. The M+ was $2495 and the AppleLine was $1000.
I also bought two 1200 baud modems so I could work at home - it was totally cool dialing into the mainframe, all my friends were impressed!
The IBM customer engineers were totally blown away when they saw it - they thought it was cool.
The sales engineer (EVERYONE @ IBM in those days was SOME kind of engineer) was unimpressed and told the IT Director that I was probably not a "team player" and management should take a close look at my career path.
Ask Me About... The 80's!
ciao
Wired Mag (pro-Mac even before Slashdot jumped on the bandwagon :)
I dont care if apple wants to rule the computer world. i just set up a pc for a client and after two hours of downloading updates and setups. i found that i had 32 instances of malware installed (detected by adware) i have a hardware firewall and antivirus installed. my powerbook has been running for 3 years now and i havnt had one malware spyware or adware installed on it. after last night i truely feel sorry for PC users. connecting your PC to the internet is like throwing a naked virgin into a room full of horny barbarians.
The answer is really absurdly simple. Say or believe what you want about him but you can't hide from the fact that Bill Gates has always been a better or more savvy marketeer than Steve Jobs. That is why Microsoft has its majority share of the market and Apple gets the scraps. To begin with Bill was born with a "silver spoon" in his mouth and had more capital to work with than Apple to promote his products. He also was smart to go with the industry leader whose name was synonymous with computers and capitalize on it - IBM. Apple was something you ate, not did your work on. In the early days, the fact that you could own an IBM computer and place it on your desktop was enough to sell it without any much any other consideration other than price. Many people didn't care if it worked so long as it had that IBM logo as it made them look "professional." It was a status symbol. Microsoft rode that status symbol right to the top via Bill Gates excellent marketing skills. That is not to say that Steve's were bad. It's just that Bill's were superior and more focused. Bill has always been a businessman. With Bill it has always been about making money and running a business. With Steve it started off with just having a good time and it was about technology. Steve evolved into the businessman. So in reality Bill got a head start - about 20 years, from the time he was born. You can debate all the mistakes, all the lucky breaks, all the missed opportunities, all the technical issues, judgment and values issues, but in my opinion the answer is that simple - Bill Gates is the better marketeer - because he was trained to be since birth.
This was my first post on the subject.
:-)
You're half right, though.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
I would say, in the last paragraph, GUI is what you actually meant to say.
Certainly, in my oppinion, there are more developers who "understand and accept the importance of consistent API" than those that do so with GUI.
The exchange rate is what messes up Mac prices in Canada. I suppose they could sell them at a lower margin here, but that could start causing cross-border problems where people start ordering Macs from Canada because they're cheaper.
And, as others mentioned, $2,799 is for a G5. There's an eMac for $1049, iMac for $1749, and notebooks from $1449. I don't care that you have a 17-inch CRT already -- you didn't give the complete picture.
Interestingly, the product that WOULD have worked well for you was probably a G4 cube or a G4 desktop. They're still available.
I originally bought a mac while I lived in the U.S. It's an expensive habit to retain in Canada -- I originally purchased my 17" powerbook for $5200 in May 2003. The upgraded model in November was $4200 -- and 80% of that price drop was due to exchange rate. Now they're $3700, though this time mostly due to Apple's drop vs. exchange. Whatcha gonna do. I enjoy it much more than the Thinkpad I have at work, so much so that I bring it to work and work off the PB. One can get from point A to point B in style with an Acura, but some people want a BMW.
-Stu
People like to refer to the el-cheapo PC's as reason why Apple's computers are so overpriced. My rule of thumb is usually that a Mac is around 15-20% slower (in CPU, not I/O) than the top PC available at the time for around $500 more. This used to hold true in the U.S., I think it's more like $200-300 now, but it still holds true in Canada to some degree.
CanadaComputers.com, probably one of the cheapest sites to get PC componentry, has an AMD FX-51 system for $2345 , FX-53 for $2689, and a P4 3.4E for $2055.
Certainly these are probably faster CPUs, but a) dual G5s would make up a fair amount of the ground if you're a multitasker vs. just a gamer, b) it would only really matter if CPU was the prime determinant to your purchase. Which is pretty rare except for benchmark freaks -- Graphics, I/O , BUS, and memory speeds matter a lot more for regular workstation use. The G5 fares well there.
Again, Acura , Honda and Toyota have the best "on paper" combination of price/performance/reliability out of almost all of the car makers -- but people sometimes still want a different make for non-quantitative reasons.
-Stu
The whole point of this article was that there have been a number of cries of protest over Apple's treatment of the iTunes Music Store and iPod vs. Real. And popular opinion is again saying that Apple is failing again to "be like Microsoft" or is being "too much like Microsoft", depending on who you talk to.
This article set to debunk that there is any particular "thing" Microsoft did to get where they are. Other than having very smart people (which they started losing but are beginning to draw in again), and illegally perpetuating their position, they just followed good business practice - take advantage of whatever opportunity comes your way. Hindsight turned it into a philosophy of "low price high volume open licensing always wins", which we know CAN be true but not universally so.
-Stu
The console business is totally different from the pc business.
PC hardware: The faster the better. Faster PC => bigger files, faster processing. (In the old days)
Console: All games run on console. No need for faster console (Think: super PS2. double speed, triple memory)
"Application Program Interface" - A series of software routines and development tools that comprise an interface between a computer application and lower-level services and functions (e.g. the operating system, device drivers, and other low-level software). APIs serve as building blocks for programmers putting together software applications. Sometimes called "Application Programming Interface."
You're right that my examples were a muddle, but the API is a huge share of this problem. The API -- at the OS level -- is largely responsible for consistency of user experience and GUI across applications, which is what the parent was talking about. Standard dialogs like "yes no cancel" and save dialogs are all in the API. And the thing is, MS's API-level stuff like this is sadly weak and gets abused all over the place as a result.
The fact that, in Windows 2000 with Lotus Notes here at work, I get one type of save dialog for single attachments and a very different, Windows3-style dialog for multiple attachments -- that's an API weirdness. The fact that everyone uses "yes no cancel" dialogs and then includes descriptions of what "yes" really means on top -- that's an obvious limitation of the OS API. "Yes" should mean yes, and the dialog should be a y/n question if you're using it.
The Windows API just plain seems to include sucky standard dialogs. Take a look at how Windows Control Panels use tabs with "Apply" and "OK" buttons that mean the same thing, and "Close" buttons that mean the same thing as the little X on the upper right. Ugly.
For another example: IE lets me use layering effects, but if I put a select object in a form, that object will always appear above every layer on the Web page, no matter what layer it's on. The select objects are calling a standard object from the Windows API that doesn't respect what IE's doing with layers. That problem has been coming and going with various cuts of Windows and IE for a few generations now.
(If anything Apple's API-level UI advantage went down with OS X -- the old pre-X OS was more mature -- but there's still a big edge for Apple in this area.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
i seemed to have missed something...just what was this release called? and where can i find it?
--A witty sig proves nothing.--