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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."
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!
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.
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.
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Funny you say that... that's exactly the reason I chose the Amiga over the PC, back in the day.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
Didn't they go bankrupt only after Apple decided against continuing to license the MacOS?
But they are related and not totally independent. An increase in Market Share increases profit, all else being equal.
If Apple wants to increase Profit, it needs to increase Market Share. Margins are already too high for 90% of the market. Most of the reasons people will not purchase a Apple is Purchase Price or Market Share.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
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.
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.
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.
I choose a windows PC over apple back in the early 90s because I couldn't stand the macintosh interface, and was familiar with dos. Oh, and that price thing was HUGE back then.
I choose linux over windows in the mid 90s because my early 90s computer couldn't keep up with the latest and greatest windoze offerings. I also had a fetish for the NeXT stations on campus and wanted one for myself. Linux was as close to a NeXT box as I could afford.
I recently choose Apple over PC hardware running GNU/Linux because of the polished interface and better fonts. Apple has also been scratching my NeXT craving quite well lately too.
Actually PC hardware of the day was capable of running a GUI. Windows 3.0 can be run on a 8086. Xerox had a computer at PARC running a GUI in the mid 70s running on consumer grade hardware. In fact, it's a myth that Gates stole the idea of a GUI from Mac OS. They both toured PARC and saw the machine. If anything they both got the idea from Xerox, which they later got (unsucessfully) sued over.
Learn some basic comprehension skills, THEN post. You look like less of a dumbass that way.
It would be a good idea to follow your own advice. You did a good job of comprehending the story, but a bad job of thinking for yourself.
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
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.
Don't forget Daystar. The first (and to my knowledge only) company to make a 4-Way SMP Mac OS machine.
Problem is that Apple didn't start licensing the machines until after they had lost the battle for supremecy. Had Apple licensed 10 years earlier they may have had better results. By the mid-1990s people had chosen their sides. The availability of clones meant that people who were unwilling to pay top dollar for Apple branded upgrades had the choice of buying a clone instead of going over to a Win-PC. They didn't bring many new users over from the windows world because it was too late.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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
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.
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.
There's something profoundly strange about reading an article comparing Apple and Microsoft as proprietary vs. open ;-)
;-)
A more interesting thought experiment (more interesting than I-love-Apple dreaming, that is) would be to imagine a possible world in which Microsoft embraced and developed open standards from the start. Of course there'd be no good business reason for this, but one has to wonder what would have become of OS/2, BeOS, Netscape and other big competitors if they had been able to interoperate with Microsoft products properly.
But then of course the libertarian crew will shout me down for suggesting that a market alone isn't the best way to regulate industries
What's hard is that Apple doesn't really have a competitor in the Macintosh market. In the Windows world, Dell competes against HP who competes against Gateway who competes against Joe Schmoe Computers etc. They all try to make a better product for a cheaper price. Competition inspires innovation (well, Apple can still innovate pretty well).
Then thing in the Apple universe, if you want to buy a computer that can run the Mac OS, you have to buy it from Apple. They can release whatever type of computers they want, for any price they want, and that's what we have to live with if we want to run the Mac OS.
Would allowing clones out there for the rest of the Mac community have helped? Maybe in the long run. The more computers out there built for the Mac OS, the more PowerPC chips being made, the more money for Mot (now IBM), more incentive to invest in chip design and research, and so forth.
I think what we found out when Apple did allow clones was that people who wanted to run the Mac didn't have to have the coolest looking machines with the liquid cooling, flip open doors (okay neither of those existed back then, but...). They just wanted something that was affordable. That's something the clone makers could do. Make something for cheaper and, in the case of Power Computing, cheaper. Apple couldn't keep up and they started to lose market share to the Mac clones (heck, I bought several clones during that time period). Heh, instead of competing with them, they shut down the cloning business.
Oh well, who knows how things would've turned out. I say instead of pushing for licensing and clones, push to have the latest games released simultaneously for Mac and Windows. Most of the people I know buy Windows so they can play games when they're hot. They could care less which platform they do email, web browsing, word processing on. They just want to make sure they can play all the games out there.
There's never enough when you have too little
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.
Actually, I think Apple sees the bigger picture very clearly (the thousands of flakey, low-margin, made-in-Taiwan chipsets, each with its own set of hardware bugs to work around, the risk inherent in competing directly with Microsoft, the inevitable mass piracy eating most of the profits, and the fact that every resulting problem would be blamed on Apple) and they want no part of it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
Well to begin with, two of the core ideas of liberalism :)
That's Libertarianism, not liberalism...
torn between the Ayn Rand nonsense and common sense.
Yeah, can't argue that there. Some libertarians turn libertarianism into a cult of Ayn Rand. It's embarassing some times.
Personally, I'm open to minimal regulations. There's quite a few Libertarians who also happen to engage in realism. But really, the main reason I asked you this question, is I didn't see how your comment related to this:
A more interesting thought experiment (more interesting than I-love-Apple dreaming, that is) would be to imagine a possible world in which Microsoft embraced and developed open standards from the start. Of course there'd be no good business reason for this, but one has to wonder what would have become of OS/2, BeOS, Netscape and other big competitors if they had been able to interoperate with Microsoft products properly.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
I think you're thinking of Windows XP
Apple's UI has always been done in-house. Their HI guidelines are probably the most comprehensive ever published outside of academia.
Frog did once design hardware for Apple...they designed most of the beige "Pizza box" style Apple machines in the late '80s/early '90s (before the iMac.) Those machines looked nothing like today's curvy/shiny/artsy Macs; they look like any other PCs. So far as I can tell, thier work for Apple ended with Steve Jobs and the iMac.
Me too.. and, while we're at it, I'll nitpick a chunk of the otherwise-excellent article at DF:
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.
The Amiga had all this, along with much better colour support, far superior sound hardware, some rudimentary hardware acceleration for graphics, and pre-emptive multitasking.
What they didn't have, was a parent company with any scruples, so out it went... but the Amiga 1000 smoked the Macintosh back in the day.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
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.
And what, pray tell, would an Intel processor be able to do with 64k of 68000 machine code?
Half-kidding, of course-- any clones would also have had to run on 68k processors. Some of the parts would have been available off the shelf, but people forget just how much of an integrated custom job the original Mac was. In fact, the Mac team scoffed at IBM's use of off-the-shelf parts in the PC.
In the case of MS it only takes a handful of people to add up to a controlling stake in the company
This isn't about control. Yes, it's true that if Microsoft stock tanks, Gates and Allen and Ballmer would lose more money than your average investor. On the other hand, if you're the average investor and your retirement drops from $300k to $100k, that's horrible. If the Gates fortune drops from $30B to $10B, I think he'll be okay.
Nonesense. The top tier of MS are pathological liars and have proven themselves to be without any morals whatsoever. The are scum of the lowest order.
I almost didn't respond because this pathetically narrow-minded statement makes the post seem like a garden-vareity slashdot troll. But you did at least bother quoting and making a point or two, so I'll respond in kind. Gates alone has given vast amounts to charity. You can say "Yeah, but that's about tax-deductions and publicity" and without extended research, I can't logically refute your statement. But I don't believe it either. Besides which, it doesn't matter all that much. A starving man who's fed doesn't starve simply because his food was tax-deductible or made the donor look good. Gates' philanthropy has done a lot of good, whether you attribute it to pure motives or not.
But the bottom line is, I challenge you to name examples of ways in which Ballmer, Gates, and Allen are "without morals" and "scum of the lowest order". Failing to patch buffer-overflows isn't evil. Throwing your weight around to gain market share isn't evil. Genocide is evil. Slavery is evil. Rape is evil. If you have some genuine issue with these people, not just "Windoze is teh sux0r!!1!" or "They say the FUD about Linux!" or Monopoly! Big corporation!" then bring in some cites, not rhetoric.
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
Also, I'm interested when you say you're "open to minimal regulations". Do you count forcing open standards upon IT companies as "minimal"?
Unless a point could be made that it would protect the public from material harm, no. But there are other ways government can encourage Open Standards without force. Below...
For Microsoft to have embraced open standards to the extent that they couldn't have monopolised the OS and Office markets, the US Government would have had to prosecute any company that published any software in the USA that didn't allow full interoperation. That, on the face of it, seems like a pretty huge move into the market to me, akin to forcing car companies to make it easy for 3rd party spare parts manufacturers, or even forcing all businesses in impoverished areas to invest a certain percentage of their revenue in the local economy. All of them can be argued for on grounds of stimulating the market, which is perhaps (I'm guessing) how you'd justify any minimal regulation of the market.
No, I wouldn't go about it with that justification. I believe Open Standards could have been(and can now) pushed through a governmental policy of only purchasing software based on Open Standards, as well as only doing business with and granting grants to, companies who embraced open standards as well.
Do you see now how they were related?
After the above I do. Interesting, I didn't quite read your first post that way.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
Ah, so there would have been one more company building "macintoshes". That would have totally changed the landscape of computing as we know it.
Wow, that reality distortion field really has affected you.
One company would have been the start. There would have been others. Apple would be better off today.
Apple would not have been able to produce their product had they been beholden to a legacy userbase or a manufacturing parter (which would take away all their profits, just like happened in the Mid-90's with the cloning fiasco).
Apple (especially when it's under the leadership of Jobs) doesn't care about a legacy userbase. Remember the "Apple ][ Forever" slogan?
Upon Jobs's return, Apple suddenly stopped caring about its partnerships with UMAX, Power Computing, APS, Daystar & Radius. Back in the 1980s they would have been just as free to fuck over any partner as they were in the 1990s.
OK, you read the article. You did NOT understand it.
I read it, and I understood it, but I DISAGREE with it.
4 years ago, I was the second most prolific Mac repairman in the Pittsburgh area. I still have all of the stuff that I got from Apple. I have my certificates for progressing through their "Learn & Earn" program. I still have my "Apple Specialist" lapel pin. As I type this, I'm completing the install of Mandrake 9.1 on a Mac that I custom built myself from two dead iMacs.
As much as I may have once loved Apple. They blew their chance. Refusing to license when it would have benefitted the platform was one of their great mistakes(IMHO, the greatest).
Are there any other misconception that I may disabuse you of?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.)
...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
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
;-)
Good idea! Too bad Jobs already thought of it. Anyone who's programmed for Mac OS X should instantly recognize all the NeXT APIs from back in those days. Nearly every API is *exactly* the same, right down to the byte length of the parameters. The only thing that's changed, is that the look of the widgets is far less "Unixy" than NeXT every was.
NeXT OS is not dead. It has merely evolved into a higher plain of existance.
P.S. For laughs, try typing "man open" in the Terminal application. The man page should give you some nice background on how the command originated in NeXT OS.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If Apple's OS and the Apple user experience is so superior to the Windows experience, why does Apple have 3% market share?
Because that wasn't (and isn't) where they want to compete. They are aimed at the professional high-end desktop market. They've never had a cheap entry-level option--they still don't. They're pretty much like Sun, only they get their chips from moto and ibm, and obviously the two companies haven't put their research money in exactly the same places.
Was it the right choice for Apple? Was it right for Sun? Did they screw up? It could be fun to conjecture, but it's really just water under the bridge.
All we can do is look back and thank God they didn't turn out as Microsoft. Whether it was due to not licensing or not catering to the low-end market or something else it just doesn't matter.
Moof.
Competition inspires innovation
How the hell are Dell and Gateway innovating? HP is even debatable these days. Apple innovates more that those guys in the desktop market and they have no direct competition.
As for XP, the UI is worse than Windows 98. There's no doubt that it looks nicer, but the way it behaves is dumb. There are many X11 desktop environments that work better.
I don't buy Macs for the looks. If I wanted looks, I would make a custom case out of an odd household device. If I wanted to be different, I could be different enough running Linux. I buy and use Macs because the less I have to think about how to do what I'm doing, the better. Apple makes things very similar between different programs, and that makes it easy to use different programs. When I launch a program I've never seen, I already know the exact location of the application's preferences, and I have a good idea of the location of application's menus.
Albuquerque PC
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.
I agree with you completely, which is why, believe it or not, I think you'd enjoy an Apple.
As much as the "Think Different" thing is over-used, a lot of people who are new to OSX never give it the chance it deserves. Ironically, the majority of people I know that don't give it a chance are the hard-core unix geeks that would benefit the most from having one.
Here are some of the arguments I've heard, you may have used or heard some of them yourself.
"I hate the finder"
I hate the finder too. That's why I use the terminal and bash to navigate the filesystem, except for absolutely braindead tasks where using the finder is quicker.
"Too much pretty, not enough speed"
This is outright false. And I have a Powerbook G4, not one of those supercharged G5 dual systems. I have only had one speed complaint with this system since I bought it - compiles are slow. However, this is a laptop and I should expect that. Plus, why in the heck should I be installing most applications from source anyways? And if you're doing your major compiles of your developed applications on the same machine running your GUI, you deserve the wait.
"It's expensive"
That's true. However, the hardware is rock solid, I haven't been able to do anything to damage the OS (yet), mainly because I've never been put in a position to do so. On other systems, I always end up with a collection of 3rd-party applications and patches which make the system "usable". I just haven't had a need with the Mac. Their idealism allows me to be more pragmatic as I use the system. The saved frustration and ease of use is more than worth the dollar amount in my opinion.
"The menu bar at the top annoys me"
Don't use it. The OS has built in controls to assign a hotkey to any menu item. Not only has this resulted in a smoother, faster computing experience for me, but reaching from the keyboard to the mouse sucks, is a top complaint amongst frequent computer users.
"1 button mouse"
Mac OS will use all 3 buttons and the wheel if you plug a mouse capable of doing this in. If not, you can use the modifier keys to simulate all of these buttons.
"Application Support"
If you have needs for a specific application, then use another OS, of course. However, almost any OSS program will compile on the Mac, and if not, chances are it's being ported. Java applications run as a subsystem of the OS, not as a userland process (like sun's JVM), and are well-integrated.
I'm sure there are a ton of questions I could refute, and I'm sure there are a ton that I couldn't. The point is, the low-end macs are relatively cheap and it's worth it if you really want the to know what the best computing experience is for you. If you know someone with a Mac, ask them to let you toy with it for a while, heck, you'll probably get a tour of the system with it.
And I can tell you first hand, using DOS, Windows, Linux and other Unices for more than 16 years now that the most important thing about using a computer is getting what you need to get done with the least amount of pain possible. I just didn't realize that shelling out an extra $500 was the answer to making 8+ hours a day a heck of a lot less stressful.
Apple discovered that Windows' panes were part of a bait-and-switch--Microsoft turned around and released a version of Windows that was a blatant copy of the Mac GUI.
Um, no.
Steve Jobs saw the cool Xerox GUI computers and wanted to make something like them. Bill Gates saw the cool Xerox GUI computers and also wanted to make something like them.
Apple got to work. They made their own hardware, which was perfect for the software they also made.
Microsoft got to work. They had a very hard time because PC hardware at the time really sucked.
Apple now wanted applications for their new Macintosh platform. They really, really wanted Microsoft Word and a Microsoft spreadsheet. Microsoft said, "well, okay, but only if you agree not to sue when we finally get our Windows thing to actually work." Apple agreed. Microsoft released some cool software for the Mac.
When Microsoft finally released a version of Windows that was even remotely non-sucky, Apple got worried and sued, even though they had already signed an agreement that they wouldn't sue. It took years, but in the end, the judge ruled that Apple had no case whatsoever.
So, a quick recap:
Both Apple and Microsoft ripped off the Xerox ideas for a GUI. Microsoft helped Apple with apps, Apple sued Microsoft despite an agreement not to.
Microsoft has done some things that bother me. But in this case, I view Apple as the bad guy and Microsoft as the injured party. Well, and Xerox as the clueless genius who didn't know what to do with his cool inventions.
When Apple tried to sue, they discovered how completely Gates had outmaneuvered Jobs--those minor features that they had licensed were precisely the ones that were original to Apple, and the license set no restrictions on what Microsoft could do with them in future versions of Windows.
I don't think Bill Gates has such amazing abilities to predict the future that he knew exactly which trivial features to license to screw over Apple. Microsoft lawyers negotiated an agreement with Apple lawyers, and the agreement was supposed to ensure that Apple couldn't prevent Microsoft from selling Windows. Ultimately a judge ruled that the agreement was valid.
Note that if Apple had prevailed, Apple would own GUIs and it would not be possible to have a GUI on a Linux distribution. At least, not without a license from Apple... and I'll just bet that it would be exactly as easy to license a GUI from Apple as it is to license the QuickTime video codecs to write a legal QuickTime player for Linux. Which is to say, impossible.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
open.
God, I love that program.
Nothing like saying, "hey, random file I have an application for, run so I can use this!"
All from the terminal.
Or a shell script.
Mmmm.....
The company was run by people who saw computers at 40 ton trucks, which were only good for business, and failed to realise there was a migration path through pick-ups to family saloons, to Nissan Micras for your teenage daughter.
IBM shareholders should have had the entire set of directors jailed for corporate criminal insanity, but just voted them out instead.
And now back to the original thread ...
DEC could have slaughtered everyone by unbundling VMS from their open hardware, and trying to compete for both hardware and software markets. I could have had VMS on my 386, or a desktop PDP/11 I could afford instead of an Amstrad monstrosity, but Ken ("Unix is snake oil") Olsen would not have it.
I'm sorry Ken, I am writing this using BSD on my PC, and DEC is f*cked. You got it wrong, and no one benefitted except Bill Gates.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
G5 servers employ a completely different bus than the G4, which is completely different from the G3, etc. An AMD Athlon uses a different bus than an Intel P4, which is different still from an Intel PIII, etc. Heck, just google around for all the different types of RAM. Yes, desktop PC's are standardized, but I can assure you that server hardware can get pretty exotic.
And the brief experiment with licensing the OS revealed that beyond cannibalizing their own market, third party vendors can also tarnish the brand with poor quality control. We had a pile of MacOS clones when I took over our network in '99. People say Apples are crap, well these things made Apples look great in comparison. (At least Apple mints a few million of the same model at a time so there is a spare parts market.)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
If you were a Mac repair guy, why couldn't you install that doohickey that put ADB and serial on your G3 machine? What's the big freakin' deal there?
Because I shouldn't have had to.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I was an Amiga user when I got my hands on a Mac II at my college. I realized then that Apple had the hardware design thing down. I still have a couple of them, but the Amiga 2000-2500 was a really ugly design. I assume that it came from the German Commodore 3000 Unix system design. The Mac II design still looks fairly modern today. Yet I threw one away and kept the Amigas.
:)
It was fun scaring the lady in the graphics dept. when I dragged the floppy to the "trash" to eject it. They thought it would erase it.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
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.
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]
I'm told the metal case of the NeXT let it be used in places where other machines weren't. That and being made in the US made it favorite for some US government organizations, I hear.
NeXTs were perfectly affordable next to similar machines of the day- trouble is, no one was using similar machines! They cost more than diskless machines (which is what UNIX folks were used to), and more than headless machines, but if you compare similar machines, they weren't out of line in the late '80s to early '90s.
Look up how much a 300 or 600MB hard drive cost in 1989, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start.
They tried to use Sun's hardware. Early documentation shows that some of the stuff was compiled there and could still be cross-compiled there. (I no doubt have this stuff at home somewhere if I could find it. I ran the Purdue NeXT Archives and did evangelism for NeXT in the early days.)
Truth is, the Sun workstations of the day weren't up to the task. They were mostly diskless 68020s (Sun 3/50s and 3/60s were the fashion of the day). You could run a NeXT diskless (you'd have to be able to to compete with Sun), but they always recommended one for swap at least. And the earliest machines were '030s- quickly supplanted, and mostly replaced in motherboard swaps, with '040s. Suns didn't have removeable media of any kind either (no, not even CD-ROMs or floppies), whereas NeXT had re-writeable optical disks.
Other less critical things too. The average Sun was an 1152 x 900 black and white (no gray) display. NeXTs used 4 shades of gray and a faster graphics architecture, which gave their GUI a distinctive look (ripped off quite a bit by MS Windows 95, actually). Ditto sound hardware.
NeXT's hardware was necessary to bootstrap the project. They probably could've quit earlier, but in the late '80s, they really needed something no one was providing. Compare a NeXTcube to a Sun 3/60. Seriously, that's what you need to be looking at. They were contemporary machines, and the Suns were very, very popular.
I don't know if you've actually used a NeXT lately, but they're actually pretty responsive workstations even now, which is mindboggling in these days of gigahertz processors. The hardware was tight, and they still look like a million bucks. I use NeXTs (later models, admittedly) even now. Wouldn't bother with a Sun 3.
No, I don't use my NeXTs much anymore- but I did migrate to a bunch of Macs. As you said, the software was the killer app.
ab
I think Apple was actually upset that the clones were competing on the basis of being faster & cheaper. Power, for example, were shipping machines with recently announced PPCs faster than Apple could manage to, and were thus eating into Apple's high-end sales, rather than just competing at the low end, where Apple wouldn't have minded losing some market share in order to build the total user base for the OS. Much more of a hit to profits that way.
From what I recall, Power was using overclocking technology to push the existing CPU's of the time to nearly twice their original speed. In essence the machine was faster and cheaper because it was using a slower processor.
That's not too bad of a way to compete, but when the aftermarket mods for Motorola for doubling your speed, (think old school Pentium Overdrive CPU's) you could only do it on Apples.
Either way, soon as Microsoft bailed them out with 100 mill cash, they bought their competition and killed them off.
Can I get an eye poke?
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