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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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