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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
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
I agree, even asinine. But you evidently did the usual Apple slam of only comparing against their top end desktop. OK, let's go to the Apple store and see what I can get. The cheapest desktop is $1049 CAD ($799 in America, btw). That is a lot less asinine, or even assinine.
What's that? You only count the high-end stuff worthy of your attention? OK, fine, but then do the same when comparing a Dell. If you compare low-end PC to high-end Apple, you'll end up looking assinine and asinine.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Here here! I really like OS X and Apple products but here's what happened when I bought a new PC last month, my choices were (all prices Canadian):
$2399; 12" Powerbook, DVD+RW;
$2099; 15" Compaq Laptop, DVD+RW;
$2429; 17" iMac DVD+RW, 1.25GHz G4, 256M RAM, 80G HD;
$2799; PowerMac DVD+RW, Dual 1.8GHz, 256M RAM, 80G HD;
$996; Sony Vaio DVD+RW, 2.8GHz P4, 512M RAM, 120G HD
I bought the Sony, it easily out-guns and way under-prices the others. Sorry Apple, I really like your products but the fact that you can't entice an Apple fan like me to buy one of your desktops is not saying much for your pricing strategy.
For what it's worth, there's nothing in the Windows world that touches your laptops, but they're still a little too pricy for me. (Also, I'm simply *not* interested in that hideous eMac -- especially since I already have a 17" CRT.)
SLL
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.
The big issue was the one raised in the first post. Apple would have had to give up hardware to become the dominant O/S player. The PC manufacturing world chose Microsoft windows for one reason, Microsoft was not IBM. There was no way Compaq or any other clone maker was going to let IBM define the hardware and software platform, not after they declared their intention to take the market proprietary with the microchannel architecture.
The other reason that Apple could not be a player was that between the launch of the Mac and the launch of Windows the Mac O/S pretty much ossified. Apple saw it as job done, finished. There was no forward movement. All the research dollars went into whacky stuff like the Newton and Dylan. It took the launch of Windows 95 for Apple to pull itself together, kick the deadweight out of the executive suite and bring back Steve.
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. The NeXT box had some really funky stuff but it was light years ahead of MacOS or Windows at the time. I would have been really interested in getting into it if it had not been obvious that an education O/S pitched at that price point was a sure fire looser.
If you put Clive Sinclair and Steve Jobs together and took the median you might get something useful. Clive Sinclair could have defined the personal computer market if he had put a real floppy drive and a real keyboard on the QL. Steve Jobs could have done likewise if he had spent less time thinking about the correct shade of black for his magnesium cube and instead made something affordable in a plastic case.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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
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...
$2799 for a dual 1.8? Where the hell did you pull that number from? The Apple store has them for $1,999 with the exact same configuration.
Here: http://tinyurl.com/4853k
As I said, all prices are Canadian.
SLL
Here is a situation, I need a new desktop computer. I have a nice laptop already and I have 2 nice 17" LCD displays .
Sounds like you are in the same position as somebody who already has a set of tires and complains that Ford doesn't sell any cars without tires. The solution is the same: sell those old tires of yours on Ebay and use the proceeds to help you buy a car with tires.
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.
...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
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Then NeXT would have vanished in the first year or so. Making hardware was criticially important to getting mind share. NeXT and Be made computers, if only for a little while, and they got a lot of attention. GEM, VisiOn, and several other attempts at a software-only play hardly made a blip on the radar.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.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.
Step one: remove guts
Step two: built a plexiglas window where the monitor screen was
Step three: seal plexi
Step four: add gravel and a colorful sunken treasure toy box
Step five: add water and fish
There, a good use for an old Mac and much more useful than a vt100.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Apple never saw the Mac OS as "job done". Rather the opposite is what killed them - they didn't think the old codebase could be used at all, and spent billions and years on Copland. Copland went nowhere, and in the meantime Windows 95 hit the scene.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
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.
Nothing. At all. At the time, making their own hardware was the best option.
When NeXT started out in 1986, there was no such thing as a commodity personal computer. There were IBM clones but they weren't anywhere near standardised and in any case, the most advanced of them were based on the 80286, a thoroughly shitty 16-bit processor.
The other players--Apple, Atari, Commodore and others I'm forgetting--were mostly better in that they generally used 680x0 CPUs but they still weren't particularly decent. They certainly wouldn't have run NeXT's software.
But they're irrelevant because the NeXT systems were workstations, not personal computers. Workstations were the serious computers of the day. They were still single-user (mostly) systems but they were fullblown Unix boxes. If you wanted to do any sort of scientific or industrial computation, that's what you got. They were priced in the $10k-$100k range and the big-name players in that arena were (IIRC) Sun, HP, DEC, IBM and SGI (and probably others) and NeXT was competing with them.
If NeXT had gone software-only, they would have had to pick their platform(s) with no clear winner in sight, then live or die at the mercy of its vendor. They would also have missed out on the huge piles of money they made by building and selling hardware. In those days, there was still big money in proprietary hardware.
IMHO, NeXT went software-only at about the right time, just as commodity (IBM-compatible) PCs were getting powerful enough to eat the workstation market. I doubt, though, that that would have been enough to save the company. Once you get into the PC operating system market, Microsoft will kill you, as Be found out.
Just before Apple bought them, they were selling OPENSTEP, the NeXTStep API and framework ported to a variety of platforms (including Windows NT). I suspect that if they hadn't taken over Apple, we'd all be developing our "real" apps for OPENSTEP now (or GNUStep if you're a Debian user) and porting them as necessary.
ObCitation: here.
As an aside, Apple is in a pretty wierd place. They're a throwback to the '80s when it was still enormously profitable to make computer hardware. It isn't anymore (although Apple seems to still make a modest profit from it) but they've got a tiger by the tail--if they move to commodity hardware, they have to compete with Microsoft who can and will kill them.
Their current strategy is to stay out of MS's range by remaining incompatible with PCs, all the while using as many commodity parts as possible and focusing on innovation and good industrial design. Given those strengths, I wouldn't be surprised if they minimized the computer business or got out of it entirely. They're currently much more adept at competing with the likes of Sony.
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.
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
Your system was a lot more than $700, as NO PC cost that little.
The Mac II was released in 1987, and supported 8-bit color on a variety of video cards and monitors, up to at least 1024x768. As of 32-bit QuickDraw in 1988, you had full 16.7 million colors with alpha channels. There was no "default" resolution to speak of, as it had no on-board video. It's capabilities were limited only by what card you put in it. Of course, if that wasn't enough you could hook up 6 monitors if you so desired. Yeah, we could do that in 1987. Windows was just figuring that out in Windows 2000... Linux is in the process of getting this right.
The original (back to 1984, or did you miss that?) Mac display at square pixels. All of the displays and resolutions on PC's prior to VGA were RECTANGULAR, or didn't you know that? Do the math on the various resolutions being posted, and you'll find that rather than have square pixels, they had very tall rectangular pixels. It's extraordinarily difficult to create a decent GUI with such a screen - witness GeOS. Mac displays were well known for being razor sharp at the time. I mean, go LOOK at one of those original displays from a PC of that era (many public schools are still stuck with them).
System 7.0 had bugs like any x.0. 7.1 was perfectly stable. 7.5 was a bit of a disaster, but as you said 7.5.3 and 7.5.5 were fine. This was during the dark days of the Copland era, pre-Amelio.
Bzzzt. You lose on the facts, wanker.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
I feel almost silly pointing this out a day late, but...
There was a NeXTSTEP for Intel. At some point NeXT decided they couldn't make it as a hardware company, sold off their plants, canned their hardware design folks, and ported everything to the PC. It worked really, really well, except for the sales part.
You could even buy it pre-installed on some ( Compaq?? ) PC-maker's boxen back in the day ( like, 1993?? ), before M$ 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...
DYnamic LANguage
It was hugely object-oriented (at a time that popular languages were procedural) and insanely dynamic (everything was typed at runtime only). I remember a lot of articles in the early 90s in MacTech saying it was the language we'd all be writing in soon. I never used it.
Dylan was created in the early 90s. By then other object oriented languages like C++, both Apple, Borland, and maybe even Microsoft at that point had their Object oriented versions of Pascal (Microsoft's was closer to Apple's Object Pascal. Borland made their object model compatible with C++) Also consider that the Gang of Four's book Design Patterns was out around that time. (There is a brief mention of Dylan in the book.)
What made Dylan stand out was an object model that was closer to CLOS, with generics and multiple dispatch. It also was a dynamic language that could compile into something as efficient as C. (between type narrowing that could give hints to the compiler, and implicit typing that could determine how a type was used, it could often optimize out most of the dynamic behavior into a simple subroutine call.) The developers of Dylan were also interested in making the language work well within a Hypercode IDE envionment, where the code was kept in a cross-referenced database.
If you are interested in hints of where Dylan was going, there is a free software project called Gwidion Dylan that has implemented a subset of the language and environment.