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Apple's First Flops
Sabah Arif writes "Apple began the eighties with two major flops under its belt: the Apple III and the LISA. Both machines were attempts at breaking into the business market. They were technologically advanced, but major flaws prevented their success."
That may be true, but Apple never really got any sort of hold in the business market. If they had succeeded, things may have looked very different.
Imagine everyday coding in Cocoa and XTools as standard in businesses... bliss. Core Data is probably enough to shift the TCO and ROI on Apple Hardware in Apple's favour, but then what CFO in his right mind would get locked into a single vendor for the OS and hardware, especially with the initial investment in x86 hardware? If I were Apple I'd think seriously about licencing the fabled x86 build of OS X for business use only. Not only would they get a boost from support contracts, but more people would be exposed to the software at work, and hopefully, start thinking seriously about buying the hardware for home. They might even start to shift a few more XServes! I guess the biggest problem they'd be facing then is piracy but that could be curbed by limiting the processor compatability to Xeons and Opterons, kind of the anti Windows XP Starter Edition.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I'd love to use OS X on x86 hardware, but aren't Apple's main source of revenue their hardware?
They would probably require assurance that OS X could actually be a real revenue source before they make the switch.
I think the biggest technical problem for x86 OSX is that they would have to suppprt a plethora of hardware options that really wouldn't earn them enough money in the end to pay it off. Tiger goes for around 130 retail so then what would they charge for x86 volume licenses? maybe 30 bucks? I doubt they could muster the current level of support and quality on 30 bucks a seat. Nope, better that users who really see the need dish out for the hardware as well, I mean think about it, you cannot turn a dodge into a mercedes just by changing the badge.
Growth is now the biggest threat to Apple because it is not so simple to scale your business to meet the demands of the market. Already Apple is feeling the strain, employees are being worked dang hard and the company is struggling to keep up supply. Success of Ipods, Ibooks and Mini's is so high that new OEM's are being used and all the long while, they still need to keep the quality and standards up to par with their reputation. If the mini's all started to exhibit failures and poor workmanship than that would harm the crossover (new mac users) market more than anything the competition could hope for.
The best situation for Apple now is to stabilize the growth and scale the infrastructure so it all runs smoothly. In EU there have been three month delays in some shops and that simply won't do.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
The big question is wether OS X would work as well outside of such a controlled enviroment as it has now. With OS X limited to run on apple computers, they have a (relatively) very limited combinations of different hardware to test and optimize for, not the case with x86.
Dan Bricklin's spreadsheet ran on the Apple first and was the sole reason folks went out and bought an Apple. For a period (think early 80's), Apple owned the desktop computer market, with many more business-oriented applications than creative/educational titles.
Only after they got crushed by IBM machines did they focus on thier current market. I don't think IBM did them in as much as the IBM clone market, which reduced the cost of the hardware to far below Apple's. With a lower price, more people purchased IBM-compatible machines and the demand for software followed.
I've owned a lot of systems over the years. The apples have always lasted longer and given me less trouble than the X86 hardware. I bought apple and it was painfully expensive, but some of it still works just fine twelve years later. I spend hundreds or even thousands less on X86 boxes to do basic computing and a year later (or less) and I'm replacing the mother board, the ram, the hard drive, or some other component. The X86 stuff is cheap and in many cases, cheap crap. For things that I don't want to fix, I spend extra money. You can do this with x86 hardware, but I've found that the good stuff is about the same price as apple. I recommend Apple, or higher end X86 for those people who don't want to tweek or fix, but just want the box to work for years.
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Well there's good x86 hardware and there's bad x86 hardware. The advantage of the PC/x86 platform has been choice. Apple may have gained stability by controlling hardware, but it made it a far less desirable platform as far as upgrade paths went. That's changed to some degree now, but it's way too late to make it more than a niche player.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.