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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."
Where can i get one of those babes? I want to replace my 95 cause it's beginning to be insecure and unstable... ...deja vu ...
"The press declared the machine and its software revolutionary. In a matter of months, the Macintosh had revolutionized Apple and the computer business" - they revolutionized and other company rules the market ?
Siropel
What about the Apple Pippin? Few people know about Apples ill-fated console release.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
major flops under its belt
It's ok Steve... it happens to every guy! Maybe you were just nervous!
Look at you now - with your impressive... eh... Mac Mini...
"... Apple began the eighties with..."
If this isn't old news.. I don't know what IS.
FTFA:
>where he led a dozen engineers (including future Apple CEO Larry Tesler)
Larry Tesler was never CEO of Apple. He was Chief Scientist and VP.
Kinda makes me wonder about the veracity of the rest of the piece...
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!
Disclaimer: I'm an Apple fan, owner, and former employee (certainly not a high-level one, though).
That said, Apple screws up a lot, particularly in first versions of a new product. As the article says, the Lisa was a flop, but it led to the original Mac, which led to the real hit, the Mac II.
The Mac Portable was a terrible product--but it led to the Powerbook, which defined the laptop computer. The Cube was overpriced and didn't have a market, but it led to the Mini, which is kicking ass.
The iPod was a hit from the jump, but the Newton was dead from its announcement date (we knew it was in trouble when they started handing them out as employee awards).
I agree with your sentiment; using the Apple developer tools and environment as standard would be sweet as. Even back in the mid 1990s the NeXT developer environment was absolute luxury. The problem is most heads of IT (and most IT support staff) depend on Windows for their livelihood so aren't about to endorse a switch to Mac, Linux, OpenVMS or anything else.
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.
Apple's PCs never got a strong hold in the business market, but once upon it's most powerful machine did:
From Wikipedia: "The Apple LaserWriter was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. Combined with GUI-based programs like Adobe PageMaker on the Macintosh, it is generally considered to have sparked the Desktop publishing (DTP) revolution in the mid-1980s.
Unlike models from HP, which had been introduced a few months earlier and used their proprietary PCL printing language, the LaserWriter included the PostScript page description language which allowed for far more complex graphics, high-resolution bitmap graphics, outline fonts, and generally much better-looking output.
The use of PostScript comes at a cost. Unlike PCL and other early printer control languages, PostScript is a complete programming language and requires a complete computer to run it. In the case of the LaserWriter this was a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 12MHz, making it the fastest machine in Apple's lineup, and the most expensive at $6,995 when it was introduced in late 1985."
I hope that after I die the one word people use to describe me is "resurrected."
It turns out according to the Apple sales database they sold exactly 65,535. :)
The Economics of Website Security
If the X86 hardware is faster, then why doesn't it outperform the Xserve clusters using Mac OS X and standard Apple hardware? Don't mistake bad benchmarking for good data. Don't believe me, go to the Super Computer web site (http://www.top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=1 1) where 5 of the top nine are PowerPC hardware. Number 7 on the list is built by using stock Xserves ordered directly from the on-line Apple Store and running Macintosh OS X. And, there are even faster Apple clusters in the wild that didn't even bother to try to compete for a ranking.
These are not marketing ploys. These are very expensive machines that are optimized to go as fast as they can to get the job done. No political bias...just go fast. The only X86 cluster in the list above a ranking of 9 has nearly twice the number of processors as the Virginia Tech cluster. Maybe you should spend a little less time pounding out Visual Basic programs and do some actual research before making statements like that.