Apple's Fruitful Future

Apple's 30th Anniversary is prompting retrospective looks at the company's last three decades. C|Net grounds their look back in the here and now, commenting on lawsuits and competition. ZDNet complains that Apple still isn't in the workplace. The BBC looks at the company's world-changing aspects in a more upbeat story. Nick Irelan wrote in to mention a Forbes piece entitled Apple's Biggest Duds, so you can image what what side that article comes down on. CNN puts the whole thing in perspective, with a balanced look at the company's good and bad points. Finally, if you want some rumourmongering, 192939495969798999 writes "Industry sources have leaked that tomorrow, on the 30th Anniversary of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs will announce that the new intel-based Mac laptops will support dual-booting Windows XP and OS X 10.4."

Comments

Forget the 30th birthday...

[__aaclcg7560]

I can't wait until Apple is 64! And Apple (Beatles) will probably sue them for being 64! :P

Re:Forget the 30th birthday...

[ZzzzSleep]

When I get older, losing disk space, many years from now,
Will you still use me to send an email line, birthday greetings,
or slashdot whine?
If you used me 'till quarter to three, could I crash once more?
Will you still boot me, will you still root me,
When I'm sixty-four?

Hmm------mmm---mmmh.
You'll be older, too.Aaah, and if you say the word, I could stay
with you.

You'll need to be handy, mending a fuse, when my ps is gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside, you can't use me if my chips are fried.
Going to swap meets, digging for parts, who could ask for more?
Will you still boot me, will you still root me, when I'm sixty
four?

Every summer we can vist one infinite loop, if it's
not too dear. We shall scrimp and save.
And sitting on your knee, that newton from e-bay

Open a shell prompt, drop me a line stating point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say, yours sincerely wasting
away.
Give me your answer, fill in a form, mine forever more.
Will you still boot me, will you still root me, when I'm sixty
four?

*Yeah.... I know it's lame....*

What, nobody's saying Apple is dead?

[dpbsmith]

Now I'm worried.

In this confusing world, the one comforting, constant, bedrock, fundamental certainty has been that the pundits would explain how Apple is moribund, in a death spiral, and will be gone in about a year. The first time I heard that was in 1985. Not counting, of course, the people in 1984 that said the Mac was dead on arrival because it didn't have an 80-column screen and cursor keys.

Circa 1990, I worked in a Fortune 500 company which cancelled all its Mac skunkworks projects, due to Apple's imminent demise, scaled back all its Windows projects, and beefed up all its OS/2 projects, because Gartner's colorful graphs showed OS/2 would pass not only the Mac but MS-DOS and Windows in, if I recall correctly, less than two years, and would dominate the market by 1995.

Nobody is saying Apple is dead? Uh-oh, I'm worried. Maybe it's time to start short-selling Apple stock.

The Lisa and Windows 1.0, 2.0...

[dpbsmith]

Right. Apple produces the Lisa and everyone says "dumb Apple, what a dud."

Microsoft produces Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 and everyone says "Got to admire Microsoft, they stick to it until they get it right."

Re:The Lisa and Windows 1.0, 2.0...

[grungebox]

Right. Apple produces the Lisa and everyone says "dumb Apple, what a dud." Microsoft produces Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 and everyone says "Got to admire Microsoft, they stick to it until they get it right."

That's true, because if there's one thing I get way too much of around here, it's Microsoft-loving and Apple-bashing.

Apple computers are 'feel good' consumer items

[MarkWatson]

I had the serial number 71 Apple II (I wrote the little chess game that was distributed with early Apples on the demo software cassette), bought an early Mac (I wrote the ExperOPS5 commercial product on it), and I still use Macs a lot for my work (although I use Linux more).

For me, Apple products are "feel good" products. Visually they look great compared to the competition. The software always seems a little more solid (probably because of only needing to support their own hardware).

You can certainly get more bang for the buck with a PC clone running Linux, but Macs with OS X are great products. When I bought my first Mac, they were very new and one day I brought my Mac into work because I wanted my secretary to type in a big stack of notes that I had written on a business trip. I immediately got pulled into a meeting and when I got out of the meeting my non-technical secretary was done - it just took her a few minutes to figure out the Mac -- try that with a PC in 1984!

Re:Dual booting is a good way to get to the workpl

[happyemoticon]

Dual booting may be a good solution, but Virtual PC for Mac/Intel running Windows at near-native speeds will be a better one.

And by the way, the comment about Apple releasing a dual booting laptop themselves is nonsense.

Re:Apple has no place in any responsible business

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Apple has no business in the workplace until it opens up it's[sic] hardware to competition.

That is just not going to happen. You see, Apple is complete vertical chain for a reason. That reason is Microsoft. Jobs realized a long time ago that having a closed ecosystem was a problem and he did something about it. He founded NextStep. Then they were killed by MS's monopoly. Sure they had better hardware and better software, but unless you can get your software pre-installed and get developers to work on it you won't reach more than a tiny minority of the market. No hardware company will pre-install OS X, because MS will just raise the price of Windows for them and suddenly they can't compete in the mainstream market. That leaves them stuck completely reliant upon Apple, and competing with them at the same time, which is a terrible place to be. So you might think, "well Apple could fix that if they ditched the hardware business." Yeah, now you go to the board of director's of the second most profitable computer retailer and tell them you want to stop selling computers and focus on the part of your business that makes only 10% of your money.

The truth is, unless the government does its job and breaks MS up into two or more OS companies and/or enforces open standards there is no way Apple can safely move into that market.

Linux, on the other hand, may be able to walk in and save the day for big business. Linux is not a company. It is a OS supported by many companies and is ideally customizable for large corporate environments. Every large organization should be looking at it. If Linux grabs just 20% of the desktop through business and Apple grabs 20% of the home market, things will really start to change. Cross-platform will be an important characteristic and real standards might be followed.

Basically, I agree with you, but it will not happen because Apple would go out of business.

Tomorrow's press release

[Un pobre guey]

Cupertino, CA - 2006-04-01 Apple Computer Corporation announced today what is possibly the single greatest technological advance of the past 500 years. Steve Jobs, accompanied by various lesser industry luminaries were invited to make this solemn announcement before the United Nations Security Council, which was convened in a special emergency session. News networks around the world suspended all other news coverage in order to report and comment live from New York as events unfolded. In the United States, all civil aviation was ordered to remain grounded starting 6 hours prior to the announcement, and remained so until three hours after.

Industry and commerce ground to a halt throughout the world, as workers, peasants, and billionaire executives alike tuned in to monitor the proceedings on radio, television, internet, and a variety of wireless and satellite communications. Most retail businesses in the United States and Europe were closed for the day, in preparation for the announcement, which was expected to change human civilization as it is currently conceived or understood.

Clergy from Mecca, to Rome, to Salt Lake City, to Tokyo and beyond paced rooms as they waited and brooded over the vast consequences of the announcement. In many Third World nations, the poor and ignorant masses were so overcome with fear and anxiety, that rioting and mass suicides began to spread on all continents, barely held in check by legions of police and military personnel, tenuously in control of their own emotions.

The entire planet fell dumb with awe as Jobs made his momentous announcement: Apple Computer had devised a method to capture and process data that was for practical purposes impervious to the causes of erasure and data loss that plague modern computing devices. No amount of electromagnetic fields could cause erasure, and data written with this technology was expected to be readable for a thousand years or more under reasonable storage conditions. Even more mind-boggling, the reading and writing of the data was technology independent. It would not be necessary for users hundreds of years in the future to preserve today's technology. Jobs demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, the ease with which future generations would be able to access such data.

The new technology, revolutionary yet environmentally friendly nanotechnology-based laminae of compacted cellulose fiber as the data substrate, and finely machined graphite rods or thin tubes of optically dense viscous gel deposition units, were shown in a variety of decorative colors. Jobs demonstrated a bright yellow substrate which was preformatted with fine rulings on its surface to guide the application of data. He showed data deposition in blue, black, red, and green, and claimed that Apple could provide deposition units in any arbitrary color. The substrate was to be made available in pads of 100 laminae, and the deposition units in boxes of one dozen. Later in the day Staples and Office Depot made surprise announcements of the imminent availability of this technology in their stores worldwide.

Re:The first Dud

[feijai]

Enough about the Lisa thanks. Apple had a go and they got it right in the end.

There are several unfortunate ways to parse that second sentence.

Re:How to get Apple in the workplace

[gozar]

That experience doesn't exist (to the best of my knowledge) with the MacOSX environment. Drives can be mounted at power up but I don't see the same experience that people are accustomed to in Windows.

I have an integrated environment where there is Mac and Windows on the same network sharing access to files. They both access the Novell and Linux server files. Windows does it better. Mac will lose its network mountings without cause that is obvious to the user and without a mounting script, the user would generally need to restart the computer (and the apps) to resume normal work. In windows, if users are dicconected from a server, the user is notified.

If you put the shared drives into the Login Items for the user, they'll automatically mount when the user logs in. On my network I've never had OS X just lose connections for no apparent reason. If I'm on a laptop and put it to sleep, I'm notified when I open it back up if it can't reconnect to any servers.

For a managed environment, you'd want to put in an OS X server. The OS X server can bind to Active Directory (and I'm assuming eDirectory) so your OS X clients will mount the users Home Directory automatically. You also get all the managing capabilities for your OS X clients. Networked home directories are really nice, and if you set it up right, you can have your users log into a Windows client, Linux client, or OS X client and have the same Desktop and Documents folder automatically.

OS X also doesn't have problems that you see with Windows and its roaming profiles.