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The Forgotten Failure of Apple's PowerTalk
DECS writes "The series of articles Why Apple Will Change TV compared how Apple is poised for success in areas where Microsoft is currently failing. But circumstances are subject to change!
Just over a decade ago, Apple began facing serious legacy problems with its platform, with many parallels to today's Microsoft. Examining Apple's dramatic fall provides a series of notable platform lessons that no company should ignore.
A look back at the forgotten failure of Apple's PowerTalk:
Apple vs. Microsoft in the Enterprise"
1. Don't try to sell a futuristic product that doesn't quite work yet; instead, talk about it while selling as existing product that can compete in the current market.
2. Don't attempt to fire conceptual ideas at an imagined market; instead, craft finished products that solve real problems and can support a sustainable market.
3. Ship a functional product and then constantly refine it; Real world use and years of ongoing refinement create enormous value for a product.
Now, according to their lessons, google with all their betas must be a rightout disaster, shouldn't it?
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I'm all for learning from past mistakes, and granted, there are similarities between the ongoing PC-in-the-living-room war and past wars; enterprise market notably - but the factors of the two markets are vastly different. Both Microsoft and Apple has come a long way in the past ten years, both regarding compability, marketing and usability - so declaring a (potential) winner based on decade-old experience is as useful as putting the proverbial finger in the air.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
..when every Mac had AppleTalk and most PC's didn't come with a network card as standard.
I don't see how this will fit in to my system. I am happily running a DishNet DVR and am not going to buy a HD TV until the tech levels out, that and I bought a very nice JVC CRT set a few years back that will serve me for many years to come. So what will this do for me? Also, what about infringement on the UK's commercial station ITV?
What's with the excited exclamation mark? In something purporting to be a news story/blurb i usually expect a recitation of facts combined with a calm statement of opinion. Shouting makes it sound like either a rant or something intended as a dire warning. Are you a fan of microsoft who is vehemently denying that apple will actually experience the success that some people believe they are posed for? Or are you an apple fan sending out a call to arms to other apple fans to make sure that this opportunity doesn't waste away? I can't tell which way you're leaning but the exclamation mark sure makes it seem like you think it's _really_ important for one reason or another.
[/punctuation nazi]
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Hate to break it to you, but Apples marketshare has DROPPED since the Appletalk days. There seems to be some misconception that MSFT is going downhill and AAPL is going uphill but the numbers tell a different story. MSFT enjoyed a 7% increase in revenue last quarter alone, while AAPL's growth has been in the iPod area. There are no similarities between AAPL and MSFT in that front.
What kind of TV tuner would you have them install?
Analog NTSC? Great, except that it'll stop working in a few years, and the quality is abysmal by modern standards.
ATSC? You get high-def, but you need an antenna, and even then you only get the big networks, which is a big step down to people used to 100+ channels of cable.
Clear QAM? It lets you use cable, so no antenna, but chances are you'll still only get the major networks, and it's arguably a greater pain in the ass than ATSC: many cable companies (Comcast, I'm looking at you) strip the metadata from their clear-QAM channels, making things like program guides really painful to use. And at the end of the day, you'll still be stuck with only the major broadcast networks, because those are the only ones that the cablecos are required to broadcast unencrypted. Everything else requires a proprietary converter box.
The solution would be CableCard, but there are still a lot of areas where you either can't get one, or are treated like shit and get a degraded level of service if you do. (And you pay several extra bucks for the privilege of renting the card.)
Given the state of the market right now, I wouldn't ship a computer with a TV tuner in it, either. If the FCC were to get its act together and really make CableCard the standard, and eliminate proprietary converter boxes, then I think you'd see an explosion in the types of set-top boxes and DVRs. I have no doubt Apple would be at the top of the list.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Digital cable tuners are supposed to include a FireWire output. All Macintosh computers have FireWire inputs. So if you're a subscriber, you should already have an appropriate tuner. Or are you talking about over-the-air?
My satellite box has a firewire out but it's conveniently disabled.
It seems to me that iTV is an extension of the iPod and iTunes. It solves one problem. How do you play any media that you on your computer in the study on your TV in your living room? Well if you have a laptop, you can just hook it up to the tv. But if you have a desktop, that's more of a problem. I think the vision of iTV is that either through wired or wireless LAN, it will receive the media from iTunes on your desktop or laptop. The success of this will really depend on pricing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
About the only useful thing to come from PowerTalk was the system-wide keychain. For some reason, it took until Mac OS 9 for Apple to introduce this feature to the Mac community at large.
Another Apple project quickly forgotten was OpenDoc, which was something like OLE for Microsoft. With OpenDoc, at least the Cyberdog browser was developed (1996-97), together with object embedding capabilities on other software. It lasted just a bit.
Have you asked your satellite provider what you can do to get it enabled and working with your computer? Or has the satellite provider already refused and are you locked into long-term commitment so that you can't use the stick of switching to the competitor?
As an email gateway developer, I worked with Exchange since it's inception and I attempted to use AOCE. When I compare that experience with what's going on now, I reach a very different conclusion.
Exchange started out life in the X.400 world. (If memory serves, Microsoft bought an X.400 product from someone else and GUIfied it.) This meant that even before the advent of the Internet Connector you could connect to Exchange using "standard" X.400 protocols. (I say "standard" because X.400 is so large and messy that pretty much everyone who implemented it was forced to deviate from the specifications in one way or another.) Not easy, but doable, and more to the point, doable from any platform able to deploy an OSI network stack. As Exchange shifted towards SMTP things improved to the point where Exchange was able to connect to existing facilities with little effort. (The article is wrong, BTW, in claiming that modem SMTP was around when Exchange first shipped. It was around but Microsoft chose to ignore it.)
AOCE, OTOH, only provided vast, arcane, incomplete and poorly documented Mac-specific API. The underlying protocols weren't documented at all. We tried hard to figure how to interface with this mess, even sitting down to discuss our issues with Apple folks at one point, but eventually gave up. And I'm talking a group of people who developed successful gateways to X.400-1984, X.400-1988, cc:Mail, Microsoft Mail, Novell MHS, and GroupWise among others. Either we are fools who got incredibly lucky several times over, or AOCE was an unmitigated disaster. And I don't think we were lucky fools.
But Apple learned their lesson. As the article points out, they now leverage open standards whenever possible. You can talk to a lot of Apple's new stuff over protocol. Sure, the APis are still there, and some of them are pretty nasty, but in a lot of cases you don't have to use them. Apple is also very active in various standards organizations (I wish they had had more success with Bonjour in the IETF, but that's a different matter).
Microsoft, OTOH, has utterly failed to learn anything from their experience with Exchange. They still roll their own whenever possible. They don't document the protocols they use, only the APIs, and of course those are only available on Windoze. I used to see lots of Microsoft people at standards meetings but not so many any more.
Of course things can change, but once things are headed in a particular direction they tend to stay on that course, even if it is a bad one. Everything I see about Microsoft says to me that they are on the wrong course and aren't doing anywhere near enough reinvention to correct it. The exact opposite appears to be the case with Apple.
I have to say I have been very impressed by Apple's strategic manovering over the last five years or so. Whilst Sony and Microsoft has been clashing heads trying to use gaming machines as a trojan horse to become the digital hub of people's living rooms, Apple has quietly been putting together all the pieces it needs to do so in a much more sophisticated manner.
Personally, I don't think Steve Jobs is very interested in conquering the enterprise desktop these days, he's got his eyes fixed on potentially a much bigger pie - becoming the digital media hub of people's homes.
I think the real problem is that PowerTalk was a bit ahead of its time and wasn't really implimented that well either.
Something like this today might actually work if done properly and without having to buy special hardware.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
You're correct; or at least, that's how the Wikipedia article describes it -- you'll be able to put the iTV in your living room, and then stream content to it from iTunes on your Mac or PC.
Sounds a little to me like the Airport Express was with audio (it was a box that you could attach to your stereo and then stream music to it, wirelessly) except that where the APE was purely "push" because it didn't have any interface on the recieving end, iTV will be able to "pull," browsing the libraries of the computers connected to it for content.
I'm cautiously excited about it, although I'm in no way going to go out and buy one on Day 1. I think there's serious possibility for it to suck if they implement a lot of DRM, or limit the number of computers you can have stream media to it. If that's the case, I hope its streaming protocol is quickly reverse-engineered, so that more flexible library backends can be built.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Seriously, companies don't really learn from another company's trials and tribulations. At some point they all suffer from the same thing, which will cause them to experience "a downfall". This malady is:
"But we're [insert company name here]!"
I know it looks innocuous, but let's see that in action!
1988, IBM was having big problems with management bloat, a stagnant product line, and a poor customer experience. But if you asked someone there 'Why would I buy from you when I could buy from Compaq or some other less expensive, more innovative competitor?' the response was invariably, "But we're IBM!"
In 1998, SGI started shipping their coolest, most important product ever. The $15,000 Windows NT workstation. If you asked an executive at SGI 'Why would I pay $15000 for a Windows NT machine with a nice graphics card when I can build a whitebox with an Nvidia Riva TNT card for far less money?', the response was "But we're SGI!"
Today, ask a SUN exec 'Why should I pay $X for a solaris workstation when I can buy assemble a box for $500 running Linux that will do the same thing?' What do they say? "But we're SUN!"
It's been my experience that this becomes a problem at most sucessful companies, and if you pay attention, you'll see it's cyclical. The company adopts this mentality, loses customers, re-vamp's their product line, customer service, etc. Gains customers, becomes successful again, and ultimately repeats their mistakes and do the whole thing over again.
Sad.
-Runz
Maybe there *are* no competitors. In the UK for example Sky have an absolute monopoly - you have to use their proprietary hardware (and closed encryption) to access their service and there are no other satellite services (unless you're into big dishes and foreign languages).
It'd be interesting to see if the Apple TV thing works over here.. they'd have to provide content (something they failed to do with the ipod video - you still can't get videos on itunes outside the US), and hardware to interface with the common sources of video - that means at the least a SCART input and digitiser. HD is right out - Sky have that locked down so hard there's no way to build hardware to interface to it unless you reckon Apple can work out a way of cheaply digitising raw HDMI output.
Site is Slashdotted, use the Coral cache of it.
.. perhaps story submitters could be asked to select which of their links are dynamically-driven, and the rest should be automatically Coralized?
Even that is rather slow
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Daniel Eran writes a lot of pro-mac articles which leads one to believe that you can't really take any of his opinions on Apple with much weight. The articles are really great to read if you are an Apple fan but, otherwise I can see how they might come off a little bit overly infatuated with Apple. If he could use more facts and cite support then I'd find them a little more insightful, as it is, they remind me of those persuasive writing assignments from English class, except all with an pro-Apple slant. Seriously though, read one or two the articles and see if you don't get the same feeling.
Mine, a Dish Network 625, doesn't even have a firewire out.
I don't think Firewire is actually that common, and I'm not sure where Tepples gets the "supposed to have" requirement from.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Do all Macs have Firewire? I thought the newer ones had gone USB 2
Verizon FiOS cable comes with Firewire AND USB (and serial, but I doubt you could get video over that). Of course they're all disabled. I've never heard of any cable company ever leaving the firewire port enabled. You can call and ask to have it enabled, but the first level techs will just tell you to reboot your box and mess with your TV settings, the second level techs will sound confused and not find it in their manual, and the third level tech will finally tell you "we don't do that, what were you thinking?!?".
Seriously, cable companies fear those features, and beyond a few geeks here and there nobody will notice if they disable them anyway. Thus nobody ever turns it on. I'm not sure why they even put them on the box in the first place.
I read the internet for the articles.
Those are really the big ones... Of course, part 1 is quite extensive.
What makes you think the competitors are going to enable the Firewire port?
I read the internet for the articles.
I don't see how this will fit in to my system. I am happily running a DishNet DVR and am not going to buy a HD TV until the tech levels out, that and I bought a very nice JVC CRT set a few years back that will serve me for many years to come. So what will this do for me? Also, what about infringement on the UK's commercial station ITV?
First of all, Apple has said ITV is just a workingname and the final name needs to change.
Secondly, what appeals to me about this device is that it's pay-as-you consume, instead of the layered monthy fees you pay with a DVR and cable. I only watch a few shows, so I don't need a full cable subscription - I save money just buying the shows I do watch on ITMS. That's why those calling for a tuner in this box are missing the point about what it's for.
Lastly, it's a way to push all the online video people watch out to TV. It's a lot more fun to browse YouTube from a couch than on a desktop.
I use a Mac mini in the role this iTV box would serve, I'm curious though when it arrives what else it might do when it arrives.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's only one competitor which is StarChoice and I don't believe their hardware is any better. I have ExpressVu in Ontario and the Canadian govt. doesn't allow American satellite companies to sell service here.
they'd have to provide content
I think that's going to be a bit of a challenge for Apple outside of the US, at least for English language programming being sold to English speaking countries. For US programmes they'd either have to make a deal with the studios to get the international rights (which might get expensive, as selling the rights to Apple will dilute the value of the programmes in foreign markets) or they'll have to deal with each rights holder in each individual market they want to enter (which will take longer, but may be cheaper). So I really wouldn't want to hold my breath waiting for apple to launch video services outside the US.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
They did, but kept the Firewire. Firewire is essential if you want to connect a video camera to your Mac to download the home movie you just made, so Apple isn't going to dump it for a while - not until something better comes along.
USB uses an error correcting protocol, and Firewire doesn't - firewire guarantees a steady transfer rate; USB, because of the error correction, does not. Thus, Firewire, or IEEE-1394, as it is otherwise known, is better for video transfer.
Plus, Firewire is standard output on all home video cameras.
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Microsoft needs to hire Steve Jobs in order to recover.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
The article states that Apple Enginners and Microsoft Markets.
The authors understanding of what marketing is, is wrong. I think it would have been more correct to say that Microsoft Sells.
The classical defination of marketing is to find out what a customer needs and then produce that for them.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You expect that turd to actually read something before posting?!?! HE'S A FUCKNUT RETARD!!!
The only reason OS X is based on NeXTstep is because part of Jobs' price for returning to Apple was to "erase" the Next failure. The core Apple faithful will buy just about anything Jobs comes up with and couldn't care less about "Unixy" features in their OS.
The new iMac 24" has a firewire 800 port as well as the 400. http://support.apple.com/specs/imac/iMac_Late_2006 .html
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
Apple vs. Microsoft in the Enterprise
So, who gets to be Spock?
Time to back away from the thread...
[UID-HeinzIntel]
Original XBOX running XBMC can stream any type of video, and I mean nearly everything, from a pc or laptop, wired or wireless to your tv. On top of streaming music and pictures etc.
Well, yeah, I'm aware of that. I was responding to the parent who was talking about Sat boxes.
But I'd still like to know where the Firewire requirement for any type of box has been mandated. You say cable companies are regulated, but (and maybe I'm wrong in thinking this) I was under the impression that there's very little regulation in terms of cable equipment and requirements, to the point that even CableCARD is more or less optional.
I have had digital cable in the past, from Adelphia, and there was no firewire port. Was this illegal, or was the regulation relatively recent, or is it not really a regulation?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
It's a long story that I've posted here a few times so I wont bore everyone with the details but about 2 years ago I led a consortium of people looking to build a Myth-TV version of the tivo 3 cablecard box.
The difference with our platform was we were going to take live content from both the cable company's feed and the cat 5 internet connection and overlay them onto a consolidated platform.
The problem with cablecard the technology is the cable companies, it is quiet clear that the FCC is a toothless tiger who are never going to get anywhere and that the cable companies are stalling until forced then they will move to a new 'technology' with the next appropriate level of stall tactics. (they were just publicly talking about the software version of cablecard that the tv set manafacturers would need to build into their hardware (eg at least a 3 year lead time from signoff).
Cablelabs the consortium and cable companies the channels can all go to hell.
We'll be back when you are a forgotten memory and everything is iptv delivered.
I've since 'gifted' it to the MythTV community but Issac et al haven't picked up on anything but the supporting documentation and the businessplan is still available for download at www.Cognation.net/Cablecard3
Cheers,
Dean
I don't think this article or /. entry adds value in any significant sense. Sure, it's great to consider in hindsight theis experience, but the criticism is unnecessary if not unfounded.
Apple addressed PowerTalk and OpenDoc (and various other initiatives) by moving to a completely different operating system. They saw the fundamental shortcomings of their ideas and their approaches and addressed them. Now, they are leveraging all the potential of OS X's *nix core in a myriad of ways.
They didn't forget the failure. They addressed it.
Besides, it seems pretty dumb to have to have two machines turned on just to play movies. Something like a Viiv designed to sit under the TV makes more sense. Or a PS3. The movie should be stored on the device connected to the TV, not beamed in from somewhere else. That doesn't make much sense at all.
"Digital cable tuners are supposed to include a FireWire output."
Who says?
"All Macintosh computers have FireWire inputs."
Yeah. Do they support the video formats over firewire that these tuners are supposed to provide? Where is iPVR? I guess the mac doesn't have support for this after all.
It makes sense for us whom already have half the hardware. I already have an Imac, and Itv looks interesting to me, especialy since Itunes already sells tv shows and is starting to sell movies.
I think the reason apple is going the route of having the Itv be a seperate machine is two fold: 1. It keeps the cost of Itv down, and 2. It may help sell a few more macs.
--C. Alan
Indeed. Remember, we're talking about Apple here. Apple customers expect things to "just work", and they aren't afraid to pay for it. That means whatever kind of TV they have, they should be able to plug it in and have it work, just like the Series3 TiVo - except Apple customers won't balk at paying an extra $600 for the feature the way many TiVo users do.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"Pushing the technological envelope"? Wake up and stop drinking the kool-aide.
Google search? Search results 90% of the time are astroturf sites and spam blogs. I've completely given up trying to find product reviews via google, for example.
Froogle? Search for some computer component part number. Let's say the same # is used by sewing machines. Click on "Computers" without clicking the subcategory "motherboards"- the parts you wanted are GONE. What the hell? Go back, click motherboards- the parts are there. Froogle is also completely incompetent when it comes to matching/grouping/consolidating products, or even matches like "1GB PC133"...half the time, that'll yield 512MB dimms which happen to have a link to 1GB dimms on the same page!
Gmail can't let you do more than ONE thing at a time. Want to have a draft of an email open while reading a second for reference? Tough. GMail can't filter by custom headers- which makes it absolutely useless for subscribing to mailing lists. Gmail blatantly and heavily encourages top-posting and full quoting, much to the annoyance of mailing list managers everywhere. GMail was a GIANT step backwards in email client functionality. I never understood what the hell all the fuss was about, and I still don't after using it for a few months.
Google Maps is "the best map client around", except MS's local.live.com blows it out of the water; pushpins, saved addresses, side birds-eye views, etc...and doesn't have the serious problems Google Maps does with serving up image tiles; half the time, tile images aren't loaded at all, or are loaded in the wrong order. Why in 2006 do I have to keep entering my home/work address as starting points/destinations, when I could have Mapquest save addresses back in 1998!?
Google Analytics? What if I'd like to do something as simple as track my visitor retention rate over time, to see if it's going up/down? Pretty simple, right? Can't do it; you can't track anything over time except for a few basic parameters. Other bug-based web-trend software is far better, and Google appears to have done squat with Analytics, which they bought off another company!
Please help metamoderate.
Do you claim that the United Kingdom doesn't have cable television?
It's illegal if 1. you asked for a cable box with FireWire and 2. Adelphia denied it.
The FCC's requirement went into effect in April 2004.
http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/cfr_2004/octqtr/pdf/ 47cfr76.640.pdf
It only applies to HD cable boxes (if your previous cable boxes were non-HD, that would be why they didn't include FireWire), but it's been in effect for ~2.5 years now. On mine, local HD channels and most non-HD digital-cable channels are available over FireWire as MPEG-2 transport streams with AC3 audio.
(On a related note, the recently-released MythTV 0.20 seems to have improved its FireWire recording, too. I've seen fewer glitches in recordings made since I upgraded from 0.19.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Funny, I get the same feeling when reading supposedly "professional" journalists like John C. Dvorak or Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows except they are overly infatuated with MSFT.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Details in tepples' comment
Something like a Viiv designed to sit under the TV makes more sense. Or a PS3. The movie should be stored on the device connected to the TV, not beamed in from somewhere else. That doesn't make much sense at all.
Yeah, if only Apple could come up with a small, pocket-sized device that included a hard disk to store movies. You could plug it into your Mac, download a movie of of some online video store, and then carry this tiny device into your living room, and drop it into a dock connected to your television. Maybe they could also port the software to Windows so you wouldn't have to buy a Mac Mini, either, but could use that setup on Windows.
Heck, while they're at it, maybe they could make that thing into a portable music player, with some headphones and....nahh, it'd never work.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
Hmmm. Did not know that. Apparently compliance isn't so good though and support for it isn't built into OS X (as of the writing of the article). Has this changed?
0 426151111599
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2004
call dish and ask for one. afaik the FCC says that they need to carry at least one firewire equipped decoder box.
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
COOL
Your points, though valid for the most part, really don't indicate anything about pushing the envelope or not. For instance, your rant on MS live mapping.. I have never seen it, and if it is better, why do you think that it *is* better? Precisely because they set out to BEAT google with that product.
"Pushing the envelope" means to ME going out and being the vanguard where other companies haven't already gone. Kind of the opposite of MS, where they find an existing product and set out to copy it (for the most part, sometimes they do have innovations).
Not sure how you are interpretting that phrase that someone applying it to google makes you so defensive.
For the record, I'm starting to get a little concerned that google is getting close to violating "do no evil" with gbase and checkout, etc... but I do still use them as primary search engine because I RARELY get a lot of spam in my search results.. maybe cause I use really long search strings..
This comment is guaranteed*
*not guaranteed
"I forgot my mantra."
You're thinking iPods. They are all USB2 now.
"I forgot my mantra."
My mistake. Ihad just had a back and forth with Elegato about why none of their Mac DTT products (apart from a really expensive obsolescent one) supported firewire, but only USB 2. Their answer, and I quote:
"All DTT products that support EyeTV use USB 2.0 only. That means your Mac has to have built-in USB 2.0 ports...
USB 2.0 products are what manufacturers currenly make, so that's what we support."
Ah well, one lost sale for them.
Actually, you can add USB 2 if you have a tower Mac, I had to do that to my G4 Dp 2 GB MDD last year, so I could connect a new printer at higher speed. Yeah "currently make", but they don't care about the legacy Macs that a lot of us use!
"Money is truthful. If a man speaks of his honor, make him pay cash." Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Robert A. Heinlein
Thanks for pointing that out. Sadly, it's a G4 anglepoise iMac.