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Why Apple Failed in the 90s
An anonymous reader writes "With news of amazing sales figures for both Mac hardware and the iPod, the future for Apple looks bright. But it wasn't always that way. The 90s were a bad time for the company, and Roughlydrafted.com has a look at Apple's failures of the previous decade." From the article: "During the development of Mac OS X, Apple polished the existing classic Mac OS, and salvaged what it could of Copland developments. Apple modernized its existing Mac APIs into Carbon, which would run software in Mac OS 9, and later allow it to run natively in Mac OS X. Despite fixing the obvious flaws in Apple's operating system offering, Mac OS X did not in itself solve Apple's problem. The company now only had an improved platform that nobody had any reason to buy. The real solution to Apple's problem was stumbled onto by a fortunate accident. "
...'cause I can't see anything new or unknown in TFA.
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Emulated sig. Pat. no. 98739174014532
Same reason spinach is failing this year: e-coli.
Any bets on what the fortunate accident was?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Why Apple Failed in the 90s
Because they had no clear corporate direction and their price/performance sucked an ass?
(just a guess)
Push Button, Receive Bacon
chair!
-m10
The comuting landscame might well have been different in Apple had made better decisions in the past, but that's life and mistakes are made
As I type this on my MacBook Pro though I can say for sure that Apple isn't going anywhere soon (I say that becasue this is the first Mac I've owned that has given me no reason to move back to Windows
With OS X and hardware which is merely moderately expensive, they might stand a better chance, but it's hard to see how they'll ever really compete with MS Windows. I guess from Apple's perspective, even if their share rises from 2% to 4%, that is still a 100% increase for them even if it's still insignificant to to a market from a whole.
That this "accident", was MS accidently forgetting to patch security flaws, Windows being hard to use, and very complex, almost every program for Windows being horrably complex and hard to use, etc, etc.
Pluss they made a really cool commercial, andd got their product viewed in movies (i know people that actually bought macs becauuse the girl from legally blonde had one...).
I'm sick and tired of journalist who can tell us EXACTLY why apple succeeded after the fact.
It's easy to give the reasons why apple failed in the 90s after the fact.
Where is the journalist in the 90s, why isn't he giving professional consultation to apple? That's right, he does not have a clue. After Columbus discovered America, everyone and his dog can give 1001 reasons why columbus has succeeded. Where were these expects before then?
reticent to license OS X to other PC vendors or sell it to run on beige boxes now that it is Intel. They tried something along those lines with the clones, and as the article states it was a complete disaster. Ultimately besides a few loud people, most of the people who would buy OS X for generic PCs are the ones who would buy a mac anyhow, so Apple loses profit while barely increasing market share. Not a good tradeoff from the corporate perspective I would think.
Monstar L
"The company now only had an improved platform that nobody had any reason to buy. The real solution to Apple's problem was stumbled onto by a fortunate accident." ... and this is where it ends, to be complete later. What a waste of time.
One thing that keeps me concerned about Apple's future is the excessive (but successful) cult-of-personality culture : the reliance on Jobs to personify the company's innovations during keynotes.
How will buyers keep faith in Apple products after Jobs disappears ?
No Steve Jobs.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
The performa line from the mid 90s was probably their worste move. I know a number of mac fans that went out and purchased one of these machines not knowing how gimped they really were. Tons of the "good" mac software couldn't run on those machines as they had much lower quality components. The bigest problem was that they had no math co-processor.
Virtually none of the documentation for these systems mentioned that they were less than a real mac, so most of the people that purchased them just ended up thinking that the whole platform was a joke.
This is when I went from a strictly mac guy to a *nix fan, eventually being forced to move to the PC. I must say OSX has got me saving my pennies to get back into the mac world.
Selling something 'different', but not really any better? Appealing to vapid, a-technical 'artists' who want to feel different because of the material goods they own?
Blar.
Rather than selling expensive Apple hardware to a tiny segment of the market, they figured out that they could sell cheap PC hardware to a tiny segment of the market at inflated Apple prices! Hooray, the kingdom is saved!
I personally loved the Mac's back in the 90's. I built a very successful commercial retouching business where our primary software/hardware was Photoshop on OS9 Mac's. OS9 performed well as you could lock down memory and dedicate it to Photoshop (no OS swapping). This is something that is sorely missing from OS/X and Windows.
Yes, there were/are WIN32 calls to ask Windows to not swap, however, there is really no guarantee. (Maybe there is now?) Photoshop has a more efficient swapping mechanism based on image tiles rather than the OS with small pages.
For the general business or home computer user, I agree, the 90's Dell's years. Apple fell short of expectations.
I think Apple's success with the iPod and iTunes really boosted their overall marketing effort. Had it not been for those products, we probably would not be having this discussion.
-G
hard to see how they'll ever really compete with MS Windows. I guess from Apple's perspective, even if their share rises from 2% to 4%,
One CEO once said "US Steel is not in the business of making steel. We're in the business of making profits."
Mac's market share is not the most important number. Mac's profitability is much more important.
GM's got huge market share but is losing money. You don't see people saying "BMW will never really compete with GM."
Just because MS' self-imposed measure of success is dominating every market with 90% share doesn't mean that this is the only metric of success.
Penny - plain text accounting
The article does not in fact give the answer! Presumably it will be unveiled in the sequel ("Coming up next...") advertised at the end of the page.
They mention the analysts were wrong that Apple needed more Apple market not more PC market, and that some execution (Performa) was done badly. That at least is true, and why Mom had to use a PC for a while until she got back to Macs.
Of course I was a Mac person in the 90s even though Apple had screwed me a number of times. Now Macs are better but PCs (with XP) are better too. If they can come out with Leopard this year instead of next year they will do much better at Christmastime I bet.
take a llok at the future at all
I didn't even bother reading TFA, as that website hardly comes close to displaying correctly in firefox. Out of curiosity, am I alone here?
when it was clear Apple was going to take forever to deliver a next-generation OS.
Copland gave me hope, but then they scrapped it. At that point I was a little disappointed, but was in no big hurry to switch.
By the time Rhapsody was in the works, it was really time that Apple got a new OS. The poor multitaking and bad memory management were a pain to deal with, and I was exited that maybe there was hope. I installed a beta version of it and was quite impressed (even though there weren't many apps available).
But then (in 1998) it, too was scraped (or transformed into OS X), and it was clear it was going to be quite a while before X came out. At that point I jumped ship over to Slackware Linux, which fulfilled pretty much all of my expectations.
I patiently waited until recently, when I picked up a MBP and am again enjoying the Apple experience.
At the beginning of the 1990s, there was an Apple Computer. At the end of the 1990s, there was still an Apple Computer. Count it as a success, considering all the companies that did not make it.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Something to mention about why the clones failed--Apple paid for all of the R&D costs while the clone-makers were the ones benefitting. In the x86/Windows world, R&D costs are generally spread out amongst the chip and board manufacturers. With Apple in the mid-90s, almost all of the R&D costs were squarely shouldered by Apple. The clones all used the reference board designs, even down to the add-in HPV video cards used in the 1st gen PPC machines. Now that they've moved to the x86 architecture, a lot of the costs are spread back out to other manufacturers. This time around, cloning might be possible, although they'd lose a bit of money from their very respectable hardware margins.
This guy's the limit!
There have been many companies that have failed during the 90-ties... the greatest loss propably beeing Digital.
Apple did survive and they are now in a better position than they've been in the last 10 years... and it really doesn't matter if it is caused by a mp3 player or by the move to Unix.
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Tru64, propably the best UNIX in the world... too bad some jerks killed it.
I don't think their future really is that bright at all. Their future may be extremely bright - to the people already in the cult of Mac - but to your everyday Windows user? They couldn't care less what Apple is doing outside of iPods and iTunes. I do roving computer repair, and I've yet to come across someone who's even asked me about a Mac yet. Lots of people have iPods and don't even know Apple still makes computers. While I'm sure no extreme is as true as is made out (Apple has no future vs. Taking over MS's #1 spot), I think Apple will remain in its niche for quite a while.
The 90s and early 00s were a time of commodity hardware. In these new days of proprietary form factors and integrated sound/video/everything people have resigned themselves to the fact that they will not be upgrading specific hardware components during the life of their machine and are getting a Mac.
They accidentally spilled blue paint on the iMac prototype... the rest is history.
Because it is not really a technology news site, it started as a blog (before the word was coined), and developed into a community site. There are plenty of technology news sites that pretend to be objective. They are boring. Why should /. immitate them, when it has been pretty successful doing what it does?
It wasn't just Apple. Nearly all of the integrated PC manufacturers, meaning those who developed integrated systems, from the hardware (in some cases including the CPU) through to the OS, either collapsed or nearly collapsed in the 90s. The reasons, of course, were first that Intel continued to increase the price/performance of its x86 architecture, leaving most RISC systems offering either worse performance, or only marginally better performance (at much higher prices), and second that Microsoft continued to improve Windows 3.x, in particular taking advantage of the revolutionary (for x86) improvements provided by the i386. Microsoft also released Windows NT, an OS architecturally comparable to Unix, but with a much lower price (than commercial Unix systems).
One notable exception to the shakeout of the early 90s was Sun Microsystems, largely because of its OS, but when Linux eventually caught on, Sun started to implode too.
On the whole, I think Apple supporters are far too harsh in their criticism of Sculley. In most ways, the original Mac was no match for its competitors, not only the Intel/Microsoft PC, but also other 68k-based competitors like the Amiga. The first Mac that really did outshine the competition was the Mac II in 1987. It was expensive, but unlike the original Mac, it offered state-of-the-art hardware. The core OS was still rather poor, but the GUI was amongst the better ones in the market.
Sculley's big mistake was joining forces with IBM and Motorola in the PowerPC debacle, but almost everyone at the time (apart from Intel) thought Risc was the future, and that the x86 would die, so it's hard to criticise him for that. If Apple had gone with x86, it could have continued to offer premium PCs (much as it did in the late 80s, and dies today), and channelled all of the money wasted on the PowerPC into developing a modern OS, as Microsoft had done with NT.
Apple's real problems came under Spindler, who tried to turn Apple into a producer of low-cost, high-volume systems (something Steve Jobs supposedly wanted to do with the original Mac as well), which is a business model that can't sustain the high R&D costs associated with developing a custom OS (and hardware, although Apple has gradually moved out of that market in most respects). All that happened was that Apple was reduced to offering inferior hardware at higher prices than competitors. With the switch to x86, Apple has finally caught up with Intel PCs (Macs are basically Intel PCs with stylish enclosures and a trendy OS), but is unlikely to ever be able to offer superior hardware again, as it did in the late 80s. That's simply the reality of a market where specialisation has made it impracticable to build integrated systems.
WHAT!! Apple went out of business is the 90's?!?! Have I been having a delusion for that long? I can not believe how real it felt I can even almost remember seeing TV commercials advertising something call a iPod from Apple. Now that you mention it does seem pretty silly come on, iPod what kind of silly name is that. Thanks for telling me. Now I can go get help for my delusion.
Back then they didn't have good stuff.
Apple has improved.
* Their marketing has gotten very much better than before.
* Now they have Mac OS X which is a Unix and therefor attract many geeks.
* People are getting more sick of Microsoft and Apple is seen as a viable alternative?
* Their iMac was horribly ugly with the computer built-into the screen. The new Mac Pro with aluminum case is cool.
"They couldn't run DOS or Windows, which was the definition of PC ever since IBM applied the letters to its first home computer."
This is where I stopped reading, and knew that the author was talking out of his ass. There was never a hard and fast (and agreed upon) definition of a PC, with the sole exception of what that first letter means: Personal.
The notion that a PC wasn't a PC unless it ran MS-DOS is ludicrous to say the least. PC was an attempt at a brand name rather than a generic description, but that isn't how it actually worked. The term PC instantly came to describe a class of computer that could be purchased by individual consumers. I had personal computers from Radio Shack (CoCo 2 and 3) which didn't run MS-DOS long before I had a personal computer from an IBM compatible reseller.
Several years ago, I booted up my old CoCo 3 and found that the BASIC ROM had a Microsoft copyright. So it's easy to argue that RS-DOS (Radio Shack DOS) was really MS-DOS in disguise. The RS-DOS BASIC syntax was remarkably similar to GW-BASIC. But I hardly ever ran from RS-DOS after getting Microware's OS/9. If you want to see just how pathetic MSDOS+IBM were for the time, fire up an IBM clone running MS-DOS and the CoCo 3 running OS/9 Level 2. The latter cleanly blow the doors (and Windows) off the former.
The single greatest reason mac has done better in this decade than before is because they created a cool looking logo, where as the old rainbow one was very boring and 80s. Apple has turned itself into a style/fashion brand, and that logo is responsible (along with putting "i" in front of their products). If the iMac and iPod had still had the old rainbow logo, I bet they would have been commercial flops.
It's always been much harder to be your own local apple store as opposed to being a local whitebox PC store. Apple had some rather hefty fees associated with retailing new products and aftermarket was dismal as well. For a long time they didn't even offer one penny discount to retailers, nada, although requiring a 50 grand bond/weird sales license deal IIRC and imposing severe restrictions on the sales, etc. The scrambling local vendor who jumped through that expensive hoops then got the privelege of paying full retail for his units and add ons (few anyway) from Apple, then had to try and make it with Apple inc undercutting their price via their online or at the end of the telephone store! Yes, it could and has beeen done to be a local neighborhood mac store, but it was and is still very difficult and expensive and mostly doesn't exist. They failed to take advantage of the local neighborhhod aspect.
It's hard to buy an apple when you can't even see one any place for sale near you. This is 2006, I can go to various cities near me that have computer stores large and small, from big department stores that offer computers *blahmart, etc, and then like office depot, etc, to the smallest whitebox shop, maybe going on two dozen stores now locally to me in three different cities in a 20 mile diameter, and not a single mac for sale. It's unobtainium, and people aren't going to go out of their way to try and track it down and drop serious cash when they have right at their fingertips a huge variety of shapes sizes colors and functions and prices of computers they can just grab and go home. I can go out right now and get a used "$99 full bundle-internet ready!" package locally to me (which isn't all that bad a deal either usually there is so much good enough used stuff on the market), all the way to some high end stuff or custom built to order-but no macs, none.
Microsoft would be a another failed Software company, but by tying their OS to only their equipment they squandered their ability to be the number one software company in the world. If tomorrow they made their OS X available to run on any Intel type processors they would take 50% of the computer market in one year. Prove me wrong Apple, try it.
Price / perfomance / quality ratio was never an issue.
Corporate direction? Ok, ill buy that.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Apple has 3% of the deskop still, Linux has less than 1% still, so which failed, exactly?
It's easier to maintain system stability when you write all the drivers.
It's easier to write drivers when you limit the hardware support. Unfortunately, the other side of that scale is market potential...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Slashdot apple summary:
If not for their hardware Apple would have failed in the past, is failing now and will be failing in the future. Their products were almost killed, are being killed and certainly will be killed unless they stop making hardware now and WHAT IF NONE CARED???
This, from a novel written in the late Nineties - about the real reason Apple and the Mac exists.
MARY R147
GO HERE if that link is overwhelmed
People do not expect this kind of thing, but it very well may be true on a completely different level, which exists beyond the thinking of most everyone else.
Is there any validity to this? If it is true, it changes everything, because it means that the current success of the Mac, iPod and OS X comes from a very unexpected place. You would almost have to watch HEROES to get a clue about where it comes from.
I know you may think this borders lunatic fringe territory, but you owe it to yourself to at least consider it.
~ 'Ro'ger 'Bor'n '' '''' '
"Glad to have gotten this off my chest. Your mileage may vary."
From the article;
...anyone have a copy/summary?
"Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.roughlydrafted.com Port 80"
Okay. Same story, my vision:
... and ends up with an underpowered (for what only its OS was needing) machine, but a Real Nice one, for "only" $5000 (or was it $7000? With its printer, maybe. Can't remember off the top of my head.) It was a cube running a really nice Unix...
... we all know the rest : iMacs, iPod+iTunes, and now i686mac.
At some point in the eighties, Steve Jobs told the rest of Apple "Okay, so we're gonna build really nice computers, shaped as cubes, running a *BSD, and charge a metric assload of $ for them."
Anwser : "You're fired."
Steve goes a little away and sets up a company to do just that...
He never could sell enough of them to turn any sort of profit whatsoever, even when he finally equipped them with enough RAM to do something useful, though. He tried to make a pizza-box version, too, which was better (and nicer looking IMO).
While that company was going from Good Idea to Bankruptcy(sp?), Apple was following, what with that crazy idea for a hardware vendor to let other make *cheaper* clones... the idea not to cut their prices as a logical consequence was not a good one either...
Then with NeXt almost dead and Apple not far away from their Final Doom either, they call Steve back to save them. Then he says "And NOW we're gonna do what I'm saying and get it RIGHT this time", and goes on "and we're gonna make those cubes running BSD, and..."
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Does TFA use the word 'beleaguered'? (/.'ed already, so can't check) No Apple-is/was-in-trouble article can be taken seriously without it.
As someone who has been an Apple developer since 1989, the assertions made in this article are ludicrous at best. They show signs of someone that has perhaps read about the company's history, but not been involved with them in any significant way (nor was it researched with any depth).
That this meaningless trash makes it onto Slashdot and Digg simply amazes me.
...Jobs wasn't there. next question?
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
You bring up the issue of retailing which I am surprised that no one else has touched on yet. I think one thing that has been huge for Apple has been the Apple retail stores. People buy iPods for various reasons and then when they go to the mall or when their spouses drag them to the mall they see hey it's an Apple store let's go in. They encounter a different shopping experience than what you get at Best Buy, Fry's, Circuit Sh*tty, etc. It kind of drives home the BMW kind of cache to the products. I have more detailed thoughts about why Apple failed in the 90s and turned things around in the past 5 years but I'll post that on a seperate thread.
who cares??
Windows sucked just as much at the time. It was just the marketing and the fact that it was overpriced. To be so much more expnsive, they really needed to offer something more. And they didn't at the time.
Yeah, the dude from a certain large PC manufacturer was in my office telling me that Apple have been making losses on their hardware for years.. they are apparently only making money from iPod sales. Without iPod sales they would be in the pits.
Surely that's not true!
I'm also a longtime Mac user, and have spotted the occasional howler at RoughlyDrafted, but overall, I think he's been successful at packaging up history in an interesting way. It's a topic lots of us are interested in, so a little redundancy isn't a bad thing. I look forward to reading his new installments.
as a long-time Mac user i remember some fallout of the clones. if i remember right, Apple hired a lot of key engineers from the clone makers. one of those clone companies was making a sub-$1000 clone Macintosh that wasn't too bad. that had been unheard of until then. was it Umax? anyway, i had heard a rumor that some of those people were brought in to make the original iMac as (relatively) cheap as it was back then. the impact of the iMac was based on its design as much as its cost and decent computing power. if it had cost $3,000 it would have failed miserably. it was powerful enough that people upgraded their older beige Macs to them if they did not need the power/size of the G3 tower.
That is far and above the ugliest and most unreadable "news" site I have ever seen. I wrecked three keyboards typing that last sentence alone because I keep bleeding from my eyes onto my keys.
The move to PowerPC was Apple's big mistake. That was the point at which Apple market share dropped, and it never came back. Even today, Apple has much lower market share than it did the day the PowerPC machines were announced. The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.
In fact, when the PowerPC 601 came out, Motorola was shipping the 68060, which outperformed the early PowerPC chips. The 68000 line could have been developed further; there was nothing in the architecture that limited it. But when Apple dropped it, that was the end of the demand for high-end 68000 parts.
The PowerPC transition killed many existing apps. The engineering community dumped the Mac at the PowerPC transition; existing CAD applications like AutoCAD were not ported to PowerPC, and most of the printed circuit board design applications were dropped at that point, too. So Apple lost a whole market segment, and one willing to pay for big screens and good graphics.
Copeland was actually a good operating system. The problem was that applications had to be revised for it, and Microsoft didn't want to bother. Apple no longer had the clout with developers it had had back at the System 7 transition, where all apps had to be revised. But Apple hadn't realized internally that it could no longer order developers around; the developers had the option of going to Windows. So backwards compatibility had become more important.
Copeland (the original "MacOS 8") actually shipped to some developers. It was almost ready to go. Acquiring NeXT delayed the release of a new OS by several years; it took much longer to get NeXT code onto the Apple platform than Jobs said it would. But it saved Jobs' ass financially; he was heavily invested in NeXT, which was headed for bankruptcy.
As for design, one of the coolest Macs ever was the 20th Anniversary Mac, the first Mac with an LCD panel. In 1997, way ahead of everyone else. That was before Jobs took over and "Steved" the product, because it wasn't his.
The iMac clamshell looked like the Lear-Seigler ADM 3A from 1977, which was a very popular low-end terminal in its day. It wasn't an original concept.
Jobs' big contribution was to suck up to Gates and thus keep Microsoft Office on the Mac That's what saved Apple.
So that's what it looks like with the Reality Distortion Field turned off.
They tried something along those lines with the clones, and as the article states it was a complete disaster.
From what I gathered from various Apple history books, Apple management expected the clones to offer high-end models. When the clones made inexpensive low-end machines, each one was costing Apple $500 USD in revenue and/or profits from their current models. When Apple tried to change the rules of the game, the clones started screaming bloody murder and were shut down.
Apple is making insanely great products again, all systems are go, and their have a hammerlock on an emerging market. So while we don't need cheerleader articles, why is so hard for these people to accept that Apple is successful and it's not going to go out of business anyday now? When Vista hits the stores (and let's face it, it will probably sell extremely well) are we going to see a myriad of articles on the complete disater that was Windows Millennium, or, Hey, what about a pathetic thing called Bob? I don't $@#king think so.
Fiat Homos et Pereat Theos
I couldn't agree more about the classic Mac OS. Not only was it unstable (I typically experienced a total system lockup about once a day), but it also offered absolutely nothing for power users. And not only was that hardware to run it very expensive, it was also slow.
Apple's turnaround has come because they got a number of things right for a change. After about 10 years of of PC use with mixed windows and linux operating systems, I've come back to being a Mac owner. There are a number of reasons. The OS is very usable for all levels of user. They also managed to make USB a standard and switch to other standards (such as DVI and VGA), which makes owning a Mac more affordable because you can use peripherals which are cheaply available. They realized that people wanted computers which are pretty on the outside. OSX also allows the user base to port just about any standard unix application to run on a Mac. The Intel switch was another great move, now Macs are actually fast computers as well (unless you're running under Rosetta, and even then it's not terrible.
Microsoft is currently repeating a lot of Apple's failures in the 90s. They're trying to create products for markets which don't exist. They've let Windows become stagnant, the last revolutionary upgrade which brought vast improvements was Windows 2000. XP and Vista are nice updates, but just baby steps.
There is only one reason that Apple is succesful again and it is called 'the Internet'. Open standards and platform independent content is what saved Apple from the looming threat of the Wintel platform.
You're a moron. One look at the garbage turned out by Apple in the 90's shows it was overpriced even if they gave it away. Frequent crashes (you losers try to act like it was only MS, but we all know better) idiotically high prices and sluggish (WAY WAY sluggish) OS performance were the norm.
You're a lying fanboy, and it's hilarious to see how easily you succumb to the reality distortion field. How does it feel to be so easily manipulated and so moronically and obviously biased?
That the classic Mac OS was no good? It was certainly scads better than anything M$ was dribbling out.
Why yes, yes it did. It was even considered "edgy" because the Internet (capital I) was abbreviated with a lowercase letter!
The degree of the industry's plagiarism of Apple's style decisions can be measured by the fact that prior to the iMac introduction, anything vaguely Internet-related was tagged "e-" (for "electronic) -- e-commerce, e-mail, e-this, e-that. Almost immediately after the iMac exploded on the scene, the e- was quietly dropped and new Internet things were tagged "i" or "i-".
-- Old Man Kensey
Perhaps it should be stated--once again--that Apple is essentially a hardware company. As many others have pointed out, when they control the hardware AND the software they have much better control over the entire experience. Once they let OS X be run on beige boxes people will start having bad experiences and Apple's reputation would suffer.
Not to mention that a hardware business model is inherently more defendable than a software one since you can't make quick digital copies of hardware.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Bill Gates $150M and committment to Office on the Mac.
Microsoft needed Apple not to fail because 5% marketshare was all the evidence Bill Gates needed as proof that Windows was not a monopoly. For $150M, Bill got the room he needed to breathe out from under Anti-Trust and seeded further MS product, even if he lost a window sale or two. It was his cost of staying in business, without the US Gov't breaking Microsoft into separate operating units.
Steve Jobs got serious credibility on the Street, with businesses really nervous about being stuck with Mac's going out of business. Bill G. stopped all that bleed, angst and hesitation in the sales pipeline for Apple Computer Inc.
During the early '90's, when OS 7 and OS 8 were crashing every 15 minutes, I had a couple of customers with 500+ Mac II's and III's that almost never crashed; they were running AUX. AUX was UNIX, and it still ran the Mac OS on top. At that time, a Mac III with a Radius monitor was the fastest AutoCAD system around.
IMO, the article (incomplete as it is) is right on about the weaknesses in Apple's strategy to gain market share. IMO, if they had contiued to expand in the UNIX area and done a better job of marketing AUX, they wouldn't have had to re-develop the idea for OSX. The Microsoft platform, with it's huge base of applications, is a great example of Kevin Kelly's proposition that "Value flows from Abundance" (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy", 1998). In short, Kelly claims that in the networked world, the more people you have using your product, the more valuable it becomes. His first examples are the telephone and fax machine: Both devices were in short demand until enough people had them so that owning one was a convenience rather than a curiosity. IMO, if Apple had done with AUX what they've done with OSX, the sheer utility of owning an Apple computer would have been enough to avoid some of the problms they had in the '90's.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Perhaps it should be stated--once again--that Apple is essentially a hardware company. As many others have pointed out, when they control the hardware AND the software they have much better control over the entire experience.
If this is the case, why are they selling essentially PCs these days? And why are there so many problems with this "we control the variables" experience -- the overheating, the cases cracking, the too-hot power supplies? I own a Macbook and while I like the computer and want to drink the kool-aid, I (and others) can't help but think it will die after a short life.
They're "designed" to be attractive, but they're not designed for any kind of durability or reliability, which makes me think they're just an expensive consumer electronics item with an all-too-obvious planned obsolesence.
Not to mention that a hardware business model is inherently more defendable than a software one since you can't make quick digital copies of hardware.
They could sell OS X for non-Apple hardware with hardware keys to limit copying.
The 8086 was very similar to the 8085, so it was trivial to translate ASM code that ran on 8085 to 8086...
At the risk of appearing totally irrelevant to the 21st century, I must take a certain amount of exception to the statement above.
The 8086 with its segmented address architecture was ('is'?) the most seriously difficult microprocessor to program ever built. The only reason that it got put into the PC in the first place is due to the recommendation of Bill Gates, who was one of the world's best microprocessor programmers at the time.
I would venture to say that the decision to use the Intel 8086 instead of the far more advanced but more expensive Motorola 68000 set back microprocessor software development by about six years. It wasn't until the late 1980's with the release of fast dependable CPUs and storage, along with interactive programming languages like Borland Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, that PC software development went beyond having one guy who wrote most of the code for each major software application. That also limited the company to one major piece of application software for which they were known, i.e. Lotus for spreadsheets, Ashton-Tate for word processors.
Software for the PC would be more advanced today if the Intel 8086 were actually similar to the Intel 8085. But it's all water under the bridge now...
Apple failed to learn how to build real business relationship with large businesses. They have no experience at that, which is why they will suffer. University hardware support programs are terrible, basically amount to selling hardware and running for it. No relationship building capacity. What can you expect from iconoclastic california company?
Their products are excellent don't get me wrong, it is just that they learned how to download products onto customers, while having excellent technical support, they have no ability/capacity/experience to deal with large clients. Which will lead to their downfall, eventually.
2c.
I have looked over, what was posted and couldn't make out if someone seen, few glossed over the idea, and I would like to emphasize it. .NET and derivatives. (look at your favorite job board). So fine, their platform is superrior(i have a powerbook). However my professor and some other businesses had terrible dealings with apple, on business level. Professor worked at other university where apple had installed 2 large classrooms with early power pc computers and promptly proceeded to ignore the customers that suppose to become future developers and/or businessmen/leaders at large corporations, that possibly will order superrior apple hardware. Not so. No extra support beyond repairing hardware under warranty terms and having sales people calling about "more hardware", at a standard educational 15% discount.
Apple does not have capacity to maintain large clients. They are big on promises, small on delivery. They key word here, is company to company relationships. Now you can order a swath of Dell PC's and most likely you'll get preferrential treatment from them. No so with apple. They make a point of that as well. Most recently they had gall to come to university here and sell computers, telling how wonderful their OS is. Well it is. What university students stand to gain from learning Carbon and Cocoa. Pretty much nothing. Most UI design jobs are nowadays with
So, it is small they like, iPod is selling at least for a while. But that would take you only so far. When you fall on hard times, you fall onto your relationship net that you had built up over number of years.
So during their presentation at the university, they have ignored questions about the relationship and his experience at previous university, only ignored the questions and continued their sales pitch. Needless to say, there are no orders of powerbooks, iMacs or MacPros.
The feeling you get is that they eager to extract money from you and run. Questions like, "will there be deeper discounts if we fully commit to apple platform?" , was no, just standard discount. Write us a check please. I don't know much about business, but unless they alter the way they handle business clients, in the end apple will end up in the same ditch.
Until the last old person has every last med, surgery, and prosthetic device they need, every pothole in every road has been fixed, and public schools are turning out 99%+ graduates who actually know what they were taught, I can't see any legitimate reason for the government to be acting the role of funder / arbiter of optional activities. Note that this isn't born of a dislike of art; quite the contrary. It's just born of liking people, and liberty, a lot better.
While I agree with much of what you say, especially as regards liberty and small government, promoting tourism does have it's place. Those homeless and in need of medical assistance can benefit by tourism as it can create jobs and as more jobs are created employers will need to increase pay and/or benefits such as health insurance. What I am against though is governments giving big businesses financial aid in the form of eminent domain, guarantied loans, and tax breaks. Such projects need to stand on their own merits.
FalconShould there be a Law?
It wasn't the fancy colored iMacs, the iPod, OS X or any great products that Apple made. It was understanding that their failure was that M$ was locking them out of the market. The SOLUTION was to sell great products direct to the public. That's it. Period.
I agree with you when you say that religion and sports should not be publicly funded. And I don't think they are. Even if your government does give money to a sports team, it's usually not with the intention of supporting that team, rather, it is intended to help its citizens by stimulating the economy.
Rarely if ever will sports help an area's economy on a sustained basis. I may be wrong, as I've never heard of this happening, and if so then I challenge anyone who disagrees with providing evidence showing I'm wrong. The only example I know of that may work is from the Olympics in Athens in 2004, as all of the housing and such after the games were given away to many poor in a lottery style drawing. However it's still too early to know if it will help.
FalconShould there be a Law?
When we tried to program we ran up against limitations associated with the programming languages available. They were good programming languages but they lacked the adequate documentation for us to make them really effective and useful. We contacted Apple. They bluntly told us that information was proprietary and we should hire Claris Works to write the software. That was it. We were out in the cold. No more Apples for me.
...
Apple is succeding now with IPod etc largely because many many people can play. If they wanted to take out Microsoft, it would be easy. All they have to do is take their basic superiority in graphics and etc and lock the doors open to developers. It will be a short time indeed before MS is on the ropes.
Have you ever used ADC, Apple Developer Connection? Though I haven't I've met some who have and they swear by it. I'm using now and have been using Windows almost exclusively for 8 years but when I get a new laptop hopefully within a few weeks I'll be getting a MacBook Pro. I'm just waiting for Apple to release one with the Merom Core 2 Duo cpu. When I do I'll be joining ADC as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Even more, Apple was being undercut by the clone manufacturers. While I'm still not sure opening up the market to the clones was a terrible idea, it is obvious that it hurt Apple bottom line in the 90s.
While I'd like to see Mac clones there's one thing not many think about, Apple isn't just a software company they are that and a hardware company While Mac OS updates are more expensive than they should be, at least that's what I've heard a number of Mac users say as I've been a Windows user for years, Apple makes a lot from hardware sales. When Apple allowed Mac clones they lost more in hardware sales than they make from licensing Mac OS. There may be a balance there somewhere, where they can make as much from an increase of the sale of the OS as they loose from a decrease in hardware sales but would clone makers be willing to pay for a license and would Apple retain the reliability of Macs?
FalconShould there be a Law?
From what I gathered from various Apple history books, Apple management expected the clones to offer high-end models.
Nope, you got it ass-backwards. The cloners were supposed to take the low end of the market that Apple wasn't that interested in. Apple wanted to keep the high-margin, high end of the market to themselves.
The cloners didn't see it that way, and got into a pissing match with Apple over who could build the fastest boxes for the least money. There was at least a brief period where the fastest Mac you could buy was made by Power Computing, and Power Computing was not shy about advertising that fact. That was very bad for Apple, since their hardware sales were responsible for a much bigger chunk of their revenues than the OS licenses the cloners bought. If things kept going that way, Apple would've been in an irreversible death spiral a la Netscape: less revenue --> insufficient R&D funds --> inferior new products --> nobody buying your products --> repeat.
Enter Steve Jobs. He returned to the company around this time, saw what a mess the cloning program was causing, and acted quickly to end it. The cloners' licenses only covered Mac OS 7.x, so Jobs decided that what should really have been called Mac OS 7.7 was going to instead ship as Mac OS 8.0, which he then refused to license to the cloners-- extracting Apple from a bad situation via a technicality.
When allowing clones nearly killed the company the last time they tried it, is it really any wonder that they are so reluctant to try it again?
~Philly
That software isn't a problem. That software can be removed. What might be considered a problem is a webcam in every computer. Some companies don't like that.
I don't know about using webcams but employers are watching what thier employees are doing online with employer owned pcs, mostly because the possibility of lawsuits when inappropriate content is viewed and from employees using pcs for personal reasons and work suffering from it. If employers get more courious about what employees are doing they may want webcams to keep an eye on them. Personally I wouldn't want to work for any such employer but...
There is also application availability, many corporations need some obscure or custom app that's not available on OS X, and the cost of Parallels and the maintenance hassle of supporting something like that might not be worth it, that sort of arrangement would more than offset the ease of OS X maintenance.
I'm using Windows now but I plan on making my next computer a MacBook Pro and when I get it I'll get CrossOver Mac as well to run the Windows apps I'll want to run. The only one I can think of right now is XMLSpy, but if I can find an app like it for Macs then I'll try it first.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Today a $1000+ system starts to look expensive to the enterprise, but lots of home users will spend that sort of money, or more, on a variety of consumer electronics. This is a whole new market, but nobody really noticed its potential until a couple of years ago. Apple truly did see it earlier than many others (but certainly wasn't the first). They made this neat little bit of software that organised your music collection - the iPod was just an add on to that originally. Then they looked at photos, home videos, etc.
I wouldn't say the home market is a new one for Apple and Macs. Way back when, mid '80s, most people I knew who got a computer to use at home got a Mac, not more than 1/4 to 1/3 got a pc with DOS. Then graphic artists were getting them. Even now some graphic artists won't use anything else.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I thought Apple came back because of MS's ati-trust suit, which ended up with MS investing in Apple to spur "competition". They did make nice PCs and make a nice MP3 player and advertise the hell out of it.
But that was after they were "back"
Where Apple score is that they get the new stuff out first so it's hard to make a comparison.
If only this were true. I'm typing this on an HP PC but I plan on replacing it with a MacBook Pro, I'm just waiting for Apple to release one with the Merom Core 2 Duo. I've been waiting for weeks yet while Dell, HP, and others have laptops with the Core2 in them Apple hasn't even announced when they will release one. After several years and a few PCs with Windows driving me to switch, if I weren't set on getting a Mac instead of dealing with more trouble from Windows, Activation, and WGA I would of gotten a laptop with Windows by now. But I'm fed up with Windows, Gateway, and HP. So I'm hoping Apple releases the MacBook with the Core2 Duo within a few more weeks. If not I may break down, get a PC, and install Linux on it.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I couldn't agree more about the classic Mac OS. Not only was it unstable (I typically experienced a total system lockup about once a day), but it also offered absolutely nothing for power users. And not only was that hardware to run it very expensive, it was also slow.
I've had the opposite experience with Macs. I've bought two used Macs, the first was a Mac SE30 I got in 1992, and the second is a PowerMac 7300/200 I got in 2000. The SE30 lasted me from '92 to 2000 when the Floppy disk drive failed. I had no other problems with it, well other than it only had a 20MB HD, 720KB floppy, and no cd. The PowerMac lasted me until early this year, it doesn't seem to be booting up though I'm not sure what the problem is. However I'm typing this on the fourth PC running Windows I got since 1998. Counting all 4 PCs I've had to replace 3 hds, it seems the hd on the PC I'm using now is failing too, three ram modules, and two motherboards. Then on one of them, a laptop, the LCD cracked a couple of months after I got it and though I got an extended warranty with it it wasn't covered. With the OS, on three of them Windows crashed and had to be reinstalled a couple of tymes each, when they crashed I called tech support and they told me to reinstall Windows. Only one of the 4 PCs has not given me either hardware trouble or trouble with Windows, and that one is a DEC Alpha running NT4. Because it's CPU is an Alpha not an AMD or Intel though I haven't been able to install much software so I haven't used it much.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They could sell OS X for non-Apple hardware with hardware keys to limit copying.
Apple tried that, but they lost more from a reduction in hardware sales than they made in licensing the Mac OS. The only ways to solve this and still allow clones is to either limit what clone makers can do and set the prices they can sale at, raise the price of licenses, and/or reduce thier own hardware costs and therefore the price of Macs. Given that why would anyone become a potential clone maker? But the fact is is Apple is both a hardware and a software maker.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Similarly, there was an old American electronic company called 'Packard-Bell' that made good electronics in the past. Ain't here no more.
A more appropriate name was Packard Hell. They were the worst pc manufacturer I knew of. Now one manufacturer that was terrific was Zenith. That is if you got one that didn't have any problems in the first month. If there weren't then it'd last and last but if you had a problem in the first month then you'd always have a problem.
FalconShould there be a Law?
There have been many companies that have failed during the 90-ties... the greatest loss propably beeing Digital.
Yea, I've got a box with a DEC Alpha next to me. As I could hardly get any software installed I wish FX!32 had been developed more.
Tru64, propably the best UNIX in the world... too bad some jerks killed it.
I don't know about this, I didn't have Tru64 installed but I did NT4 and Redhat.
FalconShould there be a Law?
In most ways, the original Mac was no match for its competitors, not only the Intel/Microsoft PC, but also other 68k-based competitors like the Amiga.
I loved Amigas and if modern ones were still being made I'd get one. I recall years ago watching an Amiga running MacOS with a new Mac next to it and the Amiga ran faster. They also had the ability to run Windows so a person could conceivably run Amiga OS, MacOS and Windows all on the same machine. Commodor's marketing was terrible though,and I was hoping when Gateway bought the Amigas they'd revitalize it. Unfortunately they didn't.
FalconShould there be a Law?
I've been reading Slashdot for years and years. No one really talks about it but this site has an obvious agenda which is anti-Micro$oft. Do I care? No. Is it a big deal? No. I'll continue to read this site like I have for years because they cover great things in the technology industry but don't even tell me that this isn't true. It's so blatant to me.
I too have been reading slashdot for years and I frequently read critizisms like your's. If slashdot is so partisan why do I keep seeing these posts? Then again I also read them about Macs, and Linux as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Compiled in less than 3 minutes: will Stallmann kill the linux revolution (today?)
2006.10.16: Root Exploit For NVIDIA Closed-Source Linux Driver
2006.10.12: IceWeasel Why Closed Source Wins
2006.10.03: Weakness In Linux Kernel's Binary Format
Man, this is a site that, while obviously pro-linux, is not blind. But yeah, Windows sucks and Linux sucks. Only linux sucks far less.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
is extremely repetitive. It says the same thing five times: "Market share was the wrong approach." X 5. Alright alrady! Get ON with it.
This is a popular meme, but the evidence is that the $150 million settlement-disguised-as-investment wasn't critical. Apple wasn't hurting financially, they were flailing around technically. Steve's axe wasn't so much about saving money as giving Apple a direction... any direction.
The people who bought Perfomas were not "mac people." They were the Walmart crowd who bought what their kid's school had, who then would generally return them to Walmart when it crapped out or their kid realized he couldn't play Doom on it.
I know.. I serviced HUNDREDS of those crapboxes back then, and nary a one was a owned by a "mac guy". Those rarely failed.
Asking customers how they feel about manufacturers is certainly a useful exercise but it's hardly an objective measure of quality.
I agree, a better though not the best metric is whether they'd recommend the company to someone they know, and like.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The version I heard was that Microsoft got caught red-handed with code in their products that was stolen from Apple. For $150M, Bill got to buy his way out of a lot of public scrutiny and some very expensive litigation. The fact that he got the advantages you listed were just sprinkles on the shit cake.