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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. "
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
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.
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
Me too!
The wikipedia page is more informative than this article...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer
Which after reading it, provides better insight than the article....
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
No Steve Jobs.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Exactly what I was thinking... After reading the quote from the article, I read the actual article in its long winded and boring entirety to find out what the answer to the question is (my guess is the iPod), turns out anonymous fuckface quoted the very fucking last paragraph of the article, getting us all curious for nothing...
Thanks a bundle, asshat, I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thanks to you!
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
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.
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
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.
Oh no! I'm shocked! Nobody every mentioned that ever in all the years Slashdot exists in any article.
Do the admins know? Somebody should tell them!
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!
One day while sending an e-mail, Steve Jobs accidentally hit the "i" key before typing Mac.
If you all Google Slashdot, will it Slashdot Google?
My best guess would be the iMac. With Colored Cases, and it all in one design, the G3 Processor (which at the time had good performance). What it did was offered something that was missing in the market. It made a computer that looked presentable in peoples homes. Before Computers Were limited to bedrooms, the basement or the spare room. the iMac made them cute enough as well smell enough to fit in the kitchen, living room, or different locations. As well its all in one design allowed it to be easily moved from room to room. So it could be in all these rooms, when it was handy. Secondly they were Cute, Which attracted the Female market, before the iMac the Female market Computer (Sexist or not, I have heard from most Woman when they see the iMac they called them cute and wanted one). So it really opened the market.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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?
Any bets on what the fortunate accident was?
That's just a lame cliffhanger so you go back and click his ads some more.
the fortunate accidents were:
- Steve Jobs coming back
- them hiring Johnathan Ive (iPod, iMac designer)
Them conspiring to make Apple a more branded, more complete experience, and hype it up, using their assets (OSX with a shiny interface, loyal designer crowd following them, the MS/Adobe/Macromedia software packs).
One day while sending an e-mail, Steve Jobs accidentally hit the "i" key before typing Mac.
OMG, this demonstrates Jobs is a closet vi fanboy !
People who hate Microsoft founded the site, and still control it.
I would say that a very high percentage of people who love computers, as opposed to simply making a living off them, hate Microsoft.
For many of us, Microsoft's invasion of pretty much everything we held dear made computing a gray, unlovable world whose primary feature was continuous crashes.
Windows 2000 came close to fixing the crashes, and Windows XP was less gray and grim than previous versions. Just as Microsoft started to look almost tolerable, an explosion of malware came, creating waves of horrible problems that required you to become a security expert just to run a PC.
At the same time, open source software, whether free as in liberty or beer, gave us new hope for an alternative that wasn't priced out of the market by the soulless commodity PC. It co-opted the commodity pricing but added an interface we're familiar with and like.
At the same time, it was still a commodity PC, a product that was slapped together by the cheaper-is-better brigade. It's great to save money, not so great to be saddled with hardware that scrapes our knuckles every time we added RAM.
So Apple came on the scene. Want a system that works at base like Linux, but has style and flair and beautiful fonts? Want something more modern than that awful X-Windows, that wasn't even that great when it was founded 30 years ago? Want some cool ways to get reative with photos, music and video?
Well, then, Apple's stuff was made for you.
Apple has created an interesting split among us. Those of us who like using our computers instead of tinkering with them, and who have some disposable income, love Apple. Those who think the principle of open source is better than having things work out of the box, or who don't have the extra bucks, love Linux. Sometimes we'll have fights, sometimes bitter ones, but in the end we're really cut out of the same cloth.
(Have you ever noticed the bitterest fights often come from people who are almost the same? But that's a question for another day.)
I hope that has explained something of the reason for Microsoft hatred, and why Slashdot covers the stories it does, the way it does.
D
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.
I sort of speak from a mid-90s perspective here, when I was using SGI computers because I just couldn't take how ugly X-Windows on Linux looked. SGI's sense of aesthetics was class-leading until Steve Jobs unveiled MacOS X. No matter what else you may say about Steve, his mastery of computing aesthetics has been absolutely unsurpassed in our largely beauty-deprived industry.
The mid-90s were where I founded a lot of my deepest views about computing, and this is an intersting problem for Microsoft. I would never buy an American car beause I hate the way US automakers made inferior junk in the 70s, and don't trust them. I can say the same thing about Microsoft; however much their OS may have improved, I still remember how horrible it was back then, and fear that if I use it it will once again leave me bitterly disappointed as it has in the past. (Even the machine I use to test my work on Windows makes me think this is still all too true).
I have a comparable problem with Linux; I love my MacOS X products, they serve me exceptionally well, so there is little point in trying something new, especially if it's still at least somewhat inferior. (Having to apt-get display drivers is a bit of a clue that this is still the case.)
In the 90s, where SGI was too expensive, Windows too crashy and Linux too raw, I was ready for something new. That opening seems to have pretty much closed for me today since I'm so happy with where I am, and - amazingly enough! - my chosen side has even been gaining considerable market momentum..
D
Maybe it isn't that he has no soul; maybe he just thinks it is more important to solve little problems like people starving in the streets and not being able to buy their medications before resources are expended on statues of politicians, "Piss Christ", and other random works of publicly supported art. I guess I can't really speak for him, but that is certainly how I feel. Every time I see public art, Christmas decorations, government-participation in parades, I grinch about it. I just can't see the government holding any legitimate position costing even one dollar in any non-critical activity, no matter if it is supposedly for the benefit of the citizens or not, until it has well and truly addressed all of the critical activities that it has been tasked with with regard to its base responsibilities.
I bought my first Mac (a PPC Mini) because a knowledgeable friend took the time to show me that her Mac worked better (a lot better!) than the two OS's I was running at the time: Windows XP and Red Hat linux. I was losing time screwing with things I didn't really have time to screw with just trying to get mundane business tasks accomplished. I'm buying my second Mac (an Intel MacBook) this week to replace my Windows laptop, which finally went nipples north. One reason I'm buying it is because the Mini lived up to the manufacturer's claims both in reliability and in functionality. I am looking forward to the MacBook and I expect to have a similar experience, despite being a pretty cynical person when you get right down to it.
Certainly it has nothing to do with "art." Do I appreciate how pretty the Mac interface is? Sure. But that wasn't a factor in going Mac. I was won over by the smooth integration of multiple languages in applications like OmniOutliner and 100% support for that by the OS; by the complete lack of need to mess with low level Unix issues; by the speed and fluidity and consistency of the interface; by the continual experience of having things "just work" (it may sound hackneyed and fanboyish, but that is the nature of the experience — OSX is as far from running windows as flying a plane on autopilot compares to hand-flying it.) It beats Windows in resistance to malware by orders of magnitude, and it beats Linux by never requiring me to screw with compiling some package or watching Gnome screw up repeatedly, losing my network connections.
There are lots of good reasons to go Mac, I could go on all day about things that I feel have worked out better for me with the Mac, no doubt boring some and annoying the rest. The bottom line hasn't anything to do with art, no matter how long I were to go on. It's simply (or maybe not so simply) a better product, and it won me over based on that. The applications I need are there, and that pretty much closes the case.
And as for your lauding tourism in Philadelphia... If you want to draw tourists, that's a task that it is primarily aimed at benefiting businesses. Therefore, those businesses that will benefit (and not all will) should be paying for it. Not the poor homeowners on the outskirts.
This is very similar to small town sports. The schools (hence, including the kid's parents and the old people in town) spend huge sums of money on everything from custom busses to playing fields. The kids play the same games they could have played in a field of grass, in jeans or shorts. The games begin, the visitors from the next town show up, and the local businesses see an upswing in sales. Those specific businesses ought to be paying for that, not the poor schlep of a homeowner.
These are areas where the government has been co-opted by interests that are not legitimate areas for it to focus, IMHO. Private support is the way to go for both art and sports above the level of casual social interaction or for exercise; and to that you can add parks, monuments, and any state-sponsored museums that might creep in here
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Thanks for calling me a young kid. I've been feeling like an old man for a while now, so that makes me smile.
I've used Macs since 1984 (although I was just drawing pictures then), and before that I played on the Vic20, Apple II's, the ST, the Amiga, an Apple IIGS.
I've managed million dolllar IT budgets for Microsoft enraptured dotcoms as they went under, and I followed NeXT while they whimpered out into irrelevance.
I was a developer through the move to Rhapsody and Mac OS X, and I'm a bit happy to see somebody with vision and a pulse injecting a challenge into the waters of IT.
Apple has also pushed POSIX (the same Linux/UNIX platform) into the mainstream, and helped Linux to challenge the NT monoculture.
So fogive me if I bubble enthusiastically about seeing a product I like be popularized by a fascinating company with interesting personalities and class and charm.
Also, if you are going to blow stink about my "inaccuracies," please lay them out instead of just making unfounded bullshit claims. I think you really are just bitter because you have nothing really interesting to say.
And for what its worth, I've written well over a hundred articles this year, and three have been posted to Slashdot in my lifetime. EVER. THREE EVER. So don't rain on my parade just because you have nothing to contribute to the world but your worthless trolling.
There is much more to a nice interface than eye candy. Aqua is more about usability than it is about eye candy. All of the features of OS X, from the dialog sheets for opening and saving files, to Expose, to fast user switching, to Spaces and Time Machine in the Leopard demo, have a wonderful way of integrating eye candy with usability to create the ultimate user interface.
I was a longtime KDE user on FreeBSD before buying a Mac a few months ago. KDE is a very great desktop environment. However, I feel that its default themes and artwork are created by programmers who want eye candy for the sake of having eye candy instead of seasoned graphics artists and designers who know all of the theories and practices behind graphic communication with user interfaces. Look at the fonts and icon sizes of a typical KDE desktop, for example. Look at that of a OS X desktop, and compare. I'm not saying that KDE is a bad desktop (it's a very great desktop); I'm just saying that some more polish is needed for their themes. Eye candy for the sake of having eye candy hurts my eyes. Eye candy with a regard for graphic communication and UI makes for a very pleasing computing experience.