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How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong
An anonymous reader writes "Wired has a look at how the good and bad of Apple, their Yin and Yang, have come together to form a company that actually works. The piece looks at Steve Jobs' unusual and abrasive management style, otherwise known as 'Management Techniques From the Dark Side'. It's essentially a list of counterintuitive, suspicious-seeming and downright evil management techniques that work - for them."
When I first laid hands on a Apple ][, I had plenty of programming under my belt. Back in that time, Big Blue(TM) (IBM) was the very personification of Evil. IBM was no different than Darth Vader. Or Lex Luthor.
You could do all you wanted with an Apple ][. Program it, modify it, make special hardware interface boards (Apple even sold a breadboard prototyping card you could plug into an expansion slot).
With IBM, you were stuck with IBM hardware, you had to use IBM software, and everything was meticulously engineered to be as incompatible with the real world as possible. Remember EBCDIC? IBM harware was truly fabulous and looked great, yes, but it still wasn't ASCII, nor would talk to otherwise standard components.
And with IBM, you were stuck with the high-priesthood. Heaven forbid users could write their own software, because IBM operating systems were meticulously crafted to be obscure as possible. It took years to learn to program on a big iron dinosaur.
Then, Apple brought out the Macintrash. The computer for the rest of them.
No expansion slots. No way to write software (the SDK initially ran on the grossly overpriced LISA).
Oh, yes, Apple was to have released some kind of Visual-Basic-like language, but the idea was nixed after Microsoft threatened to stop developping EXCEL for the mac if they released that.
With a Mac, you were back to the old high priesthood IBM was infamous for. You could only have software that the high-priests deigned you could have. Nothing else.
Oh, sure enough, eventually, as Macs got more performance, you could eventually get a reasonably-priced SDK for it. And then you had to learn how to program it, because it's operating architecture was totally different from what existed before. Before, your program used to control the OS. "open this file", "read keyboard" and so on.
Not so with the Mac. In soviet Macland, Operating System controls your program: "hey, the user clicked on this button!", "Hey! the user pressed on this key while the cursor was on his widget"! "Hey, the user pressed on the 'OFF' button" (whoops, that was on the LISA, not the Mac), and so on.
Mastering the main event loop was a black art, and took too long for many people to consider programming beige toasters.
In the meanwhile, sheep who know fuck-all about Von Neumann architecture flocked to buy beige toasters, and were so grossly indoctrinated into their quite inferior product (without it's handicapped mouse, a Macintrash is nothing but a sitting-suck -- you can't even turn it off without the mouse!!!) that they felt the need to proselyte their crappy toy to us, who know better and write programs by typing "cat > $EXECUTABLE".