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Someday You'll Hate Apple (And Google Too)
jfruhlinger writes "Think today's world, where Apple is the innovative underdog, Google is the company that does no evil, and Microsoft sits atop its throne as ruler of an evil empire. Will this state of affairs last forever? You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstart Bill Gates. Don Reisinger muses on the fickleness of consumer loves and hates. 'It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.'"
Even without the internet, people have been hating Apple for decades. Usenet and forums just made it easier for them to spew their opinions about.
Blind devotion to *anything* is questionable.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I mean, Google is easier to see, since it already has a majority marketshare in its main market, but is anyone dreaming enough to think that once (if) Apple gets a large marketshare, it will just be the next Microsoft?
I mean, looking at all their marketing tactics and dirty moves... its fine now, because its mostly aimed at Microsoft, and its with a small market...but if Apple was to NOT change tactics once it reaches 30%+ marketshare? OUCH! Bundling, false advertising, FUD, price jacking, bullying their partners around, etc? That would be fairly bad.
Now to hope that the only reason they do that now is because they have no choice (have to sink to the competition's level), but I somehow have my doubts.
Nah, I didn't like him in the 80's either. DOS was crap. Flight Simulator was a pain to copy.
mod me funny
They're not religions, political parties, families, etc. They're businesses.
They don't need an adoring cult around them. They need to provide what the market demands. If people want to impute a personality or culture to a company, that's fine as far as that goes. But it's still pretty much bullshit.
Just look at IBM. People seem to love them now. Of course, then there're the likes of, say, Standard Oil/ExxonMobil/Chevron who have always been hated...
People love companies that give them what they want. Simple as that.
Back in the 90's, MS gave us great development tools, opportunity, a series of great Office suites and other excellent software.
Sadly however, software seemed to stagnate somewhat, and Microsoft have become increasingly dependent on their core set of products / cash cows, of Office and Windows.
In contrast, Apple in the 90's had a cruddy product line, stagnating software, and people were migrating away from Mac OS in droves, so the shiny new Windows 95.
However, now, the boot is on the other foot,as Apple is giving people what they want in both software and hardware terms. iPods, great Macs (thanks to Intel, and great industrial design), and great software.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
Err, no?
Quite a lot of people never liked Bill Gates. Not his person, not his business ethics and not the software he created. There's enough stuff on the Internet about his early disagreements with Free Software advocates, for example.
And far from the article, like it or not, Microsoft and especially Gates are still hailed as the best and greatest in a lot of trade magazines and computer magazines for the non-techies. Despite the crashes and bugs and problems, a lot of "regular" people believe that they invented "the cumputa".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Apple and Google's current offerings being made from the ground up? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
It's always interesting when a piece like this comes out.
"Sure you hate Microsoft now. You didn't used to.
Why don't you crazy kids patch things up and get back together?"
Like they think I'm going to rush out and buy Vista
for nostalgic love reasons.
I posted a response to someone else's MS hating/Apple loving post that basically stated this article's points and was modded -1 Troll. I went back to my mom's basement and cried.
The only reason they're not in the same boat as Microsoft is because they're "cool". Their software is bloated and forces you to install items you don't want (Quicktime and iTunes) and now their hardware is really no different than a PC. I'll admit their iPod is a great piece of work however.
"Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true."
Why is this sad? Surely being suspicious of powerful entities is one of the better human qualities.
That's not Picasso, that's Kandinsky!
"but these companies will be hated one day too."
*sigh*
I have this conversation regularly at work. Whenever I express my distrust of Microsoft inevitably someone will start babbling about how I will hate some other random company in ten years. I can't help but think that these are all just Microsoft apologists.
It isn't the age or size of a company that makes me hate them personally- it's their behavior.
So far Google has never done anything as a company that I think is evil (yes even the China filtering) and all their products have been delightful to use. Given their past history I see no reason to assume that they will suddenly and magically become irresponsible. I also don't see my loyalty to them to be a function of any PR department. As soon as they modify the IMAP spec to make it so only their own email client can connect, or sell my personal information, then I will hate them.
The difference is that I can't imagine Google doing that. I would practically expect it of some companies like MS or Sony who have a long history of such behavior.
Incidentally- I have no opinion about Apple as a corporation.
I think most of my like for plucky upstart MS was because of how such a little company could manipulate a much larger company (IBM). The story of Bill Gates selling them an OS that he did not yet have is classic. He was reckless and successful and dishonest at the same time, and it was kind of bad-ass and cool. They kept on screwing Big Blue right up through their inheritance of the OS2 code for Windows NT, and it was a little bit beautiful in a sick sort of way.
The thing is, though, they didn't really do anything terribly innovative. DOS is just a close kissing cousin of CP/M, and if Bill had failed IBM would have paid someone else for their copy of CP/M, or just bought the real thing. Microsoft was really just a broker. Even their much-heralded office suite was nothing special until all of the competition was beaten away and no one could afford to make a competitive product. In the end, it was easy to dislike them.
Contrast this with my like for Google and Apple, where I actually like the products that they make. As long as they keep making great products, I'll probably keep liking those companies - it has very little to do with their corporate policies (unless the policies become "screw the customer").
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
is the day they decide to overprice their products and make them "for business". The reason microsoft is hated is because they are business for business, not business for consumer. If google manages to dominate the market (mainly the online part), the seeds of corruption will have been sowed.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Their "don't be evil" policy is admirable, but "evil" is subjective. Google really don't seem to be quite in step with most geeks I know when it comes to data protection and privacy.
is anyone thinking they should really remember to "don't be evil" when it comes to all these crap-ass browser plugins? EVERY TIME I get called in to help a user because "my internet is crashing", it's because Google Crapbar slunk in alongside something else they installed, and is crashing on IE's loadup.
I mean, come on. WE DON'T NEED YOUR INVASIVE CRAPBAR, IF WE WANT TO SEARCH THE BROWSER HAS A FUCKING SEARCH FIELD BUILT RIGHT IN.
I really don't understand why people think that Apple are innovative. Would someone like to highlight which products are truly original Apple innovations?
You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.
That is because there were no such days. From the very beginning, having stolen CP/M and computer time at a university to get their business running, Microsoft has always been regarded as a band of criminals largely devoid of real know-how. The fact that Google and Apple are not targets of widespread hatred in the tech community is evidence that there is more to the anti-Microsoft sentiment than simply rooting for the underdog.
Microsoft hasn't mattered in 10 years. Google is on top of the tech game now and everyone knows it. Apple is expensive and pretentious, but remains, for the most part, respected. The best Microsoft can hope for with regard to public sentiment is to transition from outright, boiling hatred to pity. If anti-Microsoft sentiment were the fickle leftist hatred of success that it is cast to be, then why would we also hate SCO, which is anything but successful?
The hatred of Microsoft is well earned, and its reasons go back to the very beginning of the company. If the SCO experience is any indication, it will long outlast the company's success.
and in Apple's case, Darwin that you conceded, Filemaker? iTunes (not the store) ?
others are pointing out more.
Are you RDF positive?
Utter nonsense. Apart from the obvious massive differences in approach to quality between MS and Apple, it's actually primarily about competition; companies generally stay in line when there are true competitive pressures. If the industry manages to become competitive (we're not there yet but it's certainly improved over five years ago) then there'll be fewer reasons to 'hate' any particular company, market forces will help make sure they behave. The current trend towards improved support for Web standards is just one example. If we end up with say 15% Linux, 30% Apple, 30% MS, 10% Androi, 15% 'other', that would be a good balance - things like interoparability will be literally forced by the market, and they'll also be forced to actually improve and debloat their respective products.
We don't hate MS "because they're big", that's what marketers want you to think. We hate them because of their unethical abuse of their dominant market position to push inferior products which we've had to suffer with for years.
The day they change their attitude and start producing quality standards-based products, is the day we start liking them, no matter their size - it's really as simple as that.
It is not success that push people like me to hate a company, it's factual commercial decisions and practices. For example I have been an Apple fan because of its open hardware Apple ][. The Mac was a big disapointment in this regard so I stopped to purchased Apple computers and to admire Apple. I switched to PC's loaded first with the cheap Microsoft Dos and W95 until I saw that Linux was providing better what I was expecting from a computer. Up to now Google is behaving fine in the sense that Google services are very useful and the privacy concerns are still moderate. Obviously if Google would become unbearable I would also hate it.
It's pretty simple, really. As I keep reminding people:
- when companies are at the top of their niche, and have their nice walled garden and penned sheep to shear at will, they want to keep their garden walled and their sheep penned. Then they want proprietary protocols, incompatible tweaks to the "standard", and they want those sheep scared shitless of even thinking about the world outside their pen. They want you to think "oh shit, if we switch from IBM mainframes to cheap Unix workstations, we'll have to retrain everyone, rewrite our software, rip out and change the whole infrastructure, etc. Naah, let's buy another workstation, it's cheaper." In fact, they don't even want you doing that kind of maths, they want you scared of what might pop up later that you haven't foreseen, and unsure if you even know the right sum it will cost you, and whether you'll get ass raped without lubricant by your clients _and_ accounting department if you changed anything.
The term FUD, now almost synonimous with MS tactics, was coined about IBM tactics. That's not even the tip of the iceberg of FUD there, but the very phrase "nobody got fired for buying IBM" carried the thinly veiled threat that you _might_ lose your job if you go with something else.
- when they're at the bottom and scraping a living off the niches outside the pens, then they want access to those rich guys gardens and sheeps. Then they start screaming that such fences and walls are an abhomination and evil. Then they want open protocols, and ISO standards, and generally everything that will make it easy for them to get to those penned sheep.
And a company's attitude can change at the drop of a hat, if their position on the food chain changes enough. IBM was the big bad monopolist, as long as it was the king of the hill. IBM became the champion of open source and open standards when it got enough of their lunch money stolen by the likes of MS.
And occasionally you even get to see the schizophrenic fits of a company that just slowly slides somewhere around the middle point. So they're starting to covet the neighbour's penned sheep, but aren't quite ready to free their own penned sheep too. Sun was for a couple of years at that point, but now it seems to have mostly resigned to being in the latter camp.
So what I'm saying is that, yes, things can change with MS too. If one day it finds itself at the bottom of the food chain, then MS _will_ become the champion of open standards. And then a bunch of nerds will love them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Woz wrote Apple BASIC, also known as Integer BASIC. Applesoft BASIC was a later product.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue later, I'd say Gates was spot on.
I like Gates. I wouldn't necessarily think him to be the most ethical of business men but in business you win or you die. He plays to win.
Watch Revolution OS, and the Pirates of Silicon Valley and rethink that. Bill Gates stole a large amount of publically available code to create Altair BASIC. He did some work with it, but nothing compared to what he took - without attribution.
The big reason that big success companies become hated is that they try to change the way they gained their success and horde everything for themselves. If Google, or others try to do this they too will get the boot from esteem. Most people do not mind a company trying to profit. I don't.
Examples include Walmart. That outfit started out as a country store which got smart in finance but remembered to serve its customers well and and always made sure to involve the local industry in the marketing plan. Then the kids and finance guys took over from Sam Walton and to say the least, instantly the buy local and support your community stuff went the way of the dinosaurs. Bill Gates at the famous evil empire used to brag about making many other people into millionaires. He made a fortune in the USA and hiring Americans to do it. Then he got rich and decided that he should keep all the money to himself. Being as rich as 4 or 5 US States wasn't enough for him. He just had to move on to China, India and the like, forgetting the guys who made him rich. Then he decided to rent his software for developers in the USA for about $2000 a year. At the same time he practically gave it away in India and China. Well it is no wonder the programmers who were living well with him suddenly became the enemies of the empire.
I know a company McKee Baking in Collegedale Tn. This company has made its original owners and heirs quite wealthy. Nobody is anything but proud of them for their pretty successful baking empire. The reason is that they pay well, and have not tried to dump the people who made their fortune possible. If they ever do I assure you their goodwill will go with it. This is pretty simple stuff people. All you have to do if you get big is not to stomp on people and just go on earning your living. It makes friends and deters enemies.
In the case of Microsoft Corporation, they undertook about 10 years ago to begin to completely destroy the careers of American Programmers. They are hated for it now. Their product lines are not growing and are shuddering with competition because they have just about destroyed any rational reason to partner with them. Google on the other hand is for the time being a friendly helpful and cooperative giant. As long as it stays so it will be so. Once burned the good will of such a company is probably not recoverable. Microsoft will be big for some time but it is in decline and it is it's own fault. If I as a programmer could come and pitch a good new idea and get it moved on to production with their cooperation and partnership, they could be winning but they are refusing to do that. Everybody who tries this game with them loses.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
He was spot-on in what would make him obscene rich, not what's right..
I find it difficult to believe Gates stole Microsoft BASIC from his local user group.
HE was the one who wrote the famous CUG letter about not stealing software. For him to lecture his fellow club members about not stealing, and then do it himself, would be hypocritical.
Oh wait.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Crappy, closed-technology machines. The cult of the single-button mouse. Reseller programs from hell. Lovely laser printers that became ultimately useless. Two wire AppleTalk networks with all of the speed of ISDN on a good day. Cute little useless Newtons. Servers that could never rise above simple workgroup needs. Special connections and exceptions needed to network with anything else but perhaps NFS or wicked Novell patches. Wonderful and proprietary (given few others used them) PPC CPUs. I'm sure others can count the way. Others can see the bloom on the rose, and I still have marks from the thorns. Oddly, I still use a PowerBook G4, alongside a heavy-duty (and less expensive) HP core-duo notebook. Only for games, of course....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
How about if you guys just give up on the groupthink instead?
The socially-reinforced need to pick out people or organizations to hate seems like something you might want to grow out of at some point.
If Apple or Google actually send assassins to kill your wife and children, go ahead and hate them. If some opinionated Internet comment-posters and the folks you chit-chat with at the office decide to hate Apple and Google, why not just encourage them to worry about reality, live their own lives, and stop the schoolgirl clique nonsense?
Don't you have anything better to do? Can't you find something before the "hate-Google" and "hate-Apple" memes get started? You have time. Now is your chance.
By William Henry Gates III
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market?
Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial work took only two months, the three of us have spent most of the last year documenting, improving and adding features to BASIC. Now we have 4K, 8K, EXTENDED, ROM and DISK BASIC. The value of the computer time we have used exceeds $40,000.
The feedback we have gotten from the hundreds of people who say they are using BASIC has all been positive. Two surprising things are apparent, however, 1) Most of these "users" never bought BASIC (less than 10% of all Altair owners have bought BASIC), and 2) The amount of royalties we have received from sales to hobbyists makes the time spent on Altair BASIC worth less than $2 an hour.
Why is this? As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing software is get back at MITS for some problem you may have had. MITS doesn't make money selling software. The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.
What about the guys who re-sell Altair BASIC, aren't they making money on hobby software? Yes, but those who have been reported to us may lose in the end. They are the ones who give hobbyists a bad name, and should be kicked out of any club meeting they show up at.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
Bill Gates
General Partner, Micro-Soft
Many Apple fans hated Apple under Skully's leadership.
He killed their most profitable platform the (Apple II) and almost destroyed their second most profitable platform (the Mac) with crap like the Performa boxes.
Those Performas made Packard Bell PC's look good!
Hate Apple? Been there, done that.
Be careful now! If you start tracking things back to the old times, you might find out that Apple stole some basic ideas crucial to its success on desktop from one company and the sued another company for doing exactly the same thing.
What matters today is that MacOSX and iTunes are 'defining characteristics' of Apple and as long as they do the job right, I as a consumer don't really care where they came from, same goes for any other company.
[President Bush's] religion encourages him to love his neighbor and to treat him as he would want to be treated. Yet a fence between his country and Mexico says otherwise. Um, I'm no Bush supporter (and it's sad that I have to run a disclaimer for even being fair to the man), but in the interest of fairness, are you saying you want to be able to just walk in no questions asked and stay as long as you want in any nation?
Sorry but no, I expect and want to be permitted to enter through legally established means, so that I may be an upstanding guest of the place I am visiting. My difficulty in affording Apple products make me think they are discriminating against the poor. What? Discriminating against the poor? Has discrimination become this catch-all now? Everyone hates discrimination, therefore, anything I don't like, down to the price someone asks for their wares is discrimination? You think someone at Apple is going "You know, we could produce these things for virtually free and give them away, but forget all that profit and paying our employees shit, what we really have to avoid is all those poor schmoes sullying our good name by using our product with a low disposable income!"
Discrimination is when you use an irrelevant attribute to make decisions. The ability to afford the product at a profitable price(*) is hardly irrelevant, and distracts from real discrimination -- and Apple is one the top 10 companies to work for if you're a minority. I'm not a fanboi, I'm just homosexual and love my wife just the same, and wish her capacity for pregnancy did not prevent her from receiving health care (I don't work for Apple, sadly).
~Rebecca
(*) Someone will invariably make a comment of gasoline or food or some such. Please understand that we're talking about Apple computer, which to my knowledge does not produce or sell anything in the "necessary for sustainable life" category. If iPods become as important as the automobile, groceries, or healthcare, we'll reconsider.
Um, what?
The Apple ][ family was MOS/WDC. There might have been 1 or 2 Intel chips on some of the motherboards, but the CPU was an MOS 6502 (or a second-source clone, usually Synertek or Rockwell,) WDC 65C02 (actually, an NCR second-source clone,) or WDC 65C816 (a VLSI second-source clone.)
In fact, we all remember when Bill Gates announced to Homebrew that he was planning to sell his BASIC interpreter for cash. Trust me, there were quite a few displeased people - not because they wanted "good stuff for free", but because it corrupted a community that was sharing its work for the great benefit.
I thought it was fair - even smart - but I also concluded that his approach turned off the exact community that he was trying to sell to. "Customers be damned" comes to mind.
And that was back in 1976. Don't get me wrong - Apple also had a crappy dozen years, when its machines were named Macs with a number. Apple was despised, even by its strongest supporters.
But Apple later learned that you have to have great products that your customers love. Google knows this too. GM? Not so much. Microsoft? No, not any more. Maybe someday they'll come back.
GM has been in the dumps for decades - so can Microsoft. Apple and Google will continue as long as their management knows that you have to strive for excellent products.
The unstated premise here is that people are being unfair for disliking the monopolistic corporation. After all, if Google and Apple become uber-rich monopolistic corporations, we'll hate them too. I can't speak for anybody else, but I like competition, and any organization that becomes successful enough to deprive the market of a healthy competition will attract my animosity.
I do not dislike Microsoft because they're "evil". I dislike the situation they are in.
Did you enjoy all the comments?...I sure did. In the end, we all learned that people already hate Google and Apple. Someday is now! Now where's my flying car?!
blah blah blah
Huh? Apple has used Intel's CPUs for a long time? Where did you get that from?
The original Apple ][s were based on MOS Technology's 6502 processor, although MOS later licensed the technology to other manufacturers, Intel was never one of them, since they were doing quite well with their 8080 and then later the 80286 and successors in the x86 line. The Apple
The original Macintosh was based on the 68000 chip from Motorola, and Macs continued to be based on that chips successors, the 68020, 68030, and 68040 for several years. Then they switched to the PowerPC family which were designed by IBM and Motorola together. I believe that most of the chips were branded IBM inside the case, but I believe the chips, at least at first, were being supplied by Motorola.
The switch to Intel didn't happen until 2006, although NextSTEP, the OS that OS X was based on, ran on multiple architectures including Intel, and Apple kept making sure that OS X could be used on Intel chips in secret to give them more bargaining power.
I highly doubt we would have seen the bunny suit ads if Apple had been using Intel chips for anything mission-critical.
The article reads like a msft sponsored PR piece. The point is that people don't hate msft for any good reason, it's all just the public being fickle.
Like hell.
Have you followed the OOXML scam? The SCO-scam? The Acacia scam? How about msft lying to the US-DoJ in video taped testomony? What about the letters from dead people campaign? How about microsoft stealing Stacker technology? Then there are: fake TCO studies, fake benchmark studies, fake think tanks, Bestbuy rackteering, msft customers sued because of msft patent violation. How about msft saying computers where "Vista Ready" when they weren't. How about the Peter Quinn scam? And, right now, msft is lying to congress about a "tech worker shortage" in order to have congress double the number of H1-Bs, and even further hurt US tech workers.
Have Apple or Google done that sort of thing?
People don't hate msft because msft is big, people hate msft because msft really is evil.
And comparing Iraq to Viet Nam just shows your vast ignorance. There's no draft in Iraq. We never toppled the North Vietnamese government. We never captured and killed Ho Chi Minh, his children, and every important official in his government. The number of soldiers who have died in Iraq are more than an order of magnitude less than the number of soldiers who died in Viet Nam (4000 in Iraq, 58000 in Viet Nam). So is genocide against those in the path of Hurricane Katrina. Economic genocide against those Americans outside Bush's "in" group WTF? Nothing you describe has anything to do with genocide. Oh, I get it, you're one of those radical leftist psuedo-intellectuals who think it's cool to throw out scary-sounding words when you're bashing Bush, even if the actual meanings of those words don't apply.
And people wonder why leftists are persona non grata in American society.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
I remember the day I saw the first Halo trailer... with Steve Jobs introducing it... WOW! If that had gone to Mac first, as planned, we'd all be playing the iBox and the XBox would have been collecting dust next to the used Jaguars. Oh, and Vista never would have happened.
But to his credit, Bill saw that coming... and squashed it.
Apple did not steal any code for Lisa/Mac OS. Apple purchased the right (with a large amount of stock) to look over Xerox Parc's work, hire some of their developers and then reverse engineer the GUI they saw there. One thing they got wrong is that when they saw Xerox's GUI, they thought they saw windows tiled over each other. Apple then had it's engineers go and figure out how this was done when Xerox actually didn't have that happening. Apple also came up with the idea of icons representing verbs or actions as opposed to just representing objects or data files. So yeah, they did build on what went before but they paid for the privilege. And the way Apple stock went up back in the 80's, Xerox did pretty well.
As for MS innovation, MS required Apple to give them their source code for Mac OS so that they could code up the first version of Excel. It wasn't until Windows 1 came out and Apple engineers poked around in it that they found Apple code used in Windows. That was finally settled with the $150M stock transfer back in the late 90's.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Wrong on both counts.
Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), and was shown around. Having paid (in stock), he was allowed to "pick one of three", and went for the GUI. Apple developers then did significant extra items on top of Xerox's work (partly because they mis-remembered what they saw; some things like overlapping windows hadn't been worked out by Xerox, although the devs thought they had seen them)
http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventions/a/Apple_Computers.htm
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance>The AIM Alliance was an alliance formed in September 1991 between Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture.. In other words, there was never any Atari "exclusivity"
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Win or die?
I call upon the excrement of the male bovine!
Many businessmen and women have lost business opportunities and not lost their business. If your business goes bankrupt you are not strapped into the electric chair.
Business is NOT win or die, it isn't even win or lose. Yes there is some competition in business, quite a bit of it actually, but being second best in business does NOT mean that you are going to go under or lose your shirt.
Ethics matters in terms of gaining and keeping a reputation with customers and employees.
It isn't a race, it isn't a game, there is no one winner and the end is the same for everyone.
First to market with a revolutionary new product guarantees you an entry in wikipedia, nothing more.
-- QED
What about a company's reputation with its shareholders. You know, like, you, if you have a retirement account. The first ethical and moral responsibility the executives and the board of directors have is to the shareholders who have entrusted them with their treasure in anticipation of an increase in value. Only legal requirements supercede that responsibility. The ethical and moral responsibility to the public, customers and employees should be in concert with the responsibility to the shareholders, but the thing about ethics and morals is that occasionally they can contradict.
What do you do when you are faced with a moral dilemma? I.E. break a promise or break a heart. The contractual duty of the board and the executives makes this somewhat easier. It always should be to protect the shareholders.
There are only 6,863,795,529 types of people in the world.
And? What's your point?
It's not like Bill Gates is the only shifty business guy out there. He was just the most successful one, and as such he is the one that people cry about the most.
I don't agree with his practices or ethics, but from a business standpoint, the man is a genius and one of the most successful in the world. There is no denying that he has accomplished the near impossible. Whether you agree with it or not is irrelevant: business is business, and in this case, Bill Gates smashed one out of the park.
The fact that he earns more money while trimming his nose hair than most of us will ever see in our entire lives is proof enough of that. Recognizing someone's business success while acknowledging their shortcomings as a person doesn't make you a pussy, you know...it's ok to admire someone while hating them.
Living With a Nerd
Many of Apple's lock-in strategies and their complete disregard for forward compatibility would be unacceptable if they had a larger deployed base.
But since Amiga isn't coming back any time soon, I'm glad there's a presence in the commercial computing world that tries to be innovative outside of office productivity (blech).
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I thought that "I was just following orders" stopped to be a dilemma some time ago.
I you allow greedy, immoral shareholders to dictate dubious business practices, you, as a CEO or any other higher official in a company, will be held responsible also for the consequences (either in the marketplace or the court of law).
A shareholder that does not understand that the only way to make money honestly is by offering a good service or product is a scumbag, no self respectable CEO should accept to work for them.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is the worst, most incorrect description of Bill Gates I have ever read. Bill Gates is perhaps the world's leading humanitarian today. He gives incredible amounts of money away for helping people in Africa, etc.
See, that's the thing though. Microsoft didn't become a monopoly (by legal definition) by force. People bought their products en masse. Microsoft didn't hold a gun to their heads...it happend because the consumers CHOSE to buy their products. Consumers have no one to blame but themselves.
Living With a Nerd
They want their headline back.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Apple has been an enemy of openness in general for decades now, so it's not that surprising they'd be opposed here. Back when Wozniak had say in how things were run it wasn't quite the same, but since the mid-80s at the latest they've been an all-proprietary shop, with aggressive efforts to prevent third-party anything from even interoperating with their products. Back when the IBM PC was de facto open, the Mac was the proprietary, locked-in platform, and not that much has changed since then.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
My local record store is a record label you ignorant clod!
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Can people influence other people, or does everyone make a choice based entirely on their own free will? Is value inherent in an operating system, or is part of the value in how many other people use it? You simplify things too much in order to make a point. Yes, people chose to buy Microsoft. The question is, why? Why do more people want Microsoft products? Are they acting in their own rational self interest? Do Microsoft's offerings really provide greater value, or is some other force at work?
You say capitalism provides people with an opportunity to rise above everyone else. I ask, does the capitalist system only allow people to rise above others through merit, or are other, less honorable factors at least as important in determining who rises and who falls?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Not exactly. Microsoft became a monopoly through a series of illegal activities. Sure, they didn't hold a gun to anyone head to force them to use Windows, but they did slander and sabotage the competition. They did use their early monopoly power (when they were the only OS for IBM PCs) to sign exclusionary deals with computer vendors to ensure that no other OS could compete. They have practiced discriminatory pricing against any retailer who dared to carry non-MS OSes with the clear intent of driving them out of business for defying Microsoft. They conquered the office suite marketplace by burning it to the ground, and using their OS monopoly rents to outlast their competition. They have a various times deliberately modified their operating system to prevent competitors products from functioning properly in Windows.
In every market that Microsoft has won, they won by being the only choice left.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Hi there all this is the happy troll pointing out Slashdot already hates Apple. Don't believe me? Scan back over a few months of headlines and posts and you'll see the truth. It's like watching CNN moan about how the press is down on Hillary while they are running endless stories about Obama's dog groomer may be antisemetic. Slashdot defends Microsoft and attacks Apple. In other news the sun comes up even on cloudy days. Guess it's time to change my screen name to troll just so it matches the mod. Killing the messenger is another tradition at Slashdot.
"no one else to blame but themselves" sounds as bad when referring to victims of illegal monopolistic behavior as it does when referring to rape victims. Oh sure, if they hadn't worn makeup, or put on a dress, and if they'd just stayed home and cleaned the kitchen then they wouldn't have gotten raped. The fact that MS "won" doesn't make it "right" from an MBA perspective. Winning by cheating isn't really winning.
Yes, except for those who plagiarised the work of others. I count Bill Gates amongst these with his rip-off of MacOS. Some people still contest that Apple just took their ideas from Xerox - well, yes they did, but with the notable difference that they BOUGHT the rights to the software (GUI) that Xerox had shelved and in fact they also employed the Xerox staff who'd built that GUI/OS to work on the original Lisa/Mac System. Mr Gates just did a wholesale rip-off and got away with it. I know, I know, he'd already done well getting lucky by selling MSDOS to IBM prior to that (before he'd even written the OS) which some would see as a shrewd business move, but it could be argued was actually fraud (it's a common tactic of conmen to sell something to a mark that doesn't actually exist). Interesting way to start a monopolistic business venture - with a grand crime! ;)
Even though I love Linux, I still have to carry around a Windows partition simply because most proprietary software only runs on Windows. Why does most proprietary software run only on Windows? Because that's what the dominant market share is using. (circular, yes)
If my parents, or pretty well anyone I know of, heads to a common franchise computer store to buy a PC, they will be presented with pretty well only one option - a windows machine. Windows is bundled with the PC, they don't know of any other options, and it's probably a hassle to get the store to take it off and refund the money.
As for familiarity, I'm sure it can be agreed the drive for consumers (individual and business) to purchase things they are familiar with is quite strong. That's what branding is all about. How did Windows become a brand name? Their corrupt business practices lead them there...
I'm not saying that consumers are not responsible for continuing to support a business known for corrupt practices, but their choice is influenced by a number of factors you are completely overlooking. Things will hopefully change, but I guarantee it won't happen over night...
- John
Not to mention that Apple sells hardware, the OS is what makes it run. They have no reason to offer the OS they make to run hardware they aren't selling.
And the third reason is that if the OS is seen as unreliable on non-supported hardware, it will lead people to think that the OS, and the company that made it, is at fault, rather than the inferior hardware it was forced upon. And is bad fr the company, and its shareholders.
You can't take the sky from me...
(Of course, if you meant to say "half a century" in both places, then I completely agree with the point about Lisp and functional languages in general. Also, while I'm not that much of an old-timer myself, I know there are those who would take issue with the claim of Fortran and Cobol being "forgotten".)
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Apple has been an enemy of openness in general for decades now
You mean openness like:
Webkit (open source, core of Safari)
Darwin (open source, base for )
GCC (used for Apple development tools, significant updates added by Apple for Objective C support)
All sorts of BSD tools
LaunchD framework
Rendezvous
Apache (OS X ships with Apache built in)
PHP, Perl, Ruby, etc (same deal).
Those are all open and strongly supported by Apple. Apple has been one of the most open source friendly companies to come along, of all the ones that also do more proprietary work as well.
I am a huge fan of open source, and also happily use a number of Apple products.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Only a handful of die-hards handy any admiration for Microsoft at the beginning. They weren't yet financially successful, their products were abysmal, and their only claim to fame was shady & heavy-handed business tactics. No comparison at all with Google.