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Andy Hertzfeld Shares His Thoughts on 25 Years of the Mac
blackbearnh writes "It may make you feel very, very old, but the Macintosh will be turning 25 in January. As we approach this momentous anniversary, O'Reilly News had a talk with Andy Hertzfeld, one of the original Macintosh designers, about the long and storied history of the Mac. Hertzfeld, who tells the story of the Mac in his book A Revolution in the Valley, shares his thoughts about how the Mac has aged over time, how life might have been different if Steve Jobs had stayed on at Apple, and the differences between working for Apple, and for Google (his current employer.)" Read on below for a bit of what Hertzfeld had to say.
"They're very similar in certain ways — essentially both Apple and Google want to rewrite the rulebook; they don't want to do things in conventional ways. They want to come up with a better way — for everything; that's not even just the technology but the work processes, the work environment, everything has to be unique and better, so they're very similar in that way. One of the ways that they're different has to do with essentially trust of employees. Apple is very secretive within the company; people working on Macs don't know anything about the new iPods, et cetera. Google is extremely open within the company; once you're a Google employee you have access to just about every piece of information there is."
He was the first interview of the very good NerdTV series of 2005.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/shows/
Who's got other gems?
what are you talking about? The company he co-founded, General Magic, went on to create OnStar. I wouldn't call that a failure.
Most of his other ventures like Radius and all that weren't failures, but they weren't big-time hits either.
Ummm... no. OnStar existed before General Magic added speech recognition services to it and Hertzfeld was gone before General Magic started getting into speech recognition applications.
Hi AsperFarts
Apple is one of GCC's biggest contributors. Or maybe you're thinking of WebKit. It's such a significant improvement over khtml that Trolltech will be including it as part of QT and KDE will be using it as well. Too bad more people don't "rip off" FOS
OS X has a larger marketshare on the desktop (you know, their target audience). But speaking of market cap, VA Linux went from 22 billion to 44 million.
Your other point is just plain stupid.
You miss a couple important factors. While market share is important, also important is the forecast for the market, and the margins on the product sold in the market.
In terms of expected profits (and hence, expected share value or dividends), who cares if market share is dropping a couple percent a year if the market is growing, say, five percent a year? Or if the margin is increasing likewise?
Of course, you might be making a valid point, I haven't crunched the numbers on MSFT. But, AFAICT from a quick googling, long-term projections for MS are still very good.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
If you had invested in MSFT you'd know that their stock has been essentially flat since 2000. Certainly if you were vested back then, selling off during the periodic spikes would help, but ultimately it has been a non-performer for nearly a decade now.
"The Mac at 25" makes me think back to when I bought my first mac in 1984. These days I'm on linux. My wife has an aging "iLamp" G4 on her desk, which we're probably going to get rid of soon and switch her to a linux box. But anyway I've continuously had a mac in the house for 24 years now.
Looking back, I see that time as dividing into three periods:
Find free books.
Yes. Things like QuickDraw were amazing. that they managed to accomplish that with such a tiny footprint is just astounding, and is what allowed the Mac to be a Mac while PCs were still running DOS.