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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare
theodp writes "The Mac wasn't the first computer to present the user with a virtual desktop of files and folders instead of a command line and a blinking cursor, but it was the sketchbook of Susan Kare that gave computing a human face to the masses. After graduating from NYU with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare was working on a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel when she got a call from high-school friend Andy Hertzfeld offering her a job to work on the Mac. The rest, as they say, is UI history. Armed with a $2.50 sketchbook, Kare crafted the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing. BTW, just in time for holiday gift-giving, Kare has self-published her first book, Susan Kare Icons. So, could computing could use a few more artists, and a few less MBAs?"
No, Xerox didn't "doom the future", they just started with an expensive first product and then were driving the cost down. Apple saw this and started cloning it. Their first attempt also cost about $10000 per workstation. Then Apple cut a lot of corners and drove the price down further to about $2500 (about $5000 in today's dollars). Corner cutting involved getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell, a shell that looked nice but was hell to program.
The Plato IV protoypes used a plasma panel with touch screen in the late '60s, and had downloadable characters you could point to to activate different functions. Not a far reach to make those program and folder icons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)
So now I know who made the Mac so insufferably ugly. For me it was a retch at first sight. I think I may be the only one in the world but I have consistently hated every single artistic and stylistic choice Apple ever made with their GUI (their hardware designs sometimes look OK, e.g. iPhone 4)
That comes from being a heterosexual. You're clearly not their target demographic.
Susan Kare is very well known in the visual design world. She is the world's leading icon designer. Not only did she do the icons for the Mac, she did some of the icons for Windows. And Autodesk products. And PayPal. And Facebook.
(If the Linux crowd had someone that good, Linux on the desktop would probably be a success by now.)
"The percentage of top 100 CEOs who earned an M.B.A. decreased from 37% in 2003 to 36% in 2004, to 35% this year [2005]. The percentage of all S&P 500 CEOs who have an M.B.A. has increased from 37% to 39% over the past two years."
content.spencerstuart.com/sswebsite/pdf/lib/2005_CEO_Study_JS.pdf
There are a lot of MBAs who successfully run large corporations, but I realize that its fun to hate on them here.
Seriously? The point isn't that people who hold Masters in Business Administration know best per se, it is that successful technology businesses are not the result of good engineering, but the result of a mix of engineering, good business management, and marketing expertise. This is traditionally the area of the MBA, but this doesn't imply that a computer scientist can never ever under any circumstances understand things like SWOT. It means that understanding how to make a business successful is separate from knowing how to make cool technology. You have identified four companies out of an entire industry populated by many successful tech companies operated by businessmen. And incidentally, Steve Jobs is not an engineer or a computer scientist. Nor are Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. None of these guys fits the profile of the typical software engineer. And Sergy Brin and Larry Page worked with Eric Schmidt who possessed executive experience, realizing the need for someone who understood how to run a business.
For all you computer history geeks out there, here is a clip from Computer Chronicles of Susan Kare demonstrating the Mac back in 1984:
http://www.archive.org/details/Computer1984_3?start=772