Slashdot Mirror
Wozniak Calls For Open Apple
aesoteric writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has voiced a renewed desire to see the company open its architecture to the masses, allowing savvy users to expand and add to their products at will. However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves. He also sees any change of heart on openness as a challenge when Apple continues to rake in huge cash with its current model."
Unfortunately, part of the effect of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field was to basically write Woz out of Apple history almost completely. If you listen to many
Apple employees and fans, you would think that Jobs created Apple single-handedly, perhaps with divine powers. There is very little respect (or even acknowledgement) at Apple for Woz or his contributions in the early days. In fact, very little respect is afforded there to the engineering of Apple products in general, versus their design and marketing. So, though it would be nice to think that Woz's voice might have some impact on Apple, he's probably even less likely to be listened to at Apple HQ than some random man-on-the-street.
Woz's story makes a lot of Apple die-hards very uncomfortable (particularly the bits about Jobs screwing him over). And the standard response seems to be just pretending that he doesn't exist, and ignoring him. It's sad and unfair. But that's the way it is.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
....let's just go back to that Open Apple key instead. That's what Woz said, right?
I suppose the notion of Apple becoming more open to modifiers, tinkerers, hardware/software enthusiasts, and lowly programmers would be akin to Gillette giving away the plans and patents to its razor cartridges.
"However, Wozniak qualified his desire for a more open Apple by arguing that openness should not impinge on the quality of the products themselves"
The moment it is opened to others it will turn into the same mess that Windows has. Keeping the hardware closed makes development & support manageable. There's a reason nobody listens. This idea is dumb.
Did they already try this in the 90s by selling the Apple Mac form factor, standards to other manufacturers? It didn't really work out well for them.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Steve Wozniak is now open for employment.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Mr. Wozniak didn't betray Apple. Apple was growing in a different direction than the kind of environment where he was continuing to feel useful. His options of remaining with Apple were apparently to either continue being an engineer at Apple where he didn't feel he was contributing much, since Apple had well over a hundred engineeers at that point, or to move into a management position, but he did not want to move into management because he liked being an engineer. The only thing he felt he could reasonably do, while being true to his own following, was to resign.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Apple's lock down lost any claim to credibility when they started censoring political cartoons. This is about control and ultimately cash flow, not quality.
Palm trees and 8
If it weren't for Jobs then Woz would still be working at HP
I could imagine an Apple under Woz turning out much the same way as the Bell Labs story: Lots of world-changing technology, very little profit.
Jobs and Woz needed each other to make Apple a reality. Jobs needed Woz to have really cool products to sell early on - without Woz, he either would have ended up yet another commune-dwelling hippie, or maybe yet another marketing jerk in a suit (like That Guy in Futurama). Woz needed Jobs to go independent and sell his stuff on a mass scale - without Jobs, he'd probably be happily designing stuff for HP or some other big firm and playing with hardware tinkering and open-source software in his spare time.
I am officially gone from
And that's pretty much the problem. As much as I hate it and as much as I think it's terribly, terribly wrong, what made Apple big is marketing, not engineering. And that's not trying to bash Apple, it's what you can easily see when you follow Apple's history. It was a niche product while they relied on engineering. It was a great product, well engineered, with a lot of technical innovations. As soon as they moved towards design and gadgets, in other words, as soon as they went for flashy and gimmicky instead of technical innovation, people started flocking to them.
Woz, as much as I agree with you, I'd sad to say that this would be a bad move for Apple. It would certainly endear Apple again to engineers, but financially it would not be beneficial.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
where Linux failed
Where is that? We have a free/libre operating system that is useful and secure, which supports modern features and which is widely used. GNU/Linux showed the world that you can have a good operating system without proprietary licensing.
OSX is the best OS out there today with no doubt
I will raise some doubts about that. I need an OS that is not going to try to thwart me when I debug programs:
https://blogs.oracle.com/ahl/entry/mac_os_x_and_the
I also need an OS that will not refuse to run on hardware that was not produced by Apple.
Sure, there is room for improvement with GNU/Linux; that is not a result of deliberate efforts to prevent users from doing what they want to do.
Palm trees and 8
Jobs treated Apple customers like cattle, to be guided through narrow constricting chutes and confined in little cages, all while milking them of every last ounce.
I think it's hysterical that you think no one who uses Apple products is bright enough to make an informed decision about them. Do you really think there are no Apple users who aren't acutely aware of the alternative products available to them? Seriously? You think no one has heard of Windows or Linux or Kindle or Android? No one is trapped by Apple.
People use Apple products because they want to, not because they have to. Almost no one actually requires a Mac and the majority of computers sold are made by other vendors. You can do virtually all the same tasks perfectly well on a Windows and/or Linux machine. There are respectable quality competing products for the iPod, iPhone and iPad, widely available to anyone who wants them, often at lower price points and sometimes with features missing from Apple products or with compelling design features of their own. And yet millions still buy Apple products and have for many years now. This does not happen by accident or by marketing and Apple certainly does not (even today) have the market power to force people into buying their products.
(And before anyone starts, Apple customers are not mostly status seeking hipsters either. Nobody sells that many units over that many years on image alone. If the products sucked they wouldn't sell for long no matter how good a salesman Steve Jobs was.)
The slashdot crowd doesn't understand that and thus they don't understand why Apple is so successful. The "marketing" crap is your best attempt to rationalize Apple's success without having to expand your tiny little world.
Meanwhile, Apple is on their way to being the first $1 trillion company because nearly everyone else in the world understands something that you don't: "The ONLY point of technology is to make life easier for humans"--by that definition, Apple cranks out the best technology using the best engineering. Deal with it.
The company was rebuilt after Jobs returned. The new team and focus pretty much made the company what it is today.
A company like apple is bigger than one person. You don't create a company by yourself. You recruit and motivate the right people. Jobs was able to do that.
A third reason is that he had a plane crash in 1981 which caused him to take a leave of absence. From what I read, it left some lasting, bad damage including memory loss. Between all that and being set for life, economically, he didn't have to go back.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Do not down play Woz's contribution to Apple. One of the major reasons for the success of the Macintosh was the IWM chip that was the heart of it This amazing hardware hack coupled complex state machine logic and individual circuits together in one chip to become greater than the sum of its parts. Woz's design used the partial circuits in a dozen or more different ways, reconfiguring itself on the fly to do what needed to be done at that point. Could another engineer have done this design and made it work so well? Perhaps, but, I doubt it. "IWM" stands for "Integrated Woz Machine", and well it should. It remains a pretty spiffy hack,
pleasant dreams
bee man dave
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/
The logistics (fuel) guys say "Without us, your tanks wouldn't run."
The tankers say "Without us, you would have no reason for existing."
Woz supporters say "Without Woz, Apple would have nothing worth selling."
Jobs supporters say "Without Jobs, you wouldn't have been able to sell it."
Everybody needs to remember it takes a team where the members complement each other. Woz and Jobs would have sucked individually, but together they made Apple great. Jobs and Raskin made Apple great in the Mac. In modern days it was Jobs, Ive and Cook. And through most of the early history there was Tog, setting the standard for usability. If you want to talk about an Apple hero most people don't know about, look at the Tog.
I wish I had mod points, but you obviously don't need them. There is the phrase "It takes two to tango" and Woz/Jobs combo danced a nice dance, a beautiful masterpiece called Apple Computers. to me, people who hold Jobs up over Woz or visa versa aren't capable of seeing the whole picture.
Was Jobs a jerk? Probably. Is Woz a nice geek? Probably. Personalities being what they are, it often takes a balanced mix of personalities to get things done. Not everyone can be a General, we need privates too. What Jobs provided was (as a previous poster suggested) was the eye on the details while following KISS principles.
iPods weren't the cheapest, biggest, baddest portable music players, but what it offered is a nice package that followed KISS. In fact, there are still other music players out there that are fantastic and cheaper than iPod, but they don't have the "it" factor. Same goes now of iPads and the rest of the Tablet markets. You have iPads and everything else (Windows 8, Android ICS) with everyone else marketing via "More GBs, Dual Cores, 10 inch screens" that are not marketing the "it" factor of iPads. The difference? iPad marketing tell you what you can do with them, everyone else tells you what they are.
Point being, Apple tells people what they can do, not what the machine is. That is why people complain that they don't understand why Apple can see the same hardware for hundreds more than other competitors. Those complaints don't understand the difference in Marketing. And that is what Jobs is famous for. Woz's problem is that he is just a geek, he can make things do what he wants, and make the things so that he can do what he wants (two different things) Most people are more like Jobs envisions, they just want things to work.
If you want to beat Apple, do what apple does, make things that do something, and sell the sizzle, not the steak.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Unix is an operating system, made by engineers for engineers. It came about before Apple, and rose to great heights without Apple, and now Apple has adopted it as their platform. I firmly believe it will be around long after Apple.
You need a marketing genius to make a wildly successful business. You need a remarkable group of engineers to create enduring technology. I know which one I value more, do you?
(Unix has its faults, it's not perfect. But I think we can agree that it has proven to be a pretty useful OS over the decades)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Problem is that Apple floundered under Sculley and his successors before Jobs returned to the company. And they did try opening up the Power Mac architecture along w/ IBM, and you had companies like Power Computing, Motorola and Umax take a stab at making macs. Only problem is that by this was that by this time, the RISC challenges to Wintel that were supposed to happen had all sputtered - NT on RISC was going nowhere, IBM failed to come up w/ Workplace OS or OS/2 for PPC, Pink - the OS from that Apple subsidiary Taligent - never materialized, Be Box was shortlived and within Apple itself, Copeland and Gershwin went nowhere. In short, all the non-Unix attempts to produce OSs for non-Wintel boxes went nowhere.
By getting NEXTSTEP on the Macs, Jobs got over that problem, and realizing that the Mac Clones were only canibalizing Apple's business, but not winning marketshare from the Wintel segment, he decided to pull the plug on that licensing. A microcosm of this problem was seen earlier - when Apple switched from the 68k to the Power Macs, it didn't help the PPC gain any marketshare over the x86 - all it did was replace one Motorola CPU w/ another, which was an ugly result for Motorola.
Given all that, if Apple did listen to Woz, it would risk going back to the state it was in the 90s, when it was haemorraging cash. No reason to jettison what works right now. What they might do is introduce something really low end to target that section of the computer market that would prefer alternatives to Microsoft.
The issue is hardware support. If you buy a Mac, Apple has made sure the hardware works with their drivers. Machines sold with Windows usually work well because either Microsoft or the manufacturer has made sure the drivers and hardware are compatible. If you installing an OS on a machine which was sold with a different OS, you can never expect the same level of hardware compatibility. Try installing OSX on a machine sold with Windows. Installing Windows on most Macs today will work, but some of the devices like internal video might not be fully functional.
If you buy a computer from a vendor that supports Ubuntu or other GNU/Linux distribution, it can "just work." I convinced my sister to buy a Dell laptop with Ubuntu and she saved a lot of money compared to similar hardware with Windows. It hasn't been perfect in every respect, but there have not been problems with driver compatibility. Also don't forget about the millions of Android phones that "just work" without their users even knowing what Linux is.
Heh, one could point the the utter failure of the "Us" festival in the 80's, I think he get's a lifetime "titanhood" pass if you look at the sheer # of problems he had to solve to make the Apple 1 & 2 work: ...an expansion bus and it's own (open) electrical and logical specification ...affordable 5.25" disk i/o (this alone would be a single major accomplishment for one hacker) ...his creative use of banked video memory to display high resolutions (280x192 was considered hi-res back then) ...and an F'ing basic interpreter in less than 8KB of ROM!!!
the fact that one person knocked a home run with all of these at the time earned him a pass.
I mean, just think of lack of resources and debug hardware: he couldn't google ApNotes or datasheets, he couldn't google for other problems people have (look at the arduino forums, now imagine developing without those). there were no digital storage scopes! he did it all by brute force of intelligence.
yeah, i gotta admit i'm a total fanboy. i'm barely qualified to praise the man.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Jobs might have left lumps of gold in the toilet every morning, and yet, it would not somehow be some sort of argument against Woz, his accomplishments, or his current ideas.
Why do Jobs fans feel so threatened by the idea of a Wozniak? Is it not enough to worship Jobs as a Dead God, is it really necessary to tear down the people who got him there in order to do it?