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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.
I'm sure he's always open to another round of Segway polo, or buying a new cell phone to add to his collection, or hanging out with school kids and doing his best attempt at an inspiring lecture (he's not great at it, but everybody loves him anyway because he is a permanent duke of geekdom), or maybe just going home and rolling around in a big pile of cash.
He's definitely not looking for employment.
It didn't work out well then because the Mac was Apple's primary source of revenue. Not so anymore.
Specifically, what happened back then was that the cloners were supposed to take the low end of the market that Apple didn't want. Instead, at least one of them went balls-to-the-wall and made some machines that were faster than Apple's fastest. They began to hit Apple right in the bottom line, which is why almost immediately upon his return Jobs used a contract loophole to kill the clone program.
Personally, I would love to see Apple open up for at least some things. I can understand to a degree that they don't want consumers running OS X on non-Apple hardware, but since they don't sell enterprise-class servers anymore I think they should officially allow, certify, and fully support installation and virtualization of OS X Server on at least a limited selection of non-Apple hardware.
They do not need to go that far. They can just drop the "only software we approved" system, end the censorship, and let people control their computers.
Palm trees and 8
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.
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.