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."

Comments

No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[crazyjj]

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.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

And without Woz Jobs wouldn't have had anything either. No Woz = No Apple 1

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[rigelglen]

Without Woz, Jobs would have been nothing and Apple would have been a failure. Jobs isn't a god, of course he was an innovator, maybe a genius, but everyone makes you believe that Jobs came up with EVERYTHING, the User Interface, Design, EVERYTHING. This isn't the case, even Jobs admitted it, he said "It's the talented people at Apple that make the difference" or something like that.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While Woz was certainly not the recipient of terribly fair treatment, I suspect that there is a second reason why he was removed from the picture comparatively early:

The success of the early Apple designs (the II particularly) rested in no small part on assorted deep-hack chip count and cost reduction measures, the sort of thing that Woz is reputed to be very good indeed at. It did lead to somewhat arcane and tightly interlinked designs; but this was back when reducing the chip count in your floppy drive was still Serious Savings or having Woz go up the mountain and descend bearing the design for ADB made your peripheral interconnects genuinely better than the other guy's. In Apple's later models, they just kept moving closer and closer to commodity circuits wrapped in nice industrial design and a friendly software layer.

Obviously, somebody still has to design their logic boards; but that hasn't really been Apple's competitive edge in ages. Jobs occupied a larger-than-life seat on the pantheon; but the members immediately behind him in public awareness and clout were the industrial design guru and the supply chain/manufacturing guy. Board-level engineering elegance appears to have been swamped by volume savings on commodity silicon some time ago.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[iluvcapra]

Wow, I've read many accounts of Apple's founding and Woz is always prominent, we've all read fanboys but I've never seen one claim Woz didn't contribute, I've never seen anyone minimize his contribution and I've never read any equivocation on his treatment at the hands of Jobs. You sir have erected a straw man; I think you'd be challenged to find a single link or quote from Jobs himself along these lines.

There is the simple fact that he left, and that he, by his own admission, had no idea how to make money off his inventions, and would have been happy working the day shift at HP and make a little money running Apple as a mail-order schematic business. To say that he was an engineers genius and critical to Apple's first success is true, but it's also true he had no idea of the potential for the business, he was by all accounts an awful salesman, and at the time he really didn't have any ambition beyond building a slightly cooler IMSAI clone.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Entropius]

Jobs wasn't an innovator. He came up with a few UI tricks using engineering advances that other people did the hard physics for.

What Jobs was was a marketer, and a good one.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[htnmmo]

Found some interesting quotes from Wozniak related to apple and jobs.

He gave up a lot of his wealth, and even potential wealth to spend more time doing things he thought were more rewarding in other ways. So when he asks people to give up their share of the pie it's not a do as I say not as I do thing.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[Lisias]

You are misguided.

Without Jobs, Woz would not had chance to show his invention to the money guys, and Apple would not had ever existed.

Without Woz, Jobs would not had chance to show a invention to the money guys, and Apple would not had ever existed.

Make no mistake - Jobs owns Woz as Woz own Jobs.

Jobs was not a rich guy looking for a clever inventor. He was lucky to be friends with Woz, as probably no other guy would risk his life this way with him, as Woz did.

We can argue forever about who is the father and who is the mother of Apple Computer.

But it's just silly trying go argue if Apple would exist without one of them: the answer is a sound "NO".

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[BackwardPawn]

It was when Atari was making a home version of Breakout and Jobs oversold his ability to create the product. Atari offered Jobs $750, plus a bonus for each chip Jobs could eliminate from the cartridge (by efficient programming). Jobs turn to Woz and told him they'd split the fee. Woz stayed up four nights programming breakout and did such an awesome job that Atari ended up paying Jobs $5,000. He paid Woz his $375 and kept the rest.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[garyebickford]

I think that happens a lot. It happened to me. I co-founded an imaging company back in 1983 based on my idea for connecting a high speed CCD camera to an advanced workstation - bleeding edge stuff at the time. A few months later the company was already doing well, and my associate (a sales guy) and I brought in a new CEO who brought some VC money with him. I left in frustration three years later as the CEO was mismanaging the place horribly, although he did mange to keep bringing new investment money into the company. The history of the company as of a year or two after that was how the CEO had taken an interesting project by a couple of engineers and single-handedly created a company to bring it to fruition - literally our efforts merited part of a single sentence in a ten page history.

The last laugh was that after I left (I had been VP of R&D), in the next two years they went through seven VPs of R&D (I guess I wasn't doing such a bad job!), and spent most of the 1990s fighting a series of battles against financial types who were trying to force them into bankruptcy - people that the CEO had originally brought in to invest in the company. The financial shenanigans were rather distressing to me. In a short conversation about 1999, the CEO of the then-defunct company agreed that the three major things I had recommended, and he had rejected finally triggering me to quit, were all correct - but as he said, "I hadn't been forceful enough to convince him!" - sigh. And he spent ten years fighting in court instead of doing other fun things.

I still feel there was a good legacy. My track record in managing the engineering side was that we were technically successful on every project, usually under budget, and had excellent morale. I'm still friends with folks that I originally hired there. And we did some really great work in vectorizing, OCR and entity recognition for large format maps and drawings. We even did some work on constructing 3D models from sets of 2D drawings. We could generate terrain models from USGS maps. I got to tour the Space Shuttle External Tank manufacturing facility, and we built image processors that were two orders of magnitude faster than anything else out there, using chips from the cruise missile program (credit where credit is due - that hardware and a lot of the original code behind the OCR and other recognition capability was done by the Visual Understanding Lab of Bob Thibadeau, research professor at Carnegie Mellon). Of course, all that can now be done by any common desktop in software.

Re:No one at Apple listens to that Steve anymore

[motokochan]

The issue the parent had is that certain keys on the keyboard behave different from how UNIX and Windows traditionally handle them. For instance, PgUp and PgDown only scroll the viewport. They do not move the cursor. The fun is when you're very used to the cursor moving and then press one of the directional arrows to find you're back in the original position. You have to remember to click the mouse in the document to re-set the cursor position. Likewise, Home and End move the viewport to the very top and bottom of the viewport, not the expected beginning and ending of the line, if you're in a multi-line textbox.

So, while the keys do work, they are quite different from other OSes out there, leading to some very annoying behavior if you're keyboard-centric.

Yeah, I'm tired of the propeller/command key.

[jcburns]

....let's just go back to that Open Apple key instead. That's what Woz said, right?

No one buys Apple because they have to

[sjbe]

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.)

Re:Gillette Razor Model?

[idontgno]

That begs the question that "balance sheets are the best scorecards".

I understand that is the conventional wisdom; anyone who questions that is generally viewed as some kind of heretic, hippy, or anarchist.

Question the premise and you allow points of view like Woz's, or Stallman's, or anyone who argues for more social responsibility and ecological awareness. But demand that every answer results in "MAKE MOAR MONEYS" and we wind up with shiny traps, tragically-abused commons, and proprietary ownership of almost anything that was once public domain.

So, yeah, society definitely needs to outgrow the "Wealth is proof of correctness" mindset.

Apple was a different company after the reboot

[clay_shooter]

The company was rebuilt after Jobs returned. The new team and focus pretty much made the company what it is today.

You guys sound like the Army

[Quila]

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.