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Apple: Losing Out On Talent and In Need of a Killer New Device (theguardian.com)
mspohr writes with a link to an interesting (and rather dour) take at The Guardian on the state of Apple, which holds that: "Despite its huge value, Silicon Valley developers are turned off by [Apple's] 'secretive, controlling' culture and its engineering is no longer seen as cutting edge." From the article: "Tellingly, Apple is no longer seen as the best place for engineers to work, according to several Silicon Valley talent recruiters. It's a trend that has been happening slowly for years – and now, in this latest tech boom, has become more acute. ... Or as Elon Musk recently put the hiring situation a little more harshly: Apple is the "Tesla graveyard." "If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk recently told a German newspaper. The biggest issue for programmers seems to be a high-stress culture and cult of secrecy, which contrasts sharply with office trends toward gentler management and more playful workdays."
Other issues aside with displays, you know Apple doesn't make their displays, right? The only thing they had to do with "retina" was the marketing term retina. Their displays are made by LG and Samsung. Apple doesn't do any LCD or OLED research, they just buy what the display makers can sell them.
He's still officially an Apple employee, and earns 120,000$ a year. You know, he made the Apple 1 and 2, did many other interesting and creative things, but I really wonder if he still would have any real technical impact on the work floor.
That's what state-of-the-art of the window systems were in the late 1980's.
http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/t...
Compared to the early desktop PC's back then, the high-end print workstations that ran PostScript natively in true-color 24-bit mode window display. Hundreds of fonts to choose from of any size and italic slant angle, and in any size. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get was the rule with a color laser printer. Steve Jobs had attended a talk on display systems and fonts and saw that as the future. Instead of having 50+ different binary files of the same font, each at a different size, a font engine could store a single font, and generate the character bitmaps on the fly only when needed.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets, light boxes, stanley knives, scissors, colored filters and any other arts/crafts tool they could find. Early film special effects involved physically editing the film frames on a editing table.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
He took a company with a monopoly and the world at its feet and ensured that they succeeded at nothing for a decade. Satya is working hard to change the revenue model to a sustainable flow for MS, but in doing so, he's creating enough backlash that companies are abandoning MS products. Had Ballmer had an iota of intelligence, he would have migrated MS to the subscription model when he started. At that time it likely would have succeeded and MS would have much more than doubled its revenue in his tenure.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.