Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the theories-and-rumors dept.
zaks writes "I
found this ZDNet article
on Yahoo, saying that Apple may soon be sold. They attribute
the story to "third-party sources close to Apple and its Interim
CEO, Steve Jobs". The potential buyers discussed in the
article are Disney, TimeWarner, and Viacom. "
Well I'll be damned, it is June already. You can always tell because it gets too hot and humid here in the midwest, and rumors that Apple's going to be purchased by Disney start making their rounds.
I've heard this rumor at least once a year since I was in high school (remember? Before there was a Windows NT? Ahh....). You can almost set your watch by it. Personally, I'll start believing that Apple's going to be bought out when I see some hard information about it, rumors be damned.
----
-- Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
They didn't call it an FPU because it isn't just an FPU, its a vector processor. Floating point units (and integer units) are part of this vector processor but calling it a FPU doesn't define its operation. The G4 or whatever its eventually named will contain an FPU, it will also contain this AltiVec processor which happens to be a vector processor.
Vector processors are what power the traditional supercomputers like the Cray T90 or the NEC machines. They are capable of performing dot product or vector operations on multiple data in a single cycle. The vector processors on machines like the T90 are much more powerful than AltiVec.
You are correct on one thing, special code will need to be made to make use of the AltiVec enabled processors but Apple has had the compiler available to the general public for some time now, as well as AltiVec emulators.
Not all code works well on a vector processor, but the return on investment for code that does is rather stunning. It so happens that a lot of graphical operations do play very nicely on a vector processor.
The old software doesn't stop working, or at least the majority of it won't. There will be backwards compatibility, but software running in backwards compatible mode won't make use of the new 'modern' features. Apple has already gone through these exercises at least twice: The original 68K based macs had a 24 bit memory address. Programmers would play tricks and use the otherwise wasted 8 bits for a variety of things. Great... except when 32 bit memory busses were introduced, some of the software that made use of these hacks broke very badly. The next event I know of was the transition from 68K processors to the PowerPC. They wrote a fairly decent 68K emulator. The fastest 68K mac shortly after the introduction of the PowerPC was a PowerPC. It wasn't perfect, some things did break, but by and large it worked.
Some possibly lesser changes were the introduction of PCI (no backwards compatibility with NuBUS at all) and USB (you can get USB->ADB converters)
No, throughout the design of a product the specifications slowly evolve from rough paper tigers to a final specification. Interim specifications aren't released as they're part of the design process and could potentially assist others in either reverse engineering exercises or in avoiding pitfalls in competing projects.
I'm trying to recall where I originally read this, it was probably a trade magazine like EE times but it wasn't something I thought I'd ever reference again.
I was surprised not to see AOL in the list of potential buyers. I wonder if the coffers have finally run dry, or if they're just holding out for a better price. So much for useless conjecture.
(posting from lynx, text field length limit) ...pointless. True, 3DNow! did allow the K6-2 to *match* the gaming performance of the PII in many cases, but so would have designing that chip with a pipelined FPU (a move that would have improved more than just gaming performance). Note the K7, sporting a 3 fully pipelined FPUs (more than the PPro/2/3), that, when code is properly compiled for it, surges out 30%+ ahead of the P6 core *at the same MHz*. Assuming Intel follows their lead and redesigns their FPU, then 3DNow! and SSE will go to the marketing graveyard along with MMX: used, but never really appreciated. It's not too hard to see that AltiVec will suffer the same fate, unless perhaps Apple's uber-marketroids pull out all the stops...
But anyway, I've rambled on far too long about multimedia processor extensions, only to show that the author was your average everyday idiot who believes all the marketing. In fact, after reading 2.5 years of Computer Shopper, I'd be inclined to say the same about EVERY Ziff Davis author. There was one CShopper columnist, I believe his name was Eric Grevstadt, who "got it". He wrote about how we don't really need $3,000 desktops and $5,000 laptops to run Word and Excel, how "upgradability" is a phantom feature, since most users never upgrade and upgrading is usually less economical than buying a new PC (for mainstream users, anyway). Knowing that, it's not too hard to understand why Computer Shopper, a publication that thrives on advertisements from vendors selling overpriced, overpowered PCs, didn't like him and gave him the axe. Ziff Davis is in bed with MS, Intel, Dell (et al.), plus any number of other big players in the Wintel PC industry, and they have a vested interest in keeping computing expensive, de-empowering, and deceptive to the unwitting user. Despite the fact that they compete with the Wintel complex, Apple is guilty of this too. Their blatantly false adverts about how the original 233MHz iMac was "faster than Intel's fastest PII" (at the time, 400MHz), et cetera are just as bad as any of Intel's P2/3 commercials, which claim everything from "our CPUs let you do all these neat things that the other guy can't" to "the PIII makes the 'net go faster". As a friend of mine adamantly maintains, Disney is one of the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse (MS is another, I forget the other 2), and them gaining another foothold into our lives by acquiring Apple would be a Bad Thing.
But hey, that's just the great whirlwind that is modern computing. If I said "I wouldn't have it any other way", I'd be lying, but I have come to half-accept it. But the important thing is to understand it, to see through the hype, FUD, and half-truths is more and art than a skill.
Nope. I just glanced over Apple's site, found quite a few expo talks and white papers. AltiVec, like MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE, is an instruction set extension and needs to be programmed/optimized for.
Really now, why would they have given a uber-FPU a special name? It would have been far more straightforward and effective to say, "our FPU is really f***ing fast all by itself! you don't need to code in some obscure ISA extension!" Like I said, seeing through the hype is an art. Things with names and campaigns behind them are rarely simple.
While AltiVec is being hyped by Apple, it is really a Motorola creation. As you known, IBM and Motorola have a philosophical disagreement wrt to the PowerPC architecture; IBM wants simplicity and pure speed, while Motorola wants the additional SIMD instruction set.
AltiVec is relevant to the issue at hand (ie. Disney). In terms of audio and video processing (we're talking multimedia, not necessarily restricted to gaming), many of the basic algorithms are primarily vector manipulations. Rather than having each individual programmer reinvent the wheel, Motorola, Apple, and others are recoding these essential algorithms using the AltiVec technology. I believed that things like optimized FFT's (audio manipulations), DCT's (video), BLAS (lot's of applications) are or will be available. As for the polygons, I want 60M lighted, textured, Gouraud shaded triangles per second (then I will be really impressed).;-)
I realize that you are wary of the hype (as one should be), but check out the performance specs for some very useful algorithms. I personally hope that this is not hype. I also wish that AltiVec optimized libraries (e.g., FFT's) become available for LinuxPPC.
BTW, elsewhere in this thread you comment about the Apple hype concerning the PowerPC performance. IIRC, the integer Byte test results were heavily biased by a single test (bit manipulation?); Apple then reported the "average" test results.
Interesting. I guess that I bought into the hype that Motorola was spreading about AltiVec.;-) I always thought that AIM was an "interesting" alliance made up of strange bedfellows.
Do you know what the original specs were and how much it changed in the actual implementation?
If this comment starts off as a +2 it is not because of content.
I know this rumour has been floating around for a long time but that is only because it is so credible. The real mystery is why it hasn't happened yet.
Ultimately this merger has to take place. There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades. But think of the uniquely friendly, unthreatening public image of the Mac combined with the marketing power of one of the dominant media transnationals.
I guarantee that this would be the computer of choice in most family homes. My young kids can hardly switch on their Windows 95 computer without running into problems with the ATI video card driver or other typical Win95 lockups and crashes. They could have had a Mac but the perceived lack of software meant that was never really an option. It doesn't take a genius to see how an iMac plus "bugs'n'daffy" plus a shedload of first class marketing could put Microsoft out of the home computer business almost overnight.
If Jobs doesn't jump at this soon then I think there will inevitably be questions as to his fitness to guide the company forward beyond this point. But Jobs has shown that one thing he is not short of is business acumen. My guess is that he is just waiting for iMac revenues to put Apple back on a sound financial footing and see a couple of new technologies like the new streaming software out the door first. That way he will have the leverage to cut the best deal for the company and its shareholders.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Just wait until....!
by
IntlHarvester
·
· Score: 2
Apple has never and will never be a piece of the enterprise puzzle.
Who says OSX Server is aimed the "enterprise"? What about the traditional Mac server market in DTP shops and education? Right now, these people are largely using WinNT for the bigger jobs.
Besides, Apple only makes desktop hardware - hardly enterprise server stuff. --
Better to go where they can win
by
InfiniterX
·
· Score: 2
Apple has proven themselves to be able to make a product that the average Joe Six-Pack can sit down and be able to use relatively easily without much training (that and some Mac hardware/software integration is very sweet, while other aspects of it we all loathe).
Apple has always also proven themselves in the content production industry - magazine, TV, movies, etc. Most reputable media shops will at least have a Mac somewhere.
Apple has also got a unique marketing push, and as much as I can't stand most of Apple's products, I do admire the way they marketed products such as the iMac. Their push was to get these products into the home, and they did it in record amounts because they tried approaches that had never been done before. It was sort of a no-nonsense approach: "you could really use this product, here's what you can do with it, and look it's so cheap!"
Apple's perfect niche would be the consumer media market. You have the backing of the content producers, since Apple dominates that market. All they need now is a cheap consumer product to display that content, and it has to have the Apple trademark ease-of-use.
Most people I bet would just want something they could look up sports scores, check the news, and maybe blast out an email or two, without the expensive overhead of a PC. Apple could make a thin-client box that people could keep on their kitchen table and read it while having their morning coffee, and if they marketed it well enough, it'd sell like crazy.
Apple would need to align with some media corporation to make this successful though - I don't think a total sellout would be necessary, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off without a media giant's backing as well. Who better than the Disney media empire to help Apple out? Again, I don't think they'd need to sell out, but for them to have the Disney AND Apple branding on the system thanks to an alliance of some sort, then it might be pretty successful.
...and Apple's a software company. Right?
by
TheInternet
·
· Score: 2
My reply to Don Crabb, the author of the article. In short, it ain't gonna happen -- just like it hasn't happened for the past five years.
----- Regarding your article -- just because "persistent, well-informed, and highly reliable sources" are telling you a looney story, doesn't mean it's true. Apple has become very adept at spreading misinformation campaigns to locate and plug its security holes. A few points:
> But as long as the company has neither the inclination (which means as long as > Steve Jobs is not interested), nor the resources to try to sell its wares to > corporate accounts,
I don't understand this at all. There is no resource issue that prevents Apple from selling to enterprise markets. They just aren't ready yet. Wait until Q1/Q2, when the next version of Mac OS X Server hits (in addition to Client) -- along with dual or quad processor G4s.
> * In short, Jobs saves the company. But saves it for what?
It's his baby.
I'm not sure why you're so transfixed on the money issue. While he has stock, he only takes a $1/yr paycheck. All evidence points to the fact that he's not in it for the money.
> Enter the Walt Disney Company, or some other entertainment giant such as > Time-Warner or Viacom.
This is an old story. It was part of a previous misinformation campaign.
> Apple could be the first computer company to really build a cheap crossover > computer/game console/Web access box. An access box that would pump 3D digital > video and sound like a bat out of hell.
How many times are we going to go down this road? Again and again, people come out with boxes like this, and again and again, nobody buys them. Steve is quite clearly against this. Remember Columbus?
> Enter Disney and Mickey Mouse or Time-Warner and Bugs Bunny.
Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny are not going to sell games, except to preschoolers. That's a niche -- the very thing you purport Apple is trying to get away from. Computer game sales today are based on technological prowess, reviews/word of mouth and multiplayer capabilities.
Movie licenses just don't do that well. The most popular games in the last few years are basically the Quake and Myst francises.
> But it sures beats being a 7 percent solution the rest of Apple's life. I > can't imagine Steve Jobs settling for that.
This is just the beginning. P1 will change a lot.
There are other fundamentals holes in story thinking. If Apple was going to be bought by a consumer company (like Disney), why would they ship Mac OS X Server? Why would they release Darwin? Why would they continue to develop AppleShare IP?
The "Apple will be bought out" argument is as old as "Apple should do software only/Apple should do hardware only." Apple's not going to be bought anytime in the near future. It's against everything that they have worked for. Here's a partial list of companies that, over the past several years, were supposed to have bought Apple:
Speaking of which.. I was driving up I-35 between Austin and Waco a few weeks ago when a new blue VW bug passed me. I didn't think much of it until I happened to glance at the license plate. It said "IMAC2". I nearly went into anaphylactic shock from being that close to someone that trendy. I just know he/she bought the blue iMac to match the color of the bug. Ick.
It must be summer. The temperature is reaching record highs around the US, and hot, irritated people are reaching irrational conclusions. In this context...
I'd like to announce that I'm not buying Apple Computer. I will not be adding it to my vast personal entertainment empire - though the expected convergence of consumer electronics and workstations is drawing near. Nor will I negotiate with Volkswagon to install MacOS on the new iBug (even if my action blocks Bill Gates from putting NT there first). And despite widespread rumors to the contrary, I am not lobbying both Capitol Hill and the Department of Energy to replace the entire Library of Congress with a few Powerbooks.
For though the masses fear the end of the millenium, and the adolescence of P1 is upon us, I just can't see squeezing more than $2 billion on my credit cards.
[Seriously: I still remember when IBM was going to buy Apple in the early 1980's.]
-- Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard this rumor at least once a year since I was in high school (remember? Before there was a Windows NT? Ahh....). You can almost set your watch by it. Personally, I'll start believing that Apple's going to be bought out when I see some hard information about it, rumors be damned.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
...for very large values of "interim."
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They didn't call it an FPU because it isn't just an FPU, its a vector processor. Floating point units (and integer units) are part of this vector processor but calling it a FPU doesn't define its operation. The G4 or whatever its eventually named will contain an FPU, it will also contain this AltiVec processor which happens to be a vector processor.
Vector processors are what power the traditional supercomputers like the Cray T90 or the NEC machines. They are capable of performing dot product or vector operations on multiple data in a single cycle. The vector processors on machines like the T90 are much more powerful than AltiVec.
You are correct on one thing, special code will need to be made to make use of the AltiVec enabled processors but Apple has had the compiler available to the general public for some time now, as well as AltiVec emulators.
Not all code works well on a vector processor, but the return on investment for code that does is rather stunning. It so happens that a lot of graphical operations do play very nicely on a vector processor.
The old software doesn't stop working, or at least the majority of it won't. There will be backwards compatibility, but software running in backwards compatible mode won't make use of the new 'modern' features. Apple has already gone through these exercises at least twice: The original 68K based macs had a 24 bit memory address. Programmers would play tricks and use the otherwise wasted 8 bits for a variety of things. Great... except when 32 bit memory busses were introduced, some of the software that made use of these hacks broke very badly. The next event I know of was the transition from 68K processors to the PowerPC. They wrote a fairly decent 68K emulator. The fastest 68K mac shortly after the introduction of the PowerPC was a PowerPC. It wasn't perfect, some things did break, but by and large it worked.
Some possibly lesser changes were the introduction of PCI (no backwards compatibility with NuBUS at all) and USB (you can get USB->ADB converters)
No, throughout the design of a product the specifications slowly evolve from rough paper tigers to a final specification. Interim specifications aren't released as they're part of the design process and could potentially assist others in either reverse engineering exercises or in avoiding pitfalls in competing projects.
I'm trying to recall where I originally read this, it was probably a trade magazine like EE times but it wasn't something I thought I'd ever reference again.
I was surprised not to see AOL in the list of potential buyers. I wonder if the coffers have finally run dry, or if they're just holding out for a better price. So much for useless conjecture.
Sean
RFC2119
(posting from lynx, text field length limit)
...pointless. True, 3DNow! did allow the K6-2 to *match* the gaming performance of the PII in many cases, but so would have designing that chip with a pipelined FPU (a move that would have improved more than just gaming performance). Note the K7, sporting a 3 fully pipelined FPUs (more than the PPro/2/3), that, when code is properly compiled for it, surges out 30%+ ahead of the P6 core *at the same MHz*. Assuming Intel follows their lead and redesigns their FPU, then 3DNow! and SSE will go to the marketing graveyard along with MMX: used, but never really appreciated. It's not too hard to see that AltiVec will suffer the same fate, unless perhaps Apple's uber-marketroids pull out all the stops...
But anyway, I've rambled on far too long about multimedia processor extensions, only to show that the author was your average everyday idiot who believes all the marketing. In fact, after reading 2.5 years of Computer Shopper, I'd be inclined to say the same about EVERY Ziff Davis author. There was one CShopper columnist, I believe his name was Eric Grevstadt, who "got it". He wrote about how we don't really need $3,000 desktops and $5,000 laptops to run Word and Excel, how "upgradability" is a phantom feature, since most users never upgrade and upgrading is usually less economical than buying a new PC (for mainstream users, anyway). Knowing that, it's not too hard to understand why Computer Shopper, a publication that thrives on advertisements from vendors selling overpriced, overpowered PCs, didn't like him and gave him the axe. Ziff Davis is in bed with MS, Intel, Dell (et al.), plus any number of other big players in the Wintel PC industry, and they have a vested interest in keeping computing
expensive, de-empowering, and deceptive to the unwitting user. Despite the fact that they compete with the Wintel complex, Apple is guilty of this too. Their blatantly false adverts about how the original 233MHz iMac was "faster than Intel's fastest PII" (at the time, 400MHz), et cetera are just as bad as any of Intel's P2/3 commercials, which claim everything from "our CPUs let you do all these neat things that the other guy can't" to "the PIII makes the 'net go faster". As a friend of mine adamantly maintains, Disney is one of the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse (MS is another, I forget the other 2), and them gaining another foothold into our lives by acquiring Apple would be a Bad Thing.
But hey, that's just the great whirlwind that is modern computing. If I said "I wouldn't have it any other way", I'd be lying, but I have come to half-accept it. But the important thing is to understand it, to see through the hype, FUD, and half-truths is more and art than a skill.
Happy computing.
MoNsTeR
Nope. I just glanced over Apple's site, found quite a few expo talks and white papers. AltiVec, like MMX, 3DNow!, and SSE, is an instruction set extension and needs to be programmed/optimized for.
Really now, why would they have given a uber-FPU a special name? It would have been far more straightforward and effective to say, "our FPU is really f***ing fast all by itself! you don't need to code in some obscure ISA extension!" Like I said, seeing through the hype is an art. Things with names and campaigns behind them are rarely simple.
MoNsTeR
While AltiVec is being hyped by Apple, it is really a Motorola creation. As you known, IBM and Motorola have a philosophical disagreement wrt to the PowerPC architecture; IBM wants simplicity and pure speed, while Motorola wants the additional SIMD instruction set.
AltiVec is relevant to the issue at hand (ie. Disney). In terms of audio and video processing (we're talking multimedia, not necessarily restricted to gaming), many of the basic algorithms are primarily vector manipulations. Rather than having each individual programmer reinvent the wheel, Motorola, Apple, and others are recoding these essential algorithms using the AltiVec technology. I believed that things like optimized FFT's (audio manipulations), DCT's (video), BLAS (lot's of applications) are or will be available. As for the polygons, I want 60M lighted, textured, Gouraud shaded triangles per second (then I will be really impressed).;-)
I realize that you are wary of the hype (as one should be), but check out the performance specs for some very useful algorithms. I personally hope that this is not hype. I also wish that AltiVec optimized libraries (e.g., FFT's) become available for LinuxPPC.
BTW, elsewhere in this thread you comment about the Apple hype concerning the PowerPC performance. IIRC, the integer Byte test results were heavily biased by a single test (bit manipulation?); Apple then reported the "average" test results.
Interesting. I guess that I bought into the hype that Motorola was spreading about AltiVec.;-) I always thought that AIM was an "interesting" alliance made up of strange bedfellows.
Do you know what the original specs were and how much it changed in the actual implementation?
If this comment starts off as a +2 it is not because of content.
I know this rumour has been floating around for a long time but that is only because it is so credible. The real mystery is why it hasn't happened yet.
Ultimately this merger has to take place. There is nowhere else for the company to go, with Microsoft owning most of the market, that is the lesson of almost two decades. But think of the uniquely friendly, unthreatening public image of the Mac combined with the marketing power of one of the dominant media transnationals.
I guarantee that this would be the computer of choice in most family homes. My young kids can hardly switch on their Windows 95 computer without running into problems with the ATI video card driver or other typical Win95 lockups and crashes. They could have had a Mac but the perceived lack of software meant that was never really an option.
It doesn't take a genius to see how an iMac plus "bugs'n'daffy" plus a shedload of first class marketing could put Microsoft out of the home computer business almost overnight.
If Jobs doesn't jump at this soon then I think there will inevitably be questions as to his fitness to guide the company forward beyond this point. But Jobs has shown that one thing he is not short of is business acumen. My guess is that he is just waiting for iMac revenues to put Apple back on a sound financial footing and see a couple of new technologies like the new streaming software out the door first. That way he will have the leverage to cut the best deal for the company and its shareholders.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Apple has never and will never be a piece of the enterprise puzzle.
Who says OSX Server is aimed the "enterprise"? What about the traditional Mac server market in DTP shops and education? Right now, these people are largely using WinNT for the bigger jobs.
Besides, Apple only makes desktop hardware - hardly enterprise server stuff.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Apple has proven themselves to be able to make a product that the average Joe Six-Pack can sit down and be able to use relatively easily without much training (that and some Mac hardware/software integration is very sweet, while other aspects of it we all loathe).
Apple has always also proven themselves in the content production industry - magazine, TV, movies, etc. Most reputable media shops will at least have a Mac somewhere.
Apple has also got a unique marketing push, and as much as I can't stand most of Apple's products, I do admire the way they marketed products such as the iMac. Their push was to get these products into the home, and they did it in record amounts because they tried approaches that had never been done before. It was sort of a no-nonsense approach: "you could really use this product, here's what you can do with it, and look it's so cheap!"
Apple's perfect niche would be the consumer media market. You have the backing of the content producers, since Apple dominates that market. All they need now is a cheap consumer product to display that content, and it has to have the Apple trademark ease-of-use.
Most people I bet would just want something they could look up sports scores, check the news, and maybe blast out an email or two, without the expensive overhead of a PC. Apple could make a thin-client box that people could keep on their kitchen table and read it while having their morning coffee, and if they marketed it well enough, it'd sell like crazy.
Apple would need to align with some media corporation to make this successful though - I don't think a total sellout would be necessary, but they probably wouldn't be able to pull it off without a media giant's backing as well. Who better than the Disney media empire to help Apple out? Again, I don't think they'd need to sell out, but for them to have the Disney AND Apple branding on the system thanks to an alliance of some sort, then it might be pretty successful.
My reply to Don Crabb, the author of the article. In short, it ain't gonna happen -- just like it hasn't happened for the past five years.
-----
Regarding your article -- just because "persistent, well-informed, and highly reliable sources" are telling you a looney story, doesn't mean it's true. Apple has become very adept at spreading misinformation campaigns to locate and plug its security holes. A few points:
> But as long as the company has neither the inclination (which means as long as
> Steve Jobs is not interested), nor the resources to try to sell its wares to
> corporate accounts,
I don't understand this at all. There is no resource issue that prevents Apple from selling to enterprise markets. They just aren't ready yet. Wait until Q1/Q2, when the next version of Mac OS X Server hits (in addition to Client) -- along with dual or quad processor G4s.
> * In short, Jobs saves the company. But saves it for what?
It's his baby.
I'm not sure why you're so transfixed on the money issue. While he has stock, he only takes a $1/yr paycheck. All evidence points to the fact that he's not in it for the money.
> Enter the Walt Disney Company, or some other entertainment giant such as
> Time-Warner or Viacom.
This is an old story. It was part of a previous misinformation campaign.
> Apple could be the first computer company to really build a cheap crossover
> computer/game console/Web access box. An access box that would pump 3D digital
> video and sound like a bat out of hell.
How many times are we going to go down this road? Again and again, people come out with boxes like this, and again and again, nobody buys them. Steve is quite clearly against this. Remember Columbus?
> Enter Disney and Mickey Mouse or Time-Warner and Bugs Bunny.
Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny are not going to sell games, except to preschoolers. That's a niche -- the very thing you purport Apple is trying to get away from. Computer game sales today are based on technological prowess, reviews/word of mouth and multiplayer capabilities.
Movie licenses just don't do that well. The most popular games in the last few years are basically the Quake and Myst francises.
> But it sures beats being a 7 percent solution the rest of Apple's life. I
> can't imagine Steve Jobs settling for that.
This is just the beginning. P1 will change a lot.
There are other fundamentals holes in story thinking. If Apple was going to be bought by a consumer company (like Disney), why would they ship Mac OS X Server? Why would they release Darwin? Why would they continue to develop AppleShare IP?
The "Apple will be bought out" argument is as old as "Apple should do software only/Apple should do hardware only." Apple's not going to be bought anytime in the near future. It's against everything that they have worked for. Here's a partial list of companies that, over the past several years, were supposed to have bought Apple:
Sun
Microsoft
IBM
Sony
Disney
Oracle
It just ain't gonna happen.
Take it easy,
- Scott
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Speaking of which.. I was driving up I-35 between Austin and Waco a few weeks ago when a new blue VW bug passed me. I didn't think much of it until I happened to glance at the license plate. It said "IMAC2". I nearly went into anaphylactic shock from being that close to someone that trendy. I just know he/she bought the blue iMac to match the color of the bug. Ick.
It must be summer. The temperature is reaching record highs around the US, and hot, irritated people are reaching irrational conclusions. In this context...
I'd like to announce that I'm not buying Apple Computer. I will not be adding it to my vast personal entertainment empire - though the expected convergence of consumer electronics and workstations is drawing near. Nor will I negotiate with Volkswagon to install MacOS on the new iBug (even if my action blocks Bill Gates from putting NT there first). And despite widespread rumors to the contrary, I am not lobbying both Capitol Hill and the Department of Energy to replace the entire Library of Congress with a few Powerbooks.
For though the masses fear the end of the millenium, and the adolescence of P1 is upon us, I just can't see squeezing more than $2 billion on my credit cards.
[Seriously: I still remember when IBM was going to buy Apple in the early 1980's.]
Given one hour to live, the student replied: "I'd spend it with professor FP who can make an hour seem like a lifetime."
Just imagine, "Apple.com, now part of the Go Network" "apple.go.com" *gag*
If Disney did buy Apple, I don't think I could stop myself from buying an iMac and putting Mickey Mouse ears on it though
Del