I'm reminded of a seminar at the last WWDC where Apple showed a bunch of stuff you can do with Core Image transitions, like animating tab switches. They explicitly said "you can do this, but PLEASE don't! Find something useful for it instead."...thereby perfectly encapsulating the difference in corporate cultures between Microsoft and Apple.
What most people are not understanding is the level of creativity and power people will have developing applications for Vista.
Developers, developers, developers, developers - the creative sort! Yeah, and the people that manage those developers - a real creative bunch you got there, too.
Good luck inspiring developers to creativity when they're worried about losing their jobs to offshoring, dealing with a marketplace that seems to be just fine with the cartoonish and visually assaulting "Luna" theme of XP, and working with their own private version of Lumberg.
Despite what Thurrot said, Vista's graphic subsystem is more advanced than OS X's. This has been discussed endlessly around the web,
Really? Where? Discussed endlessly? Because I can't recall seeing any articles here (or dupes!) or at any of the other geek sites I visit on a regular basis. Maybe I missed the endless discussion.
and even he has made this point before, so he's obviously trolling here.
Have you ever seen an Xserve? They account for about 90% of the LED's in the server room where I work
Yes, I have, and I appreciate the post...but XServe LEDs, though many, are tiny. Like Jawas fighting the mighty, singular Death Star of Dell's "Massive Blue Server-Lite 2000", they are overwhelmed, since hey - they don't photograph as well.
I'm lucky enough to have known a couple of set dressers for popular television shows introduced over the past decade. We never spoke specifically about Apple products, but she (both of them) had iBooks, a cube at home, etc.
Decorating a TV set is pretty complicated. You don't show brand names unless they're paying for it (and you must hide those brands from all camera angles), but you want to encourage a feeling of familiarity for the viewer, so you end up with stuff like a half-turned Coke(TM) can that has a malformed "ribbon device" to avoid the trademark police. Regardless, you always display products that the viewer will find familiar - hence the avocado-green washer and dryer on That 70's show. That godawful combo isn't there because it's pretty, but it is a clear indicator of when the show occurs, and a nod to the life and times the show is set in.
Apple is pretty unique in that they don't have to pay, but you'll notice that rarely is the Apple logo shown on TV shows that place Apple products. Apple knows that their industrial design is enough to get them placed in shows that want to show progressive, forward-thinking office environments or creative, flip characters.
You see racks of Dell servers on "24", but you never see the word Dell, either - and I'd bet you my neck on a block it's because XServes just don't have big enough blue LEDs and blinky lights - and because Dell's servers are, oddly enough, among their best looking products.
Apple products just look better on camera, full of artful, swooping designs that are utilitarian enough for everyday use, but futuristic enough for TV's trendsetting set dressers.
Great... Apple wants you to run the XP partition as FAT32 instead of NTFS... can we possibly make it more insecure?
Armed with the knowledge that Apple doesn't do stupid things on purpose*, what could possibly the reason that they don't do r/w on NTFS volumes?
-Licensing? Does MS license the NTFS volume format? I wouldn't expect Apple to pay for this, except under a grand co-announcement that MS is now supporting HFS+. In other words, no bloody likely. -Engineering effort? Is there an open source project Apple could leverage to add NTFS r/w to HFS+? -NIH? (Not Invented Here syndrome) Does Apple refuse to bolster NTFS' legitimacy by only supporting a subset of it's features?
*Anymore.
Maybe if we understood why Apple isn't providing complete NTFS read/write support (I don't need journaling, compression, etc.) we might have a better idea what the best alternatives are.
Since when do "loyalists" have the right to kick a company in the nuts by blabbing about all its secret in-development products? I love the way people on Slashdot assume they have the "right" to absolutely anything at anyone's expense, especially if it's a company. Because companies are evil, right? Yawn.
Fuckin' A. Maybe Jason should have to pay Apple back for the development costs of the product - or maybe just the costs of keeping the product secret, including security patrols, badge readers and the maintenance of, printing of employee handbooks that explicitly detail the company's NDA policy, heck - even down to the software they're probably now using to monitor their network for e-mail going to...Jason O'Grady.
JD, you got in trouble because you did something wrong and you knew it. Buck up, and don't use ZDNet's blog to get sympathy - it only makes you look pathetic.
Re:How to fix trade secrets
on
Apple vs Bloggers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with (1) is that Apple is a *big* company. They have lots of people working for them, most of whom will know *something* about some secret project/gizmo/whatever.
Apple is pretty compartmentalized - while I'm sure everyone knows *something* is coming, I'd be willing to bet that very few people have all the details.
One example: I'd be surprised if anyone besides ID, testing and the ad agency knew what a new product was actually going to look like until several days before release. Which explains why we've never seen even a picture of new Apple product more than a couple of days before an announcement over the past few years.
Since Apple started making the big Ipod+Itunes money, they've started getting...well...EVIL!!!
No, it's more like "since Steve Jobs came back Apple's had some fucking pride, discipline and follow-up"
Apple employees have been wanting O'Grady's ass in a sling for over ten years now. Since Steve returned, the level of cynicism at the company has fallen to all time lows (though by no means extinguished) and employees understand they have a stake in every last competitive advantage possible - including secrecy about unannounced products.
Every time O'Grady publishes a leak from an Apple contractor, third party, or employee, he materially damages all the hard work and expense of keeping those products secret.
Apple spends a shit load (metric) of money to keep developing products under wraps - security patrols, disguises, etc. - very similar to how large car companies develop and test new designs.
And though you can find snapshots of heavily-disguised prototype cars in the auto magazines, those photographers hunt down the testers and photograph from great distances - they're not passing along privileged information from an employee who signed a contract to keep that information secret.
In other words, if some doofus Apple employee took the new ÜberBook iPro to the Donut Wheel and someone snapped a picture and published it, neither the photographer or publisher would be liable. If the same employee sent O'Grady an e-mail about the machine, both parties would be liable for dissemination of the information.
he didn't intend, or didn't know that the offense would injure the owner of that trade secret. It's not clear that Apple has suffered any injury (although they'll no doubt claim they have), but that is for the court to decide.
Jason O'Grady has been publishing leaks about unreleased Apple products for over ten years. I'd say he knows exactly what he did, and that it was against the law.
Says who? Jobs was back at Apple in '96, and took over as CEO in '97. Unless you want to say that the iMac was in development for some 3 years, I don't see how Jobs couldn't have had a hand in directing development.
The iMac was not in development for three years, but the architecture it was based on was concieved at least 16 months before the computer shipped. That does not strictly mean the iMac was in development for that period.
The iMac was based heavily on the logic board of the PowerBook G3 Series computer, which is what we all thought was going to be introduced at Flint Center that day. Much of the engineering and design work for the silicon (except for USB) was finished by the time Jobs took over. All that was left for the iMac (not to make it sound trivial) was to test the design with NewWorld ROMs, bolt a monitor on, design a cool case, and make sure it didn't overheat or leak too much RF. If you look at an original iMac's logic board, it's quite similar, even in shape, to a PowerBook G3 233 MHz.
(An interesting aside; Steve surprised the shit out of most of the Apple folks in the room by introducing the iMac - after covering the new desktop G3s and the dramatic new dual media bay PowerBooks. It was the original "one more thing". From the tales I've heard, some people involved in those other projects were none too happy, since they'd busted ass to get the G3 Series out, rescuing Apple from the legacy of the 5300. It was supposed to be the day PowerBooks were vindicated, and all anyone could talk about was the iMac.)
In a way, I think that the original iMac was a test for the people of Apple; I think if it had missed it's ship date or been a complete piece of crap, Jobs might have left.
Come on, off the top of your head, tell me the differences between the 1999 iMac DV and iMac SE (apart from color), and those from 2000. How about the difference between the iBook and the iBook?
The DV SE had a faster processor, bigger disk, and more memory. It also had a major differentiator that Performas didn't: COLOR.
Why should I neglect to mention that it was the only graphite-colored iMac when that's the chief difference? Architecture is the same, specs vary slightly, but all the same pieces are there; with Performas, you never really were sure if the 6225 had an external Global Village modem connected to the serial port or an Apple modem card and a rubber plug in the serial port. Apple played no such configuration games with the iMac. iMacs came with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and computer. They all came with modem, ethernet, and USB. From the DV on, they also had firewire - and you could immediately tell exactly what generation of iMac it was, (if not the revision) by looking at the freaking case from 20 feet away.
Under Jobs, Apple has only once, in the most recent quarter, surpassed Gil Amelio's revenue record.
Respectfully, I have to wonder aloud if you aren't one of the better trolls on Slashdot.
I worked for Spindler, Amelio and Jobs.
Spindler shipped a LOT of product, and under him, the confusing gobbledygook of naming conventions like "Performa 6225" was born. Now, if you can tell me the difference between Performa 6220 and a 6225 off the top of your head...imagine what it was like in support when Apple had 40-some odd machines based on four logic boards and varying form factors, markets...
Actually, it was a lot like HP/Compaq's naming conventions these days - mention a product name, and you had to go look up the feature list, which sub-species of logic board, what processor speed, disk capacity, etc - and some machines had quiet revisions. A far cry from the 2X2 product matrix Jobs introduced and far removed even from today's multi-market, multi-tier product line.
Under Spindler, Apple shipped a lot of product though. Unfortunately, they were declining very fast in quality because Spindler was racing to the bottom, commanding engineering to ship low-cost products on schedule no matter the quality.
I remember the KROM (Apple sales comm. "radio show") tape in which the PowerBook product manager proudly crowed about how the 5300 series was going to ship on time, with features no PC laptop had. For the next eight years, Apple was replacing those machines - every 5300 took at least one ride to the service depot (I'm not exaggerating) and a great deal of them were repaired multiple times or outright replaced...with another 5300 that had bugs and needed repair. The product didn't actually work until six months after it shipped - and after it was already EOL'd. Thanks, Mike "Diesel" Spindler!
Spindler is best forgotten. Underhim we got the PowerBook 5300, Performa 52 and 62xx series, the Performa 6400 series, crappy peripherals that took several replacements at times to get a working unit, etc.
Amelio was the "fix it guy" who was supposed to turn us around with motivational talks, koffee klatches (yes, I really did work there) and a management team that included Silicon Valley's best...or at least the best who weren't smart enough to be working for startup Internet companies like Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
He flat-out told us during a comm meeting that we were stupid and lazy and generally tried to be the strict daddy for a company of people that he thought were just lazy slobs - people who, if they'd just cut their hair and wear a tie would somehow make the company sing again.
Needless to say, this didn't go over well with employees. Thank God Fred managed to eke a $25 Million profit one quarter from those "record revenues" Amelio generated. Apple was taking in lots of money - sure - just like a drowning person takes in a lot of water.
Fred and Steve were the only guys Amelio hired that ended up doing much good for Apple. Fred cut costs by NOT laying everyone off at once (this was after March 17, 1997) and Steve had the balls to knock a few walls out of our haunted mansion and start renovating.
Apple today may not sell as many computers, but they're far more influential and relevant because Jobs returned - and you can give Amelio that kudo if you want.
Under Jobs, Apple has only once, in the most recent quarter, surpassed Gil Amelio's revenue record. I think a fair way to look at Jobs is that he's a company builder and marketer whose ability to actually produce economic results is approximately on par with the best CEO from Apple's history.
Or, you could look at it this way: Amelio was so inept at fixing the damage Spindler wrought, stood by while the clone makers whupped Apple's ass, and drove so many smart people from the company that it has taken Jobs this much time and almost ten years' worth of focussed engineering effort to regain the former revenue level.
Perhaps it makes more sense when you consider that we were
As you mentioned, there is a true Outlook client for the Mac that synchronizes natively with Exchange servers - but it was dropped in favor of Entourage years ago and hence was never Carbonized to run natively under OS X.
I never understood this. Microsoft released this software two months before the Mac OS X public beta shipped - and two years after Apple screamed from the rooftops that Rhapsody was the future of the Mac OS.
In other words, one of the most significant pieces of software an enterprise Mac user might need was developed on a set of APIs that were already deprecated.
Since then, we've had to make so with running the "real" Outlook in Classic (which is a little like a racing car with two tires half-deflated) or using the annoyingly helpful Entourage, which stores it's mail in a format that seems to have been jointly developed by Vogons and Klingons. (Contrast with Apple's mbox files....)
And why isn't there a button to make this window with two icons in it COVER THE WHOLE DAMN SCREEN?!!?! WHERE IS THAT BUTTON?!! The one with a rectangle on it!
You're describing the typical computer user of 1999.
Even pedestrian users are more sophisticated now; most "average" users have been online in one form or another for several years, and if they run Windows, they're usually aware of the trouble that brings when you're exposed to the Internet. I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives, and that's what this is. I think the average user might htink something like:
"Apples don't get viruses, but they are Windows compatible"
Apple just makes something up, and proclaims it's "Better" then the competition. The BIOS works fine, why change it just to be "Cool" and break 20 years of backwards compatability?
Here, here. BIOS works just fine! Why muddy the waters with a more modern, extensible, secure and flexible firmware layer?
It's people like you who have helped us keep the super-useful parallel port on the back of our zero-configuration USB desktop printers. Why shouldn't someone with a 286 and Windows 3.1 miss out on the superlative experience of today's inkjets?
Well, considering that EFI is now 6 years old, why shouldn't it be both ultra modern and industry standard?
I hope I'm not taken as sarcastic, but compared to the bootloader on every other PC, Apple's machines are ultra modern and industry standard because they use EFI. If you're comparing by using BIOS as a yardstick (and Apple is), the claims on Apple's web site are pretty solid - EFI is a modern industry standard - it just isn't used widely by any other Intel PC developer.
I think most people are missing the point; Apple is positioning bootcamp as software that "fixes" beoken down shitty old Windows so it'll work on your "special" Intel Mac.
Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.
clearly indicate how Apple will be "bringing it" against Vista with Leopard. Apple is positioning Windows as the broken down, patched up, late again has-been with too many promises and too few benefits - but we'll do what Microsoft can't - get Windows running on new, nicer hardware in very little time. Apple makes Microsoft look like fools, especially by touting EFI and the fact that Windows STILL won't support it in Vista.
It's gonna be an awfully exciting year for Apple watchers.
(just kept "servicing" the units until they went out of warranty- often times breaking unrelated components, loosing computers altogether, taking weeks to do the repairs, somehow not doing the repair at all, etc.) and only after (among other things) a petition with 3800 signatures [petitiononline.com] did Apple extend the warranty...and Apple probably had ten times that many "real" data points in the form of failed logic boards that were diagnosed, narrowed down to a serial number range, and considered for a repair extension.
Having lived in that particular nook of the belly of the beast, I can assure you that Apple studies this stuff extremely carefully and considers all the concrete, confirmable data points - things like returned service parts and service provider diagnoses. If Apple elected not to extend the REP to other serial number ranges, then they likely had a good reason - Applecare is very thorough (especially since 1996) about nipping service and design problems in the bud when the majority of them happen during the warranty period.
When the rash of failures occurs after the majority of serial numbers affected fall out of warranty...well, they don't care so much, and as a shareholder, I think their commitment to the customer is complete. The warranty is to cover defects in workmanship, with allowances for phone agents to make exceptions. If something breaks after you've had the product a year, it's hard to argue that it was defective when it left the factory - which is what the warranty is for.
Apple won't ever cover your product short of a lawsuit because it would mean cutting checks to people who have paid for repairs. See also the PowerBook G3 series hinges, Titanium PowerBook cases and hinges, and yes, your dual USB iBook.
3800 signatures doesn't do anything but let Apple know that 3800 people had a free minute to go sign a petition. Maybe if you had called, explained that you were NUM weeks out of warranty and were having a problem, maybe they'd have helped you. I would have.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reminded of a seminar at the last WWDC where Apple showed a bunch of stuff you can do with Core Image transitions, like animating tab switches. They explicitly said "you can do this, but PLEASE don't! Find something useful for it instead." ...thereby perfectly encapsulating the difference in corporate cultures between Microsoft and Apple.
What most people are not understanding is the level of creativity and power people will have developing applications for Vista.
Developers, developers, developers, developers - the creative sort! Yeah, and the people that manage those developers - a real creative bunch you got there, too.
Good luck inspiring developers to creativity when they're worried about losing their jobs to offshoring, dealing with a marketplace that seems to be just fine with the cartoonish and visually assaulting "Luna" theme of XP, and working with their own private version of Lumberg.
Despite what Thurrot said, Vista's graphic subsystem is more advanced than OS X's. This has been discussed endlessly around the web,
Really? Where? Discussed endlessly? Because I can't recall seeing any articles here (or dupes!) or at any of the other geek sites I visit on a regular basis. Maybe I missed the endless discussion.
and even he has made this point before, so he's obviously trolling here.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
Have you ever seen an Xserve? They account for about 90% of the LED's in the server room where I work
Yes, I have, and I appreciate the post...but XServe LEDs, though many, are tiny. Like Jawas fighting the mighty, singular Death Star of Dell's "Massive Blue Server-Lite 2000", they are overwhelmed, since hey - they don't photograph as well.
I'm lucky enough to have known a couple of set dressers for popular television shows introduced over the past decade. We never spoke specifically about Apple products, but she (both of them) had iBooks, a cube at home, etc.
Decorating a TV set is pretty complicated. You don't show brand names unless they're paying for it (and you must hide those brands from all camera angles), but you want to encourage a feeling of familiarity for the viewer, so you end up with stuff like a half-turned Coke(TM) can that has a malformed "ribbon device" to avoid the trademark police. Regardless, you always display products that the viewer will find familiar - hence the avocado-green washer and dryer on That 70's show. That godawful combo isn't there because it's pretty, but it is a clear indicator of when the show occurs, and a nod to the life and times the show is set in.
Apple is pretty unique in that they don't have to pay, but you'll notice that rarely is the Apple logo shown on TV shows that place Apple products. Apple knows that their industrial design is enough to get them placed in shows that want to show progressive, forward-thinking office environments or creative, flip characters.
You see racks of Dell servers on "24", but you never see the word Dell, either - and I'd bet you my neck on a block it's because XServes just don't have big enough blue LEDs and blinky lights - and because Dell's servers are, oddly enough, among their best looking products.
Apple products just look better on camera, full of artful, swooping designs that are utilitarian enough for everyday use, but futuristic enough for TV's trendsetting set dressers.
Great... Apple wants you to run the XP partition as FAT32 instead of NTFS... can we possibly make it more insecure?
Armed with the knowledge that Apple doesn't do stupid things on purpose*, what could possibly the reason that they don't do r/w on NTFS volumes?
-Licensing? Does MS license the NTFS volume format? I wouldn't expect Apple to pay for this, except under a grand co-announcement that MS is now supporting HFS+. In other words, no bloody likely.
-Engineering effort? Is there an open source project Apple could leverage to add NTFS r/w to HFS+?
-NIH? (Not Invented Here syndrome) Does Apple refuse to bolster NTFS' legitimacy by only supporting a subset of it's features?
*Anymore.
Maybe if we understood why Apple isn't providing complete NTFS read/write support (I don't need journaling, compression, etc.) we might have a better idea what the best alternatives are.
Since when do "loyalists" have the right to kick a company in the nuts by blabbing about all its secret in-development products? I love the way people on Slashdot assume they have the "right" to absolutely anything at anyone's expense, especially if it's a company. Because companies are evil, right? Yawn.
Fuckin' A. Maybe Jason should have to pay Apple back for the development costs of the product - or maybe just the costs of keeping the product secret, including security patrols, badge readers and the maintenance of, printing of employee handbooks that explicitly detail the company's NDA policy, heck - even down to the software they're probably now using to monitor their network for e-mail going to...Jason O'Grady.
JD, you got in trouble because you did something wrong and you knew it. Buck up, and don't use ZDNet's blog to get sympathy - it only makes you look pathetic.
The problem with (1) is that Apple is a *big* company. They have lots of people working for them, most of whom will know *something* about some secret project/gizmo/whatever.
Apple is pretty compartmentalized - while I'm sure everyone knows *something* is coming, I'd be willing to bet that very few people have all the details.
One example: I'd be surprised if anyone besides ID, testing and the ad agency knew what a new product was actually going to look like until several days before release. Which explains why we've never seen even a picture of new Apple product more than a couple of days before an announcement over the past few years.
Since Apple started making the big Ipod+Itunes money, they've started getting...well...EVIL!!!
No, it's more like "since Steve Jobs came back Apple's had some fucking pride, discipline and follow-up"
Apple employees have been wanting O'Grady's ass in a sling for over ten years now. Since Steve returned, the level of cynicism at the company has fallen to all time lows (though by no means extinguished) and employees understand they have a stake in every last competitive advantage possible - including secrecy about unannounced products.
Every time O'Grady publishes a leak from an Apple contractor, third party, or employee, he materially damages all the hard work and expense of keeping those products secret.
Apple spends a shit load (metric) of money to keep developing products under wraps - security patrols, disguises, etc. - very similar to how large car companies develop and test new designs.
And though you can find snapshots of heavily-disguised prototype cars in the auto magazines, those photographers hunt down the testers and photograph from great distances - they're not passing along privileged information from an employee who signed a contract to keep that information secret.
In other words, if some doofus Apple employee took the new ÜberBook iPro to the Donut Wheel and someone snapped a picture and published it, neither the photographer or publisher would be liable. If the same employee sent O'Grady an e-mail about the machine, both parties would be liable for dissemination of the information.
See the difference?
he didn't intend, or didn't know that the offense would injure the owner of that trade secret. It's not clear that Apple has suffered any injury (although they'll no doubt claim they have), but that is for the court to decide.
Jason O'Grady has been publishing leaks about unreleased Apple products for over ten years. I'd say he knows exactly what he did, and that it was against the law.
Yes, the evil people always hide in garages.
I fully support George W. Bush's plan to surreptitiously search all garages in order to find these evil people.
What? 9/11 changed everything, you know.
liberalization of handling of illegal aliens
Did you mean Get hispanics to Vote Republican?
Says who? Jobs was back at Apple in '96, and took over as CEO in '97. Unless you want to say that the iMac was in development for some 3 years, I don't see how Jobs couldn't have had a hand in directing development.
The iMac was not in development for three years, but the architecture it was based on was concieved at least 16 months before the computer shipped. That does not strictly mean the iMac was in development for that period.
The iMac was based heavily on the logic board of the PowerBook G3 Series computer, which is what we all thought was going to be introduced at Flint Center that day. Much of the engineering and design work for the silicon (except for USB) was finished by the time Jobs took over. All that was left for the iMac (not to make it sound trivial) was to test the design with NewWorld ROMs, bolt a monitor on, design a cool case, and make sure it didn't overheat or leak too much RF. If you look at an original iMac's logic board, it's quite similar, even in shape, to a PowerBook G3 233 MHz.
(An interesting aside; Steve surprised the shit out of most of the Apple folks in the room by introducing the iMac - after covering the new desktop G3s and the dramatic new dual media bay PowerBooks. It was the original "one more thing". From the tales I've heard, some people involved in those other projects were none too happy, since they'd busted ass to get the G3 Series out, rescuing Apple from the legacy of the 5300. It was supposed to be the day PowerBooks were vindicated, and all anyone could talk about was the iMac.)
In a way, I think that the original iMac was a test for the people of Apple; I think if it had missed it's ship date or been a complete piece of crap, Jobs might have left.
Come on, off the top of your head, tell me the differences between the 1999 iMac DV and iMac SE (apart from color), and those from 2000. How about the difference between the iBook and the iBook?
The DV SE had a faster processor, bigger disk, and more memory. It also had a major differentiator that Performas didn't: COLOR.
Why should I neglect to mention that it was the only graphite-colored iMac when that's the chief difference? Architecture is the same, specs vary slightly, but all the same pieces are there; with Performas, you never really were sure if the 6225 had an external Global Village modem connected to the serial port or an Apple modem card and a rubber plug in the serial port. Apple played no such configuration games with the iMac. iMacs came with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and computer. They all came with modem, ethernet, and USB. From the DV on, they also had firewire - and you could immediately tell exactly what generation of iMac it was, (if not the revision) by looking at the freaking case from 20 feet away.
Try that with a Performa.
Under Jobs, Apple has only once, in the most recent quarter, surpassed Gil Amelio's revenue record.
Respectfully, I have to wonder aloud if you aren't one of the better trolls on Slashdot.
I worked for Spindler, Amelio and Jobs.
Spindler shipped a LOT of product, and under him, the confusing gobbledygook of naming conventions like "Performa 6225" was born. Now, if you can tell me the difference between Performa 6220 and a 6225 off the top of your head...imagine what it was like in support when Apple had 40-some odd machines based on four logic boards and varying form factors, markets...
Actually, it was a lot like HP/Compaq's naming conventions these days - mention a product name, and you had to go look up the feature list, which sub-species of logic board, what processor speed, disk capacity, etc - and some machines had quiet revisions. A far cry from the 2X2 product matrix Jobs introduced and far removed even from today's multi-market, multi-tier product line.
Under Spindler, Apple shipped a lot of product though. Unfortunately, they were declining very fast in quality because Spindler was racing to the bottom, commanding engineering to ship low-cost products on schedule no matter the quality.
I remember the KROM (Apple sales comm. "radio show") tape in which the PowerBook product manager proudly crowed about how the 5300 series was going to ship on time, with features no PC laptop had. For the next eight years, Apple was replacing those machines - every 5300 took at least one ride to the service depot (I'm not exaggerating) and a great deal of them were repaired multiple times or outright replaced...with another 5300 that had bugs and needed repair. The product didn't actually work until six months after it shipped - and after it was already EOL'd. Thanks, Mike "Diesel" Spindler!
Spindler is best forgotten. Underhim we got the PowerBook 5300, Performa 52 and 62xx series, the Performa 6400 series, crappy peripherals that took several replacements at times to get a working unit, etc.
Amelio was the "fix it guy" who was supposed to turn us around with motivational talks, koffee klatches (yes, I really did work there) and a management team that included Silicon Valley's best...or at least the best who weren't smart enough to be working for startup Internet companies like Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
He flat-out told us during a comm meeting that we were stupid and lazy and generally tried to be the strict daddy for a company of people that he thought were just lazy slobs - people who, if they'd just cut their hair and wear a tie would somehow make the company sing again.
Needless to say, this didn't go over well with employees. Thank God Fred managed to eke a $25 Million profit one quarter from those "record revenues" Amelio generated. Apple was taking in lots of money - sure - just like a drowning person takes in a lot of water.
Fred and Steve were the only guys Amelio hired that ended up doing much good for Apple. Fred cut costs by NOT laying everyone off at once (this was after March 17, 1997) and Steve had the balls to knock a few walls out of our haunted mansion and start renovating.
Apple today may not sell as many computers, but they're far more influential and relevant because Jobs returned - and you can give Amelio that kudo if you want.
Under Jobs, Apple has only once, in the most recent quarter, surpassed Gil Amelio's revenue record. I think a fair way to look at Jobs is that he's a company builder and marketer whose ability to actually produce economic results is approximately on par with the best CEO from Apple's history.
Or, you could look at it this way: Amelio was so inept at fixing the damage Spindler wrought, stood by while the clone makers whupped Apple's ass, and drove so many smart people from the company that it has taken Jobs this much time and almost ten years' worth of focussed engineering effort to regain the former revenue level.
Perhaps it makes more sense when you consider that we were
As you mentioned, there is a true Outlook client for the Mac that synchronizes natively with Exchange servers - but it was dropped in favor of Entourage years ago and hence was never Carbonized to run natively under OS X.
I never understood this. Microsoft released this software two months before the Mac OS X public beta shipped - and two years after Apple screamed from the rooftops that Rhapsody was the future of the Mac OS.
In other words, one of the most significant pieces of software an enterprise Mac user might need was developed on a set of APIs that were already deprecated.
Since then, we've had to make so with running the "real" Outlook in Classic (which is a little like a racing car with two tires half-deflated) or using the annoyingly helpful Entourage, which stores it's mail in a format that seems to have been jointly developed by Vogons and Klingons. (Contrast with Apple's mbox files....)
And why isn't there a button to make this window with two icons in it COVER THE WHOLE DAMN SCREEN?!!?! WHERE IS THAT BUTTON?!! The one with a rectangle on it!
You're describing the typical computer user of 1999.
Even pedestrian users are more sophisticated now; most "average" users have been online in one form or another for several years, and if they run Windows, they're usually aware of the trouble that brings when you're exposed to the Internet. I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives, and that's what this is. I think the average user might htink something like:
"Apples don't get viruses, but they are Windows compatible"
And that's pure gold.
The Missing Link!
Classic.,/i>
Naw, dude. Classic isn't supported anymore.
But maybe that's we'll all be calling Windows in a few years.
I love it. Microsoft Copland.
Leave it to Apple to re-stylize the Windows logo to look better and be more informative.
I prefer to think of it as a warning that if users decide to boot into windows, things are going to go downhill...fast.
Here, here. BIOS works just fine! Why muddy the waters with a more modern, extensible, secure and flexible firmware layer?
It's people like you who have helped us keep the super-useful parallel port on the back of our zero-configuration USB desktop printers. Why shouldn't someone with a 286 and Windows 3.1 miss out on the superlative experience of today's inkjets?
I hope I'm not taken as sarcastic, but compared to the bootloader on every other PC, Apple's machines are ultra modern and industry standard because they use EFI. If you're comparing by using BIOS as a yardstick (and Apple is), the claims on Apple's web site are pretty solid - EFI is a modern industry standard - it just isn't used widely by any other Intel PC developer.
Read the Apple Bootcamp page. Phrases like:
clearly indicate how Apple will be "bringing it" against Vista with Leopard. Apple is positioning Windows as the broken down, patched up, late again has-been with too many promises and too few benefits - but we'll do what Microsoft can't - get Windows running on new, nicer hardware in very little time. Apple makes Microsoft look like fools, especially by touting EFI and the fact that Windows STILL won't support it in Vista.
It's gonna be an awfully exciting year for Apple watchers.
(just kept "servicing" the units until they went out of warranty- often times breaking unrelated components, loosing computers altogether, taking weeks to do the repairs, somehow not doing the repair at all, etc.) and only after (among other things) a petition with 3800 signatures [petitiononline.com] did Apple extend the warranty ...and Apple probably had ten times that many "real" data points in the form of failed logic boards that were diagnosed, narrowed down to a serial number range, and considered for a repair extension.
Having lived in that particular nook of the belly of the beast, I can assure you that Apple studies this stuff extremely carefully and considers all the concrete, confirmable data points - things like returned service parts and service provider diagnoses. If Apple elected not to extend the REP to other serial number ranges, then they likely had a good reason - Applecare is very thorough (especially since 1996) about nipping service and design problems in the bud when the majority of them happen during the warranty period.
When the rash of failures occurs after the majority of serial numbers affected fall out of warranty...well, they don't care so much, and as a shareholder, I think their commitment to the customer is complete. The warranty is to cover defects in workmanship, with allowances for phone agents to make exceptions. If something breaks after you've had the product a year, it's hard to argue that it was defective when it left the factory - which is what the warranty is for.
Apple won't ever cover your product short of a lawsuit because it would mean cutting checks to people who have paid for repairs. See also the PowerBook G3 series hinges, Titanium PowerBook cases and hinges, and yes, your dual USB iBook.
3800 signatures doesn't do anything but let Apple know that 3800 people had a free minute to go sign a petition. Maybe if you had called, explained that you were NUM weeks out of warranty and were having a problem, maybe they'd have helped you. I would have.