Re:hillarious interview with Steve Jobs about OS X
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Three companies? NeXT no longer exists. It was bought by Apple. I count two companies.
With regards to Lisa and Mac, Apple planned to have three products after the Apple II+. Apple III - a stopgap business machine; Lisa - a serious business machine that would be Apple's future; Annie - a cheap gaming computer.
Jobs, being in upper management, wasn't nominally in charge of Lisa, but was closely involved in it, the PARC tour was arranged so that he'd let them do GUI devlopment, fired and hired people up to and including project leaders, and was kicked off by Markkula when he consistantly missed deadlines. (mostly by adding features)
Then he went to the Mac, fought with Raskin, who ran it and had proposed GUIs at Apple to begin with, Raskin quit, and Jobs consistantly missed deadlines. (mostly by adding features) He also fought with his engineers - Jobs' dream Mac would've had 64kB RAM and a 880kB Twiggy disks. (the kind that he had had made for Lisa, and were notoriously lousy) Word has it that he deliberately kept networking off the Mac as long as he had control; he definately kept expansion slots off. (and had tried to get rid of them on the Apple II but was rebuffed by Woz)
When the Lisa and Mac divisions were brought under a single division, Steve killed the Lisa - the Mac was better, in his opinion, even though Lisa sales were picking up a little bit.
Then he tried to oust Sculley, but was in fact hoisted by his own petard, stripped of power, and quit, taking key employees with him.
A few good histories of Apple can get into the real nitty-gritty. Same with NeXT. The story btw is that (aside from robot colors, which also happened) Steve wanted the factory to be in the US, and for people who were buying computers to be able to see them being assembled, rather like cars.
But the place where people would be taken to see the assembly was oriented with the assembly line in such a way that the cubes would go right to left. That's backwards, but he only decided after the plant was completed, so everything had to be torn out and moved so that they went in the correct direction.
No one _ever_ came to see the assembly.
Another great story is that the case designers wanted to put an imperceptable angle in the cube sides so that it could fall out of the mold; this was unacceptable to Steve, so special one-of-a-kind mold technology had to be developed to accomodate the perfect cube angles. Magnesium turned out not to hold paint well; the logo was nearly as bad as Apple's in terms of printing costs; cubes would only have MO drives - no HDs, but MOs broke easily and were slow and expensive... there are a lot of problems with NeXT that were caused by what Steve wanted to do, regardless of what actually would've made sense.
And no one could ever argue with Steve.
With regards to Pixar, there are rumors that Monsters, Inc. won't be all that good. Particularly in the face of the Harry Potter movie and Fellowship of the Ring. Their deal with Disney is nice (they have had difficulty predicting hit movies accurately, e.g. 102 Dalmatians and Emperor's New Groove) but when it runs out, with other major studios pursuing computer animation aggressively, what do they do? Movie making is a highly turbulent business, and Pixar is very small, given the output of many other studios and production companies. But again, Lassiter pretty much runs Pixar according to all reports I've heard.
Apple isn't doing well, as their market share is pitiful. Perhaps their revenues are good, but they are pretty certainly under a sustainable share point, and unless they can grow up to something like 15-30% of the market, it'll continue to decline, as it's been doing steadily for a decade. Making a few million is nice. In the face of MS making so much more, it's not quite _as_ nice. And Apple competes against Intel, MS, Dell, Compaq, Gateway and all the little clone makers. It's a nasty uphill battle.
Please, check out reliable sources. "Fire in the Valley," "Apple Confidential," "Infinite Loop," "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing," "Accidental Empires." They generally paint the same picture of Steve.
Re:hillarious interview with Steve Jobs about OS X
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OS X
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Sorry, I meant in context: Gates is rather paranoid, and I understand his management style tends to involve wanting direct control over everyone at MS. (which is merely unfeasable to him for techical reasons alone)
But he has managed to get MS to the top, and keep it there, and get its tentacles into other businesses and take them over, or at least make good headway into doing so. It makes him a successful businessman, even if I doubt I'd want to ever deal with him personally.
Re:hillarious interview with Steve Jobs about OS X
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OS X
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Steve is more like a cross between the PHB and Catbert. He's stupid, and nontechnical, but actively evil. (wasn't it Cringely that described him as a sociopath?)
He co founded Apple, but his job consisted chiefly of convincing investors to invest, people to buy the hardware, and getting more people to help run the company. This was pretty impressive, as he was against bathing at the time. Or eating a balanced diet.
But he screwed up at Apple all the time; had he not been successfully opposed by the Woz, the Apple II would've not really been expandable or useful. He mismanaged the Lisa project. (you are right about PARC, only Steve wasn't familiar with GUIS - too bad he didn't adopt Ethernet, laser printing or Smalltalk when he was there; all parts of the tour)
He mismanaged the Mac project, which was not successful until the Mac Plus came along after he was booted out.
NeXTs failure is in many ways Steve's own fault. I enjoyed "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for an accounting of his screwups large and small. (e.g. having the assembly plant built, torn down and rebuilt, because the computers have to get assembled going in the proper direction!)
Pixar's success is in many ways due to Steve not getting involved. He lets Pixar do its own thing, more or less, though it was started as a division of Industrial Light and Magic, so he can't take all the credit. Additionally, Pixar is so small that one good flop is bound to cause no end of trouble for them.
Steve is remarkable for his amazing chutzpah. Outside of that, I'd take a stable and historically successful person like McNealy, or Gates or Dell or Ellison any day. Steve's too unreliable to be given the keys to anything, IMHO.
(Best Apple manager: Mike Scott. This is not saying a hell of a lot, I'm afraid.)
I _am_ a Mac user, and I know that Apple's prices are awful. Although there is the possibility of generic components being of lower quality than name brand, in truth they're just as frequently the same components.
The Windows platform is hugely benefited by the ability of some guy in the middle of nowhere to assemble computers on margins so thin he can see through them, but to be able to sell them to people in his town. Apple, or Dell, or Gateway, or Compaq, or whomever can never have presences in all markets, and the Web isn't always a viable replacement.
Frankly, I doubt they'd ever even consider selling computers with a profit of $5 or $10 because it's too low - regardless it is a perfectly worthwhile niche to be filled.
Only one really big company - MS - is trying to move in on that segment, with the XBox (possibly future revisions, that use.Net and incorporate WebTV) but it's chiefly a response to the OS now being one of the most expensive parts of a low end system. If eMachines started selling Linux systems (if they could manage somehow) MS would percieve it as a threat, so it's acting preemptively;)
We can't pretend that the world is in the 1980s forever. Relatively good generic parts - ones that are 'good enough' are pervasive, and we had better deal with that. If Apple were smart they'd port over to x86 as fast as possible to take advantage of the cheaper, faster, more standard hardware. And if they had the opportunity (read: MS is broken up) they would need to spin off their hardware division entirely and license the OS to absolutely anyone that wanted it, from Michael Dell to Krazy Larry.
But I doubt they'll even be able to get that far, these days.
The Xerox Star in 1981 flopped. The Apple Lisa in 1983 flopped. The Apple Macintosh in 1984 flopped. (more on that in a moment) GEM could have worked out, but Apple killed it, and MS would have worked to kill it later. The Amiga in 1985 flopped. Windows 1 and 2 in '85 and '87 (?) flopped. NeXTStep in '89 flopped. BeOS in '96 flopped.
The Mac achieved decent success, but honestly has been declining in significance (this coming from a long time Mac user) since the very early 90's. It's just about toast now. However, until compelling applications - i.e. DTP - and reasonable hardware - i.e. the Mac Plus - came along, the Mac was a failure.
Windows has succeeded largely because it is incrementally better than running plain jane DOS, but doesn't interfere with the ability to do so. No significant reinvestment in hardware or software was necessary, because compatability was prioritized higher than functionality. It seems to have worked. Certainly MS has wanted people to use NT since it's arrival, but it's taken the better part of a decade to get people there and it's not all done yet.
What sells computers is really a combination of Applications, Compatability/Standards/Mindshare, Performance and Price. All tempered by the perception of those attributes, which frequently override the realities.
(Oh, btw, pretty much everyone in the Lisa and Mac projects at Apple knew about PARC. Taking them there was a ploy to get managerial support; they were already familar with the details and had a good idea of what they wanted to do.)
However, the lack of initial communication with IBM and DR was due not to Kidall being out, but his wife being paranoid about what IBM might want them to sign. They hooked up later, but momentum had already been lost to MS (Bill probably would have signed away his soul, in blood for that contract - maybe he did;)
Eventually, though, IIRC, DOS was dirt cheap and CP/M very expensive, which ended that little chapter very quickly; who wanted to blow several hundred bucks on CP/M?
Yet even as the raw number of macs sold has gone up since Steve returned, the market share has gone down.
The competing Wintel platform is so popular that its sales have gone up at a far far greater rate. It's somewhat tougher for people in that market, as margins keep getting thinner and thinner. (Apple's got it worse of course - they can't even try to spread it out a little)
Until these last couple of quarters everyone but Apple's been doing great. They, on the other hand, seem to have got the Titanic band playing away....
Now it's beginning to look like the US market is saturated: how popular is Apple abroad? Not very. They seriously overcharge the foreign markets (at one point it was cheaper for British Mac Users to get a ticket to New York, buy a Mac, stay overnight, and fly back than it was to get one in the UK) prioritize the US above them, and are getting/going to get destroyed by the ever-powerful home grown market. Because with generic hardware, pirated software goes a long way. In Israel, a fairly up-to-date place, I understand virtually no one uses Macs, but virtually no one pays for software either. This helps MS in the long run though, as they are standardizing on their platform and will probably pay sooner or later.
You could, after all, walk in to any computer store in the entire world and stand an excellent chance of never seeing a six-colored product. But I bet you'd find a CDR with Win95 somewhere.
Already I had doubts that even had OS X attracted users and alienated no one, that Apple could survive. I wanted them to - I've been using Macs since '86, and I think they've got the best UI around.
But OS X is not a Mac, and if you think of it as what it really is: A new OS altogether, and as such it stands a snowball's chance in hell. NeXT failed because '89 was too late to introduce a new OS. BeOS failed for a pretty similar reason. If you had something that flawlessly ran Windows programs and ran on x86 hardware (as I predicted OS X would have to rapidly become) you might have a small opportunity, but unless the breakup had occured MS would do everything in their power to destroy you, a la DR DOS. (which in '85 had the GEM GUI that Apple killed off, but was fairly good)
It's possible that Apple may pick up some Linux users, but they'll have to deal with the crap Apple is known for spewing, ("Did we say that your computer would run OS X? Sorry.") the expensive, slow, incompatable hardware that's plagued it since the beginning, and frankly OS X is useless at certain things Linux is good at and you'd expect OS X to be good at.
I mean, where are the OS X terminal applications that are special? What about remote desktops? Unique applications - aren't any. Stability? Naw, OS X has been crashing on lots of people, including me, frequently and hard. OS X is too much like NeXT to be considered an interesting E theme. But it's too little like MacOS to retain the traditional userbase that, if they're going to get shafted, might as well get shafted with a cheap Wintel box so it hurts less.
And they still weren't widely adopted as I understand. Perhaps there is less to their popularity, given the importance of other factors, than I had been led to believe.
Not all that is good is popular; not all that is popular is good. The NeXT dev sw could have made programming so easy that only 5 year old children can do it, freshen breath and wake you up in the morning. But did anyone ever care enough to buy and use the thing? Unrequited love doesn't keep people in business.
I don't think that it was worth the price, because as much as people talk about how great it is, I suspect they're not using it now, and weren't using it then.
Yeah, I still suspect that Be was intended to be sold to Apple and take it over from within as ironically happened with NeXT. I really don't see, having used it, the greatness of their OS. As for their other software, I understand that it's become rather outdated, but is/was good. If so, given how strapped they were for cash, it probably could have been bought up by Apple at the NeXT bankruptcy proceedings if nothing else.
(have you been to the dot-com auctions lately? Man are they a blast. If only FuckedCompany and Ebay would team up on doing something like that... it would probably go out of business;)
I could discuss the reasons why NeXT failed, but I'd probably run into some kind of maximum post limit on slashdot.
Read "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for a pretty grizzly account. I haven't read the new bio of Steve that came out fairly recently yet, so I can't comment on that. To get some of the other background though as to what NeXT was up against, and some of Steve's history of screwups at Apple (particularly the Lisa and Macintosh) check out "Fire in the Valley" and "Infinite Loop."
(hell, you can get a good and accurate idea of Apple's and MS's souls just by looking at their street addresses)
Neither was NeXTStep. Not if they wanted to actually migrate Mac users over. Both would have to be foundations. Significant issues existed with NeXT - porting it to the hardware, rewriting the graphics engine so as to not have to shell out to Adobe, but mostly making it friendly, which it is not. It looks like it ought to be, but it's not particularly for Mac users. We already have conventions of how to accomplish things, after all.
Regarding the Be dev APIs, it's entirely possible that they're not good. I'm not a programmer. OTOH, for all the acclaim that NeXT had for their development environment, it did not really help them in the market. There is a chicken/egg matter with regards to programmers and users, but of the two, I suspect that programmers are more portable. If Be had bad development tools, why couldn't anyone have made better ones? Making an entirely better OS strikes me as harder.
As for the UI, it has a lot to do with Steve being a prick. The single most important rule of UI is to create something, test it, and modify or scrap it based entirely on ACTUAL USER TESTING, then repeat. It's too convenient that the NeXT UI should be almost perfectly suited to the needs and wants of Mac users, and the flaws that are getting cried out about aren't getting any more than token attention from Apple.
Steve was convinced that the NeXT was the best, but never actually tested it. Except in the real world, where it was a demonstratable flop. I don't buy the idea that Apple tried to do anything with their UI - which IS the foundation for users - except to slap a six-color coat of paint on it.
Am I defending the Mac from a technological standpoint? God no! It was lousy as anything. I am defending how well it worked for people sitting in front of it though. The UI developments were the soul of the Mac, and needed to be preserved and improved. Neither has happened.
Apple may be stuck with NeXTStep for the long haul, but I think that haul will be very short. That these words should come from someone who's used Apples since '81 and Macs since '86 ought to scare the shit out of Steve and co. I'm staying with the MacOS despite its problems because it's nevertheless better at letting me do what I want. After that, probably a backwards step to Windows, which is equally lousy as OS X, but has a future, support and is cheap.
I know where it comes from, but the other factor is the market share. If there are enough users on a platform it will attract programmers who like to make money.
If there are no users except the legions of programmers that write for it, whoever makes it will either have to work for free - which is more or less what's been happening with Unix for ages, and is okay - or will not work on it at all.
I recall that Doom was originally written on NeXT. I've even played it on my NeXT Cube. (it's pretty bad in 2 bit greyscale with DPS as a graphics engine) But the money came from DOS users.
For most general purpose computers, software can be ported across platforms. If NeXT really wanted to make money from their IDEs they would have gotten them running on Windows and on the Mac. But no one has ever accused NeXT of making money.
I do realize the importance of dev tools though, really. If for no other reason than that Bill could extort all kinds of nice things out of Apple in the 80's by holding the BASIC that they licensed from them for the Apple II over their heads.
Who the hell wanted to be like NeXT? They lost money like it was going out of style as though they were an ur-dot-com. Never had a business strategy, never had a market, never had good hardware for the workstation crowd or good software for the microcomputer crowd, insanely bad management, no killer apps.... They were good at what, again? Oh right - having the most money they ever took in be their sale to Apple.
Here's a question. Did you ever see NeXT running on your friend's computers? I own a NeXT Cube, and yet I have only ever met one other person in the world (irl) who was using their OS, and that was seven years ago. I can't say that I saw Be much more than that - one friend had both BeBoxes - but neither was ever popular.
It's 'cause Unix is a fuzzy concept anyway. While technically things like/usr or/var or/etc may not be part of Unix, and the OS can be implemented and run without them, I rather suspect that many people plunked down in front of such a system would have difficulty using it and identifying it as Unix without being told.
Unix, at least as I've understood it, is the whole environment, and not just some specific piece, like the kernel. Strip away too much of that environment, even for good reason, and it's not too Unixy after a while. At which point you should ask, why go through the trouble of using Unix, if you're going to use it so selectively?
Popup folders, and that stuff was not listed in relation to the file structure, they were just examples of things that for whatever brain-dead reason aren't around anymore. I suspect you could implement most of it on Unix, it's just that Steve is kind of a prick.
Spatial memory, btw, is metadata. It's information that describes other data, specifically how it is organized in some kind of space in relation with other stuff. Which sounds kind of dumb, but God knows it's nearly the entire point of experiments with 3D apps. HotSauce springs to mind. Consider your real life desktop. In my experience, most people tend to put related objects in proximity to each other; they don't keep them all in a single alphabetically indexed stack.
Perhaps people are doing things wrong, I don't know. But if they like organizing things that way, I say let 'em.
Well, partially I say it because I'm not a programmer. I like programmers, I admire programmers, I'd like to be one. (I'm not very good at - I like gotos and I don't get recursion;)
But the Mac, like other mainstream OSes is targeted at non-programmers, so their needs come first. Good dev tools _are_ important, and Apple would have been in much more dire straits longer ago had it not been bailed out by Metroworks. But that's not _enough_ of a reason to buy NeXT.
Besides: if NeXT were so easy to develop for, and every progammer's dream, why did that not help it become viable? On the programming front I suspect that a BeOS-derived OS X would have been no worse than the Mac at least, and as NeXT has been mismanaged and a big money-loser since inception, could've gotten picked up for a song a little later.
Can anyone who's programmed on the traditional MacOS, NeXTStep and BeOS weigh in with their opinions, please?
Lastly, the 'look' of the UI is important, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the way that things _work_ when you interact with them. Their appearance is important, but not everything.
For instance a modern car does not look a hell of a lot like a car from nearly a hundred years ago. But the underlying UI - wheel, pedals, shifter - are basically the same and you could drive it. A totally malleable file structure like the Mac's is very different than a rather rigid one such as on Unix. For someone used to the former, the latter may impose too much unwanted structure.
The gist of it is that people may very well be demonstratably more efficient with computers that enforce things like that. But they may also be unhappy. The Mac was intended to make people happy by doing whatever suits them, no matter how stupid it is to an outsider. Often the way the designers hope that users will follow is helped along, but that's chiefly done by making it so damn good that people gravitate towards doing it that way and never realize that perhaps they've been hoodwinked.
It's kind of difficult to explain, really. But there is a definate Tao of the Mac, and I generally haven't seen much else that was like it.
And you probably wouldn't want to be Criswell, or you'd predict that BeOS would become the only OS by 2014, at approximately the same time that clones of famous movie stars are available for purchase at your local Sears.;)
It's not that Unix is inferior. It's that Unix is not a very good desktop - and a very bad replacement for the Mac, if you actually like the Mac. (and the few remaining Mac users like the Mac a lot;)
For me, as long as Unix is hidden, I don't care. Little elves could make the computer work, provided that it doesn't crash. That is not equivalent to saying anything like 'just don't use the terminal.' There is a lot of baggage that comes along with Unix - such as the files structure, or the security model - that are anathema to the Mac.
However at the point at which you successfully get rid of all that, there's very little left of Unix that's still useful except perhaps the kernel.
OS X has a lousy, though cool graphics system. The file system is rather rigid. UI advancements like spatial memory, label metadata, popup folders etc. that have been on the Mac for years and years are gone with no replacement (or no feature-complete one) much less anything better. It continues to tie users to a nonstandard hardware platform. The compatability box has a few good things going for it, but not nearly enough. (it ought to boot from a ram dump, for starters)
I strongly suspect that BeOS was developed solely with the intention of replacing the MacOS by having Be get bought by Apple. I think that it would have done a good job with more work and more resources. OS X, OTOH really is NeXT Step, all over again, with a different logo. For users familiar with both, there's not a big difference.
NeXT may have been favored by Unix users - who generally wouldn't know an all-around good UI if it bit them in the ass, I'm sorry to say - but it wasn't ever a viable substitute or replacement for the Mac. It wasn't then, it isn't now.
No, it was precisely aimed at one customer. Apple.
JLG was at Apple (and presumably still has some social contacts there - my impression is that the Valley is a small world) long enough to know that Blue would not be revolutionary and that Pink was destined for failure.
Blue - so named because the features were on blue sticky notes - became System 7. (System 8 and 9 are not significantly different... there haven't been any updates of that caliber for ten years)
Pink - again with the notes - was one of Apple's first attempts to write a replacement for the Mac. But it died, largely due to mismanagement.
Copland was another attempt, and probably could've worked out. But the designers wanted to get legacy Mac software running natively on it. I don't think that emulators were ever really considered. Too bad that they didn't realize that that was one of the reasons why the contemporary PDM project that developed PPC-based Macs succeeded was practical backwards compatability.
BeOS has demonstratably run on Apple hardware with the old MacOS running in an emulator, and was very very fast, with a good OS and POSIX, on crappy hardware. How NeXT even wound up in the running back in '97, I'll never know.
Me, I'm using OS X right now, but the UI isn't the Mac's. It's not inspiring any loyalty in me to stick with Apple. Who knows - the same might have happened with Be. But I think that BeOS or a successful Copland (which would've been rather similar) would have been better and seen the light of day sooner.
Oh well. It's hardly the first time Apple blew it. It'll just probably be one of the last.
I once lived in an apartment in Cleveland Circle. One roommate had a line of her own (using the spare pair - Bell Atlantic was lazy) and the other roommate and I shared the main line. One day the main line cuts out, though the second line was still live. We eventually determined that the people downstairs had been renovating their apartment, and cut through just enough of the wire by accident to kill one pair and not the other. When we finally got BA to come out, they just put on a set of multiplexers and didn't even consider running an intact cable to replace or augment the one that was known to be damaged.
Between that and Cablevision, I didn't even bother wishing for a high speed line.
The actual case was in regards to anti-draft pamphleteering during World War I. (Schenck v. U. S. back in 1919)
(Additionally, what's up with the guy who keeps saying that Holmes wrote a dissenting opinon? The Schenck opinion was unanimous. I suspect that he's thinking of Abrams v. US, in which Holmes and Brandeis did dissent despite the majority using Holmes' own test, but they were in favor of the defendant.)
First off, allow me to point out that it is not considered dangerous to yell fire in a crowded theater. It is dangerous to yell fire in a crowded theater, falsely, and with the intention of causing a riot. If there really were a fire, you have an obligation to yell about it. Not doing so would be criminally negligent!
Secondly the general criteria that is germane here (this isn't libel - the printed information is believed to be correct....) is the 'clear and present danger' doctrine.
If some speech constitutes a clearly recognizable, incontravertable danger, such as a death threat, and is intended to have immediate consequences, such as your death right now get him! then it's no longer protected from the government by the aegis of the first amendment. However sufficiently vague threats are entirely permissible.
It's not necessarily treasonous for me to advocate the overthrow of the government, for instance. It only becomes so when I start getting into my plan for doing it pretty damn soon. if my plan were that the Saucer People would assist us tomorrow, the clarity of the danger is too small; if it were that the populace would kill off government officials when they've had enough, the immediacy of the danger isn't actionable.
Furthermore, it is not technically the speech that's at issue, it's the intent to act upon that speech. The police are generally expected to prevent murders in progress. They don't have to wait for it to actually happen, standing idly by until then. Likewise, it's not really that you say fire, but that you're doing something deliberately intended to injure or kill.
(and given the nature of theaters in Holmes' day, there would literally be a stampede, crushing people to death, because those theaters were firetraps. Think 'soccer riot.')
Current copyright law has certain interesting provisions. For instance there are statutory exceptions that permit users who have legally obtained software to install and run it, and to back it up, without the necessity of agreeing to a license.
Fair Use provisions both encoded in law by Congress and recognized by the Courts prior to and regardless of Congress' opinion on the matter permit users to buy, sell and trade software as desired, as well as discuss and review it.
Yet programmers are still entitled to copyrights on their software - the copyrights simply don't expand into those areas, not at all.
With this in mind, how do you justify MS's draconian EULAs for single-user software? The laws discussed above negate any need for them to protect either party, after all. Additionally, how do you justify the upcoming licensing scheme that will tie installations closely to hardware, again given that MS would be just as protected under the law if it had no licensing at all. Why is it desirable? If you don't think it's desirable, what specifically are you doing within MS to get rid of these practices?
Consider what tends to get done with computers in non-geek households: Games, light word processing, finances, Web browsing, email, listening to mp3s, watching movies.
Well, MS is going to start blocking off the ability to listen to any old mp3, so let's discard that.
Combine three MS projects, and you'll have the answer. XBox as the platform, and to provide the games, WebTV to provide internet usage, and.Net to let people pay to use Word over the Internet from MSN.
XBox - at the very least the 2nd or 3rd revision - is being aimed at taking over the console market and replacing WebTV. It may later move into the TiVO videorecording market as well, but the first two are good for a start.
Sure, Emachines or whoever could use Linux, but that'll harm them in the market, as users automatically want Windows, which ends up being one of the costliest items in the ultra low margin computer. MS has no such problems, and can even screw with the licensing of Windows to the $400 market to help keep XBox viable until it can support itself.
I've used NeXTStep, you're right in that OS X is based on it, and not on the traditional MacOS UI. But NeXTStep and OS X are near-useless monstrosities. And I've got a rarely-used NeXT Cube and installed (and then removed) OS X on my Mac over the weekend. If it's as stable as Win2K has been in my experience, WinXP is looking pretty good.
Oh, and Steve didn't design it - he's not a designer. (IIRC Keith Ohlfs was at the heart of the NeXTStep UI, as well as WebTV's) In fact, Steve generally does really terrible things when he tries to micromanage. e.g. telling engineers that the chips on the Mac 128k's logic board were too close together to look good, and only relenting when they showed that it wouldn't work how he wanted because he knew nothing about board design. There are tons of anecdotes about Steve's horrible, arbitrary management practices and their effects. Any good history of Apple or NeXT is likely to have some. I suggest "Infinite Loop" and "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for starters.
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Three companies? NeXT no longer exists. It was bought by Apple. I count two companies.
With regards to Lisa and Mac, Apple planned to have three products after the Apple II+. Apple III - a stopgap business machine; Lisa - a serious business machine that would be Apple's future; Annie - a cheap gaming computer.
Jobs, being in upper management, wasn't nominally in charge of Lisa, but was closely involved in it, the PARC tour was arranged so that he'd let them do GUI devlopment, fired and hired people up to and including project leaders, and was kicked off by Markkula when he consistantly missed deadlines. (mostly by adding features)
Then he went to the Mac, fought with Raskin, who ran it and had proposed GUIs at Apple to begin with, Raskin quit, and Jobs consistantly missed deadlines. (mostly by adding features) He also fought with his engineers - Jobs' dream Mac would've had 64kB RAM and a 880kB Twiggy disks. (the kind that he had had made for Lisa, and were notoriously lousy) Word has it that he deliberately kept networking off the Mac as long as he had control; he definately kept expansion slots off. (and had tried to get rid of them on the Apple II but was rebuffed by Woz)
When the Lisa and Mac divisions were brought under a single division, Steve killed the Lisa - the Mac was better, in his opinion, even though Lisa sales were picking up a little bit.
Then he tried to oust Sculley, but was in fact hoisted by his own petard, stripped of power, and quit, taking key employees with him.
A few good histories of Apple can get into the real nitty-gritty. Same with NeXT. The story btw is that (aside from robot colors, which also happened) Steve wanted the factory to be in the US, and for people who were buying computers to be able to see them being assembled, rather like cars.
But the place where people would be taken to see the assembly was oriented with the assembly line in such a way that the cubes would go right to left. That's backwards, but he only decided after the plant was completed, so everything had to be torn out and moved so that they went in the correct direction.
No one _ever_ came to see the assembly.
Another great story is that the case designers wanted to put an imperceptable angle in the cube sides so that it could fall out of the mold; this was unacceptable to Steve, so special one-of-a-kind mold technology had to be developed to accomodate the perfect cube angles. Magnesium turned out not to hold paint well; the logo was nearly as bad as Apple's in terms of printing costs; cubes would only have MO drives - no HDs, but MOs broke easily and were slow and expensive... there are a lot of problems with NeXT that were caused by what Steve wanted to do, regardless of what actually would've made sense.
And no one could ever argue with Steve.
With regards to Pixar, there are rumors that Monsters, Inc. won't be all that good. Particularly in the face of the Harry Potter movie and Fellowship of the Ring. Their deal with Disney is nice (they have had difficulty predicting hit movies accurately, e.g. 102 Dalmatians and Emperor's New Groove) but when it runs out, with other major studios pursuing computer animation aggressively, what do they do? Movie making is a highly turbulent business, and Pixar is very small, given the output of many other studios and production companies. But again, Lassiter pretty much runs Pixar according to all reports I've heard.
Apple isn't doing well, as their market share is pitiful. Perhaps their revenues are good, but they are pretty certainly under a sustainable share point, and unless they can grow up to something like 15-30% of the market, it'll continue to decline, as it's been doing steadily for a decade. Making a few million is nice. In the face of MS making so much more, it's not quite _as_ nice. And Apple competes against Intel, MS, Dell, Compaq, Gateway and all the little clone makers. It's a nasty uphill battle.
Please, check out reliable sources. "Fire in the Valley," "Apple Confidential," "Infinite Loop," "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing," "Accidental Empires." They generally paint the same picture of Steve.
Sorry, I meant in context: Gates is rather paranoid, and I understand his management style tends to involve wanting direct control over everyone at MS. (which is merely unfeasable to him for techical reasons alone)
But he has managed to get MS to the top, and keep it there, and get its tentacles into other businesses and take them over, or at least make good headway into doing so. It makes him a successful businessman, even if I doubt I'd want to ever deal with him personally.
Steve is more like a cross between the PHB and Catbert. He's stupid, and nontechnical, but actively evil. (wasn't it Cringely that described him as a sociopath?)
He co founded Apple, but his job consisted chiefly of convincing investors to invest, people to buy the hardware, and getting more people to help run the company. This was pretty impressive, as he was against bathing at the time. Or eating a balanced diet.
But he screwed up at Apple all the time; had he not been successfully opposed by the Woz, the Apple II would've not really been expandable or useful. He mismanaged the Lisa project. (you are right about PARC, only Steve wasn't familiar with GUIS - too bad he didn't adopt Ethernet, laser printing or Smalltalk when he was there; all parts of the tour)
He mismanaged the Mac project, which was not successful until the Mac Plus came along after he was booted out.
NeXTs failure is in many ways Steve's own fault. I enjoyed "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for an accounting of his screwups large and small. (e.g. having the assembly plant built, torn down and rebuilt, because the computers have to get assembled going in the proper direction!)
Pixar's success is in many ways due to Steve not getting involved. He lets Pixar do its own thing, more or less, though it was started as a division of Industrial Light and Magic, so he can't take all the credit. Additionally, Pixar is so small that one good flop is bound to cause no end of trouble for them.
Steve is remarkable for his amazing chutzpah. Outside of that, I'd take a stable and historically successful person like McNealy, or Gates or Dell or Ellison any day. Steve's too unreliable to be given the keys to anything, IMHO.
(Best Apple manager: Mike Scott. This is not saying a hell of a lot, I'm afraid.)
Like the $899 iMacs?
.Net and incorporate WebTV) but it's chiefly a response to the OS now being one of the most expensive parts of a low end system. If eMachines started selling Linux systems (if they could manage somehow) MS would percieve it as a threat, so it's acting preemptively ;)
I _am_ a Mac user, and I know that Apple's prices are awful. Although there is the possibility of generic components being of lower quality than name brand, in truth they're just as frequently the same components.
The Windows platform is hugely benefited by the ability of some guy in the middle of nowhere to assemble computers on margins so thin he can see through them, but to be able to sell them to people in his town. Apple, or Dell, or Gateway, or Compaq, or whomever can never have presences in all markets, and the Web isn't always a viable replacement.
Frankly, I doubt they'd ever even consider selling computers with a profit of $5 or $10 because it's too low - regardless it is a perfectly worthwhile niche to be filled.
Only one really big company - MS - is trying to move in on that segment, with the XBox (possibly future revisions, that use
We can't pretend that the world is in the 1980s forever. Relatively good generic parts - ones that are 'good enough' are pervasive, and we had better deal with that. If Apple were smart they'd port over to x86 as fast as possible to take advantage of the cheaper, faster, more standard hardware. And if they had the opportunity (read: MS is broken up) they would need to spin off their hardware division entirely and license the OS to absolutely anyone that wanted it, from Michael Dell to Krazy Larry.
But I doubt they'll even be able to get that far, these days.
GUIs have never sold themselves.
The Xerox Star in 1981 flopped. The Apple Lisa in 1983 flopped. The Apple Macintosh in 1984 flopped. (more on that in a moment) GEM could have worked out, but Apple killed it, and MS would have worked to kill it later. The Amiga in 1985 flopped. Windows 1 and 2 in '85 and '87 (?) flopped. NeXTStep in '89 flopped. BeOS in '96 flopped.
The Mac achieved decent success, but honestly has been declining in significance (this coming from a long time Mac user) since the very early 90's. It's just about toast now. However, until compelling applications - i.e. DTP - and reasonable hardware - i.e. the Mac Plus - came along, the Mac was a failure.
Windows has succeeded largely because it is incrementally better than running plain jane DOS, but doesn't interfere with the ability to do so. No significant reinvestment in hardware or software was necessary, because compatability was prioritized higher than functionality. It seems to have worked. Certainly MS has wanted people to use NT since it's arrival, but it's taken the better part of a decade to get people there and it's not all done yet.
What sells computers is really a combination of Applications, Compatability/Standards/Mindshare, Performance and Price. All tempered by the perception of those attributes, which frequently override the realities.
(Oh, btw, pretty much everyone in the Lisa and Mac projects at Apple knew about PARC. Taking them there was a ploy to get managerial support; they were already familar with the details and had a good idea of what they wanted to do.)
However, the lack of initial communication with IBM and DR was due not to Kidall being out, but his wife being paranoid about what IBM might want them to sign. They hooked up later, but momentum had already been lost to MS (Bill probably would have signed away his soul, in blood for that contract - maybe he did ;)
Eventually, though, IIRC, DOS was dirt cheap and CP/M very expensive, which ended that little chapter very quickly; who wanted to blow several hundred bucks on CP/M?
We can only hope, my friend, we can only hope.
;)
(although the second I come across copies of the episodes, they're going online, and damn copyright
--cpt k, who wouldn't ride in TB3 if you paid him a million dollars.
Yet even as the raw number of macs sold has gone up since Steve returned, the market share has gone down.
The competing Wintel platform is so popular that its sales have gone up at a far far greater rate. It's somewhat tougher for people in that market, as margins keep getting thinner and thinner. (Apple's got it worse of course - they can't even try to spread it out a little)
Until these last couple of quarters everyone but Apple's been doing great. They, on the other hand, seem to have got the Titanic band playing away....
Now it's beginning to look like the US market is saturated: how popular is Apple abroad? Not very. They seriously overcharge the foreign markets (at one point it was cheaper for British Mac Users to get a ticket to New York, buy a Mac, stay overnight, and fly back than it was to get one in the UK) prioritize the US above them, and are getting/going to get destroyed by the ever-powerful home grown market. Because with generic hardware, pirated software goes a long way. In Israel, a fairly up-to-date place, I understand virtually no one uses Macs, but virtually no one pays for software either. This helps MS in the long run though, as they are standardizing on their platform and will probably pay sooner or later.
You could, after all, walk in to any computer store in the entire world and stand an excellent chance of never seeing a six-colored product. But I bet you'd find a CDR with Win95 somewhere.
Already I had doubts that even had OS X attracted users and alienated no one, that Apple could survive. I wanted them to - I've been using Macs since '86, and I think they've got the best UI around.
But OS X is not a Mac, and if you think of it as what it really is: A new OS altogether, and as such it stands a snowball's chance in hell. NeXT failed because '89 was too late to introduce a new OS. BeOS failed for a pretty similar reason. If you had something that flawlessly ran Windows programs and ran on x86 hardware (as I predicted OS X would have to rapidly become) you might have a small opportunity, but unless the breakup had occured MS would do everything in their power to destroy you, a la DR DOS. (which in '85 had the GEM GUI that Apple killed off, but was fairly good)
It's possible that Apple may pick up some Linux users, but they'll have to deal with the crap Apple is known for spewing, ("Did we say that your computer would run OS X? Sorry.") the expensive, slow, incompatable hardware that's plagued it since the beginning, and frankly OS X is useless at certain things Linux is good at and you'd expect OS X to be good at.
I mean, where are the OS X terminal applications that are special? What about remote desktops? Unique applications - aren't any. Stability? Naw, OS X has been crashing on lots of people, including me, frequently and hard. OS X is too much like NeXT to be considered an interesting E theme. But it's too little like MacOS to retain the traditional userbase that, if they're going to get shafted, might as well get shafted with a cheap Wintel box so it hurts less.
And they still weren't widely adopted as I understand. Perhaps there is less to their popularity, given the importance of other factors, than I had been led to believe.
Not all that is good is popular; not all that is popular is good. The NeXT dev sw could have made programming so easy that only 5 year old children can do it, freshen breath and wake you up in the morning. But did anyone ever care enough to buy and use the thing? Unrequited love doesn't keep people in business.
I don't think that it was worth the price, because as much as people talk about how great it is, I suspect they're not using it now, and weren't using it then.
Yeah, I still suspect that Be was intended to be sold to Apple and take it over from within as ironically happened with NeXT. I really don't see, having used it, the greatness of their OS. As for their other software, I understand that it's become rather outdated, but is/was good. If so, given how strapped they were for cash, it probably could have been bought up by Apple at the NeXT bankruptcy proceedings if nothing else.
;)
(have you been to the dot-com auctions lately? Man are they a blast. If only FuckedCompany and Ebay would team up on doing something like that... it would probably go out of business
I could discuss the reasons why NeXT failed, but I'd probably run into some kind of maximum post limit on slashdot.
Read "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for a pretty grizzly account. I haven't read the new bio of Steve that came out fairly recently yet, so I can't comment on that. To get some of the other background though as to what NeXT was up against, and some of Steve's history of screwups at Apple (particularly the Lisa and Macintosh) check out "Fire in the Valley" and "Infinite Loop."
(hell, you can get a good and accurate idea of Apple's and MS's souls just by looking at their street addresses)
Neither was NeXTStep. Not if they wanted to actually migrate Mac users over. Both would have to be foundations. Significant issues existed with NeXT - porting it to the hardware, rewriting the graphics engine so as to not have to shell out to Adobe, but mostly making it friendly, which it is not. It looks like it ought to be, but it's not particularly for Mac users. We already have conventions of how to accomplish things, after all.
Regarding the Be dev APIs, it's entirely possible that they're not good. I'm not a programmer. OTOH, for all the acclaim that NeXT had for their development environment, it did not really help them in the market. There is a chicken/egg matter with regards to programmers and users, but of the two, I suspect that programmers are more portable. If Be had bad development tools, why couldn't anyone have made better ones? Making an entirely better OS strikes me as harder.
As for the UI, it has a lot to do with Steve being a prick. The single most important rule of UI is to create something, test it, and modify or scrap it based entirely on ACTUAL USER TESTING, then repeat. It's too convenient that the NeXT UI should be almost perfectly suited to the needs and wants of Mac users, and the flaws that are getting cried out about aren't getting any more than token attention from Apple.
Steve was convinced that the NeXT was the best, but never actually tested it. Except in the real world, where it was a demonstratable flop. I don't buy the idea that Apple tried to do anything with their UI - which IS the foundation for users - except to slap a six-color coat of paint on it.
Am I defending the Mac from a technological standpoint? God no! It was lousy as anything. I am defending how well it worked for people sitting in front of it though. The UI developments were the soul of the Mac, and needed to be preserved and improved. Neither has happened.
Apple may be stuck with NeXTStep for the long haul, but I think that haul will be very short. That these words should come from someone who's used Apples since '81 and Macs since '86 ought to scare the shit out of Steve and co. I'm staying with the MacOS despite its problems because it's nevertheless better at letting me do what I want. After that, probably a backwards step to Windows, which is equally lousy as OS X, but has a future, support and is cheap.
I know where it comes from, but the other factor is the market share. If there are enough users on a platform it will attract programmers who like to make money.
If there are no users except the legions of programmers that write for it, whoever makes it will either have to work for free - which is more or less what's been happening with Unix for ages, and is okay - or will not work on it at all.
I recall that Doom was originally written on NeXT. I've even played it on my NeXT Cube. (it's pretty bad in 2 bit greyscale with DPS as a graphics engine) But the money came from DOS users.
For most general purpose computers, software can be ported across platforms. If NeXT really wanted to make money from their IDEs they would have gotten them running on Windows and on the Mac. But no one has ever accused NeXT of making money.
I do realize the importance of dev tools though, really. If for no other reason than that Bill could extort all kinds of nice things out of Apple in the 80's by holding the BASIC that they licensed from them for the Apple II over their heads.
Who the hell wanted to be like NeXT? They lost money like it was going out of style as though they were an ur-dot-com. Never had a business strategy, never had a market, never had good hardware for the workstation crowd or good software for the microcomputer crowd, insanely bad management, no killer apps.... They were good at what, again? Oh right - having the most money they ever took in be their sale to Apple.
Here's a question. Did you ever see NeXT running on your friend's computers? I own a NeXT Cube, and yet I have only ever met one other person in the world (irl) who was using their OS, and that was seven years ago. I can't say that I saw Be much more than that - one friend had both BeBoxes - but neither was ever popular.
It's 'cause Unix is a fuzzy concept anyway. While technically things like /usr or /var or /etc may not be part of Unix, and the OS can be implemented and run without them, I rather suspect that many people plunked down in front of such a system would have difficulty using it and identifying it as Unix without being told.
Unix, at least as I've understood it, is the whole environment, and not just some specific piece, like the kernel. Strip away too much of that environment, even for good reason, and it's not too Unixy after a while. At which point you should ask, why go through the trouble of using Unix, if you're going to use it so selectively?
Popup folders, and that stuff was not listed in relation to the file structure, they were just examples of things that for whatever brain-dead reason aren't around anymore. I suspect you could implement most of it on Unix, it's just that Steve is kind of a prick.
Spatial memory, btw, is metadata. It's information that describes other data, specifically how it is organized in some kind of space in relation with other stuff. Which sounds kind of dumb, but God knows it's nearly the entire point of experiments with 3D apps. HotSauce springs to mind. Consider your real life desktop. In my experience, most people tend to put related objects in proximity to each other; they don't keep them all in a single alphabetically indexed stack.
Perhaps people are doing things wrong, I don't know. But if they like organizing things that way, I say let 'em.
Well, partially I say it because I'm not a programmer. I like programmers, I admire programmers, I'd like to be one. (I'm not very good at - I like gotos and I don't get recursion ;)
But the Mac, like other mainstream OSes is targeted at non-programmers, so their needs come first. Good dev tools _are_ important, and Apple would have been in much more dire straits longer ago had it not been bailed out by Metroworks. But that's not _enough_ of a reason to buy NeXT.
Besides: if NeXT were so easy to develop for, and every progammer's dream, why did that not help it become viable? On the programming front I suspect that a BeOS-derived OS X would have been no worse than the Mac at least, and as NeXT has been mismanaged and a big money-loser since inception, could've gotten picked up for a song a little later.
Can anyone who's programmed on the traditional MacOS, NeXTStep and BeOS weigh in with their opinions, please?
Lastly, the 'look' of the UI is important, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the way that things _work_ when you interact with them. Their appearance is important, but not everything.
For instance a modern car does not look a hell of a lot like a car from nearly a hundred years ago. But the underlying UI - wheel, pedals, shifter - are basically the same and you could drive it. A totally malleable file structure like the Mac's is very different than a rather rigid one such as on Unix. For someone used to the former, the latter may impose too much unwanted structure.
The gist of it is that people may very well be demonstratably more efficient with computers that enforce things like that. But they may also be unhappy. The Mac was intended to make people happy by doing whatever suits them, no matter how stupid it is to an outsider. Often the way the designers hope that users will follow is helped along, but that's chiefly done by making it so damn good that people gravitate towards doing it that way and never realize that perhaps they've been hoodwinked.
It's kind of difficult to explain, really. But there is a definate Tao of the Mac, and I generally haven't seen much else that was like it.
And you probably wouldn't want to be Criswell, or you'd predict that BeOS would become the only OS by 2014, at approximately the same time that clones of famous movie stars are available for purchase at your local Sears. ;)
It's not that Unix is inferior. It's that Unix is not a very good desktop - and a very bad replacement for the Mac, if you actually like the Mac. (and the few remaining Mac users like the Mac a lot ;)
For me, as long as Unix is hidden, I don't care. Little elves could make the computer work, provided that it doesn't crash. That is not equivalent to saying anything like 'just don't use the terminal.' There is a lot of baggage that comes along with Unix - such as the files structure, or the security model - that are anathema to the Mac.
However at the point at which you successfully get rid of all that, there's very little left of Unix that's still useful except perhaps the kernel.
OS X has a lousy, though cool graphics system. The file system is rather rigid. UI advancements like spatial memory, label metadata, popup folders etc. that have been on the Mac for years and years are gone with no replacement (or no feature-complete one) much less anything better. It continues to tie users to a nonstandard hardware platform. The compatability box has a few good things going for it, but not nearly enough. (it ought to boot from a ram dump, for starters)
I strongly suspect that BeOS was developed solely with the intention of replacing the MacOS by having Be get bought by Apple. I think that it would have done a good job with more work and more resources. OS X, OTOH really is NeXT Step, all over again, with a different logo. For users familiar with both, there's not a big difference.
NeXT may have been favored by Unix users - who generally wouldn't know an all-around good UI if it bit them in the ass, I'm sorry to say - but it wasn't ever a viable substitute or replacement for the Mac. It wasn't then, it isn't now.
No, it was precisely aimed at one customer. Apple.
JLG was at Apple (and presumably still has some social contacts there - my impression is that the Valley is a small world) long enough to know that Blue would not be revolutionary and that Pink was destined for failure.
Blue - so named because the features were on blue sticky notes - became System 7. (System 8 and 9 are not significantly different... there haven't been any updates of that caliber for ten years)
Pink - again with the notes - was one of Apple's first attempts to write a replacement for the Mac. But it died, largely due to mismanagement.
Copland was another attempt, and probably could've worked out. But the designers wanted to get legacy Mac software running natively on it. I don't think that emulators were ever really considered. Too bad that they didn't realize that that was one of the reasons why the contemporary PDM project that developed PPC-based Macs succeeded was practical backwards compatability.
BeOS has demonstratably run on Apple hardware with the old MacOS running in an emulator, and was very very fast, with a good OS and POSIX, on crappy hardware. How NeXT even wound up in the running back in '97, I'll never know.
Me, I'm using OS X right now, but the UI isn't the Mac's. It's not inspiring any loyalty in me to stick with Apple. Who knows - the same might have happened with Be. But I think that BeOS or a successful Copland (which would've been rather similar) would have been better and seen the light of day sooner.
Oh well. It's hardly the first time Apple blew it. It'll just probably be one of the last.
Oh boy you bet that Boston wiring is often bad.
I once lived in an apartment in Cleveland Circle. One roommate had a line of her own (using the spare pair - Bell Atlantic was lazy) and the other roommate and I shared the main line. One day the main line cuts out, though the second line was still live. We eventually determined that the people downstairs had been renovating their apartment, and cut through just enough of the wire by accident to kill one pair and not the other. When we finally got BA to come out, they just put on a set of multiplexers and didn't even consider running an intact cable to replace or augment the one that was known to be damaged.
Between that and Cablevision, I didn't even bother wishing for a high speed line.
The actual case was in regards to anti-draft pamphleteering during World War I. (Schenck v. U. S. back in 1919)
(Additionally, what's up with the guy who keeps saying that Holmes wrote a dissenting opinon? The Schenck opinion was unanimous. I suspect that he's thinking of Abrams v. US, in which Holmes and Brandeis did dissent despite the majority using Holmes' own test, but they were in favor of the defendant.)
Not quite. (IANAL, blah blah)
First off, allow me to point out that it is not considered dangerous to yell fire in a crowded theater. It is dangerous to yell fire in a crowded theater, falsely, and with the intention of causing a riot. If there really were a fire, you have an obligation to yell about it. Not doing so would be criminally negligent!
Secondly the general criteria that is germane here (this isn't libel - the printed information is believed to be correct....) is the 'clear and present danger' doctrine.
If some speech constitutes a clearly recognizable, incontravertable danger, such as a death threat, and is intended to have immediate consequences, such as your death right now get him! then it's no longer protected from the government by the aegis of the first amendment. However sufficiently vague threats are entirely permissible.
It's not necessarily treasonous for me to advocate the overthrow of the government, for instance. It only becomes so when I start getting into my plan for doing it pretty damn soon. if my plan were that the Saucer People would assist us tomorrow, the clarity of the danger is too small; if it were that the populace would kill off government officials when they've had enough, the immediacy of the danger isn't actionable.
Furthermore, it is not technically the speech that's at issue, it's the intent to act upon that speech. The police are generally expected to prevent murders in progress. They don't have to wait for it to actually happen, standing idly by until then. Likewise, it's not really that you say fire, but that you're doing something deliberately intended to injure or kill.
(and given the nature of theaters in Holmes' day, there would literally be a stampede, crushing people to death, because those theaters were firetraps. Think 'soccer riot.')
Current copyright law has certain interesting provisions. For instance there are statutory exceptions that permit users who have legally obtained software to install and run it, and to back it up, without the necessity of agreeing to a license.
Fair Use provisions both encoded in law by Congress and recognized by the Courts prior to and regardless of Congress' opinion on the matter permit users to buy, sell and trade software as desired, as well as discuss and review it.
Yet programmers are still entitled to copyrights on their software - the copyrights simply don't expand into those areas, not at all.
With this in mind, how do you justify MS's draconian EULAs for single-user software? The laws discussed above negate any need for them to protect either party, after all. Additionally, how do you justify the upcoming licensing scheme that will tie installations closely to hardware, again given that MS would be just as protected under the law if it had no licensing at all. Why is it desirable? If you don't think it's desirable, what specifically are you doing within MS to get rid of these practices?
They already thought of this, I'm sure.
.Net to let people pay to use Word over the Internet from MSN.
Consider what tends to get done with computers in non-geek households: Games, light word processing, finances, Web browsing, email, listening to mp3s, watching movies.
Well, MS is going to start blocking off the ability to listen to any old mp3, so let's discard that.
Combine three MS projects, and you'll have the answer. XBox as the platform, and to provide the games, WebTV to provide internet usage, and
XBox - at the very least the 2nd or 3rd revision - is being aimed at taking over the console market and replacing WebTV. It may later move into the TiVO videorecording market as well, but the first two are good for a start.
Sure, Emachines or whoever could use Linux, but that'll harm them in the market, as users automatically want Windows, which ends up being one of the costliest items in the ultra low margin computer. MS has no such problems, and can even screw with the licensing of Windows to the $400 market to help keep XBox viable until it can support itself.
I've used NeXTStep, you're right in that OS X is based on it, and not on the traditional MacOS UI. But NeXTStep and OS X are near-useless monstrosities. And I've got a rarely-used NeXT Cube and installed (and then removed) OS X on my Mac over the weekend. If it's as stable as Win2K has been in my experience, WinXP is looking pretty good.
Oh, and Steve didn't design it - he's not a designer. (IIRC Keith Ohlfs was at the heart of the NeXTStep UI, as well as WebTV's) In fact, Steve generally does really terrible things when he tries to micromanage. e.g. telling engineers that the chips on the Mac 128k's logic board were too close together to look good, and only relenting when they showed that it wouldn't work how he wanted because he knew nothing about board design. There are tons of anecdotes about Steve's horrible, arbitrary management practices and their effects. Any good history of Apple or NeXT is likely to have some. I suggest "Infinite Loop" and "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" for starters.