To put things in context, a highend 486-based IBM PS/2 system cost around $8000 at the time. The Quadra 950 was not that overpriced.
Re:Flops at Apple are predictable
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Top 10 Apple Flops
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· Score: 2, Interesting
John Scully gets very little respect from Mac fans (becuase he fired Jobs). He might have lost the marketshare war, but he put the Mac on a sound technical foundation and turned Apple into the strong mid-sized company it is today.
Furthermore it was Scully who turned Apple into something more than just a computer company, the whole "brand icon" thing was his idea. In that sense, the Jobs II era is really just walking in Scully's footsteps.
Actually, the IIGS was a total mistake -- Apple wouldn't sell a cheap color Mac, so instead they invested tons of development into the GS to make it sorta Mac-Like. (Finder, Hypercard, AppleTalk).
Problem was when they dropped it, a whole bunch of Apple customers got marooned. It would have been much smarter to get those schoolkids on the Macintosh platform from the very beginning.
If you thought the LCII was bad, try the original LC:)
The LCII thing does highlight Apple's 1990 strategy of shipping severely crippled computers to the low-end and consumer markets. These people got a terrible user experience with slow/incompatible/useless machines that probably drove them away from Apple forever. A few more examples:
+ When Quadras were shipping, Apple was selling Mac Pluses/Classics to students. This was during the time VGA was becoming common on IBM PCs.
+ Right before the PowerPC machines shipped, my boss managed to buy a 030 Performa for his kids -- a machine that was 2 years obsolete on arrival.
+ The 6300/6400 Macs which not only had severely crippled motherboards, were also defective and had to be recalled.
1993 was only the official date when the//e was finally dropped from the back of the catalog. Apple hadn't done anything to support the platform for years prior.
(And the long lifespan wasn't that strange. www.ibm.com had PCjr parts listed well into the late 90s.)
You know, unlike OS X, you can change the DPI setting in Windows to 120dpi or more (this used to be called "Large Font" mode). That's right, Windows has always been psuedo-resolution independant. Although a small number of apps can have problems.
[Speaking of OS24Ever, OS/2 v2 had some bizarre resolution independant dialogs -- running @ 1280 caused some stuff to appear in huge ~30pt font.]
Well, somewhere around I have a PCMCIA 10MB Western Digital drive from circa 1992. So the formfactor was nothing new -- it was the percieved cost/size ratio that was atractive to Apple. I don't think it was any secret that Toshiba designed the disks for belt-sized devices.
Apple apparently cornered the market for the Toshiba disks for a while. But now there is, inevitably, an alternative. Hitachi now makes a disk that size
Buried in the article, there was this key fact. Owning all the tiny hard drives on the market for more than a year translated into a long-term perception advantage for Apple -- that iPod == Smallest == Sexiest now and forever.
Had they not had the foresight to monopolize the formfactor, the iPod would have been one of a half-dozen similar models on the market just as it was picking up and it might have been lost in the pack (especially because the early models were firewire only).
Actually those secretaries were recruited into COBOL business programming by IBM and others specifically to reduce programmer's salaries overall. (much like the process seen with tools like VB and Java). Even back in the "good ol days" you speak of, most coding was boring business form/report stuff.
It is incorrect to say that nobody cared. ActiveX's lack of security was attacked by Sun and the computing press even before the technology was released. And there were "format my drive" and spyware controls from the very beginnning.
At the very least, I cared, and disabled ActiveX site-wide back in 1997 or so. (The policies in IE3 were atrocious - you really could delete anyone's drive.)
What I find more interesting is how, while ActiveX security was attacked from the beginning, the Netscape Plugin model has always had a free pass (even today with Mozilla). The only real difference between the two is one click verus three click installs.
Check daveschroeder's post history. You'll find an enormous number of root-level karmawhore posts which consist of 5 numbered points about why Apple Never Does Anything Wrong. The guy's MO is appleturfing instead of participating, and therefore he get's trolled/adhomed.
Microsoft has had the underlying search technology to do "smart folders" since the mid-90s, they've just never done the UI integration.
The real issue is that people Macintoshes for the User Interface, therefore Apple concentrates on wizbang Finder/UI features.
Nobody buys Windows for the UI/Explorer, they buy it for the programs that run on top. Many enterprise users actually perfer that Explorer never change. Therefore Microsoft concentrates on APIs and tech that's by-in-large invisible to the end user.
Not really. You can run NT4 without IE at all (just delete the IE2 directory from the machine). That is unless you are running Microsoft servers (IIS, Exchange) that require IE4+.
Unfortunately, there's many plugins that are not available as Netscape-style (mainly Intranet/Vertical stuff) or are only available in a incomplete form (Windows Media Player). This prevents the use of Mozilla where it otherwise would be easy to support.
The security problems with ActiveX are more related to "easy to install" policies in IE than the technology itself. Just make it a pain in the ass to use in Mozilla and you get basically the same benefit. (and yes I know about www.iol.ie, but that's too much of a pain-in-the-ass for endusers.)
Before someone starts talking about "sandboxes", don't forget that Mozilla already supports unsandboxed addins -- "extentions" and "Plugins" that can cause all the same spyware problems if you can trick the user into running them.
> Microsoft is selling software that protects you from holes in...the software they wrote?
You're wrong if you think security holes are they main way this stuff gets installed. Spyware usually comes bundled with freeware programs (Kazaa etc) or is installed by social engineering (Your computer may be broadcasting an IP Address!!).
With all the people quibbling with you, I'll put in my agreement with your comment.
Apple's traditional customer base is made of people that are either (1) Extreme Consumer Fetishists [aka "Cult of Mac" types] or (2) So locked in they don't care about product release plans or specs. The top secret/suprise announcement generates buzz and works for these folks.
However if Apple is going to get more serious about the corporate and educational markets they are going to have to be better about releasing product plans.
I should have noted that IANAA(migan), so that was 3rd hand information.
I can see how a "Amiga on a Chip" might have made sense down the road, but in the era when the Amiga was at it's peak it probably would have been too complex/expensive. Even so, they probably would have had to do an entirely NEW set of custom hardware in an era when it was clear that non-PC systems seemed to be going the way of the dodo.
The "corrupt executives" argument has appeal to the screwed users, but I kinda doubt it really made a significant difference one way or another. The main problem was that they were idiots, not that they were overpaid.
Well, that's what Microsoft thought before they spent billions of dollars getting nearly 100% marketshare in browsers and then settling all the resulting lawsuits.
The fact is that most people do not use browsers in an "integrated" manner, and can switch to browsers with little consequence. So perhaps now Microsoft realizes that "ActiveX" and a few other hooks wasn't really worth the massive investment it took.
It was a direct consequence of Commodore's "budget" strategy -- The main reason the Amiga sold at all was because it was cheap, and because it was cheap, there was very little R&D investment. Compare that to Apple who had ridiculous margins and a ridiculous R&D budget to match (and even then fell behind.)
Recall that their main experience was with the C64, a cheap piece of obsolete junk thrown onto the market with very little developer or hardware support but yet still made them a mint. As systems became more complex, they were still operating the same way.
Plus, others have made the argument that it wasn't possible to siginificantly upgrade the Amiga hardware without breaking all the software. They may have realized this and just decided to let the Amiga wither while they moved into PC clones.
The old IBM tried to push these crazy totalizing end-to-end schemes on people and pretty much got smacked down hard.
The new IBM is much more focused on giving enterprise customers What They Want. And What They Want is a commodity OS (Linux/Windows) on commodity hardware (x86). They want CHEAP, and IBM will give it to them.
Other than Nerd Fantasy World, nobody in the enterprise world wants AIX (where they can avoid it), nobody wants a single source desktops ( like Apple) and nobody wants an oddball CPU like the G5 when x86 is faster and more readily available. It probably hurts some of you to hear it, but it's true.
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I'm pretty sure the IIgs was dropped from the catalog a couple years before the //e was.
To put things in context, a highend 486-based IBM PS/2 system cost around $8000 at the time. The Quadra 950 was not that overpriced.
John Scully gets very little respect from Mac fans (becuase he fired Jobs). He might have lost the marketshare war, but he put the Mac on a sound technical foundation and turned Apple into the strong mid-sized company it is today.
Furthermore it was Scully who turned Apple into something more than just a computer company, the whole "brand icon" thing was his idea. In that sense, the Jobs II era is really just walking in Scully's footsteps.
Actually, the IIGS was a total mistake -- Apple wouldn't sell a cheap color Mac, so instead they invested tons of development into the GS to make it sorta Mac-Like. (Finder, Hypercard, AppleTalk).
Problem was when they dropped it, a whole bunch of Apple customers got marooned. It would have been much smarter to get those schoolkids on the Macintosh platform from the very beginning.
If you thought the LCII was bad, try the original LC :)
The LCII thing does highlight Apple's 1990 strategy of shipping severely crippled computers to the low-end and consumer markets. These people got a terrible user experience with slow/incompatible/useless machines that probably drove them away from Apple forever. A few more examples:
+ When Quadras were shipping, Apple was selling Mac Pluses/Classics to students. This was during the time VGA was becoming common on IBM PCs.
+ Right before the PowerPC machines shipped, my boss managed to buy a 030 Performa for his kids -- a machine that was 2 years obsolete on arrival.
+ The 6300/6400 Macs which not only had severely crippled motherboards, were also defective and had to be recalled.
+ eMac/Mac Mini (**ducks**)
1993 was only the official date when the //e was finally dropped from the back of the catalog. Apple hadn't done anything to support the platform for years prior.
(And the long lifespan wasn't that strange. www.ibm.com had PCjr parts listed well into the late 90s.)
You know, unlike OS X, you can change the DPI setting in Windows to 120dpi or more (this used to be called "Large Font" mode). That's right, Windows has always been psuedo-resolution independant. Although a small number of apps can have problems.
[Speaking of OS24Ever, OS/2 v2 had some bizarre resolution independant dialogs -- running @ 1280 caused some stuff to appear in huge ~30pt font.]
> I think this is something that should be built into the OS, not added to a word processor.
Have you used Word's revisions? The feature is tightly bound to the presentation layer. It works nothing like a sourcecode version control app.
Anyway the root poster should try Office 2003. Vastly improved revision markup over O XP. (Haven't used the Mac version, so can't compare.)
IBM's were only 1GB right?
Well, somewhere around I have a PCMCIA 10MB Western Digital drive from circa 1992. So the formfactor was nothing new -- it was the percieved cost/size ratio that was atractive to Apple. I don't think it was any secret that Toshiba designed the disks for belt-sized devices.
Apple apparently cornered the market for the Toshiba disks for a while. But now there is, inevitably, an alternative. Hitachi now makes a disk that size
Buried in the article, there was this key fact. Owning all the tiny hard drives on the market for more than a year translated into a long-term perception advantage for Apple -- that iPod == Smallest == Sexiest now and forever.
Had they not had the foresight to monopolize the formfactor, the iPod would have been one of a half-dozen similar models on the market just as it was picking up and it might have been lost in the pack (especially because the early models were firewire only).
Apple didn't really do it -- the second CPU just sat there unless you were running a specially written Photoshop filter or something.
Actually those secretaries were recruited into COBOL business programming by IBM and others specifically to reduce programmer's salaries overall. (much like the process seen with tools like VB and Java). Even back in the "good ol days" you speak of, most coding was boring business form/report stuff.
It is incorrect to say that nobody cared. ActiveX's lack of security was attacked by Sun and the computing press even before the technology was released. And there were "format my drive" and spyware controls from the very beginnning.
At the very least, I cared, and disabled ActiveX site-wide back in 1997 or so. (The policies in IE3 were atrocious - you really could delete anyone's drive.)
What I find more interesting is how, while ActiveX security was attacked from the beginning, the Netscape Plugin model has always had a free pass (even today with Mozilla). The only real difference between the two is one click verus three click installs.
> Nice combo troll/ad hominem attack.
Check daveschroeder's post history. You'll find an enormous number of root-level karmawhore posts which consist of 5 numbered points about why Apple Never Does Anything Wrong. The guy's MO is appleturfing instead of participating, and therefore he get's trolled/adhomed.
Are you an official Apple rep? You speak like it and perhaps you should identify yourself when astroturing.
Also, please reply directly to people's posts rather than blatently attempting to karmawhore a root level early post to the top of the page.
Microsoft has had the underlying search technology to do "smart folders" since the mid-90s, they've just never done the UI integration.
The real issue is that people Macintoshes for the User Interface, therefore Apple concentrates on wizbang Finder/UI features.
Nobody buys Windows for the UI/Explorer, they buy it for the programs that run on top. Many enterprise users actually perfer that Explorer never change. Therefore Microsoft concentrates on APIs and tech that's by-in-large invisible to the end user.
Not really. You can run NT4 without IE at all (just delete the IE2 directory from the machine). That is unless you are running Microsoft servers (IIS, Exchange) that require IE4+.
It's not a joke option here.
Unfortunately, there's many plugins that are not available as Netscape-style (mainly Intranet/Vertical stuff) or are only available in a incomplete form (Windows Media Player). This prevents the use of Mozilla where it otherwise would be easy to support.
The security problems with ActiveX are more related to "easy to install" policies in IE than the technology itself. Just make it a pain in the ass to use in Mozilla and you get basically the same benefit. (and yes I know about www.iol.ie, but that's too much of a pain-in-the-ass for endusers.)
Before someone starts talking about "sandboxes", don't forget that Mozilla already supports unsandboxed addins -- "extentions" and "Plugins" that can cause all the same spyware problems if you can trick the user into running them.
> Microsoft is selling software that protects you from holes in ...the software they wrote?
You're wrong if you think security holes are they main way this stuff gets installed. Spyware usually comes bundled with freeware programs (Kazaa etc) or is installed by social engineering (Your computer may be broadcasting an IP Address!!).
With all the people quibbling with you, I'll put in my agreement with your comment.
Apple's traditional customer base is made of people that are either (1) Extreme Consumer Fetishists [aka "Cult of Mac" types] or (2) So locked in they don't care about product release plans or specs. The top secret/suprise announcement generates buzz and works for these folks.
However if Apple is going to get more serious about the corporate and educational markets they are going to have to be better about releasing product plans.
I should have noted that IANAA(migan), so that was 3rd hand information.
I can see how a "Amiga on a Chip" might have made sense down the road, but in the era when the Amiga was at it's peak it probably would have been too complex/expensive. Even so, they probably would have had to do an entirely NEW set of custom hardware in an era when it was clear that non-PC systems seemed to be going the way of the dodo.
The "corrupt executives" argument has appeal to the screwed users, but I kinda doubt it really made a significant difference one way or another. The main problem was that they were idiots, not that they were overpaid.
Well, that's what Microsoft thought before they spent billions of dollars getting nearly 100% marketshare in browsers and then settling all the resulting lawsuits.
The fact is that most people do not use browsers in an "integrated" manner, and can switch to browsers with little consequence. So perhaps now Microsoft realizes that "ActiveX" and a few other hooks wasn't really worth the massive investment it took.
It was a direct consequence of Commodore's "budget" strategy -- The main reason the Amiga sold at all was because it was cheap, and because it was cheap, there was very little R&D investment. Compare that to Apple who had ridiculous margins and a ridiculous R&D budget to match (and even then fell behind.)
Recall that their main experience was with the C64, a cheap piece of obsolete junk thrown onto the market with very little developer or hardware support but yet still made them a mint. As systems became more complex, they were still operating the same way.
Plus, others have made the argument that it wasn't possible to siginificantly upgrade the Amiga hardware without breaking all the software. They may have realized this and just decided to let the Amiga wither while they moved into PC clones.
Wasn't their cluster down for 2 months while they waited for Apple/IBM to deliver machines? Oh wait.
The old IBM tried to push these crazy totalizing end-to-end schemes on people and pretty much got smacked down hard.
The new IBM is much more focused on giving enterprise customers What They Want. And What They Want is a commodity OS (Linux/Windows) on commodity hardware (x86). They want CHEAP, and IBM will give it to them.
Other than Nerd Fantasy World, nobody in the enterprise world wants AIX (where they can avoid it), nobody wants a single source desktops ( like Apple) and nobody wants an oddball CPU like the G5 when x86 is faster and more readily available. It probably hurts some of you to hear it, but it's true.