Why Apple Failed in the 90s

An anonymous reader writes "With news of amazing sales figures for both Mac hardware and the iPod, the future for Apple looks bright. But it wasn't always that way. The 90s were a bad time for the company, and Roughlydrafted.com has a look at Apple's failures of the previous decade." From the article: "During the development of Mac OS X, Apple polished the existing classic Mac OS, and salvaged what it could of Copland developments. Apple modernized its existing Mac APIs into Carbon, which would run software in Mac OS 9, and later allow it to run natively in Mac OS X. Despite fixing the obvious flaws in Apple's operating system offering, Mac OS X did not in itself solve Apple's problem. The company now only had an improved platform that nobody had any reason to buy. The real solution to Apple's problem was stumbled onto by a fortunate accident. "

The real solution

The real solution to Apple's problem was stumbled onto by a fortunate accident.

Any bets on what the fortunate accident was?

Re:The real solution

Any bets on what the fortunate accident was?

Exactly what I was thinking... After reading the quote from the article, I read the actual article in its long winded and boring entirety to find out what the answer to the question is (my guess is the iPod), turns out anonymous fuckface quoted the very fucking last paragraph of the article, getting us all curious for nothing...

Thanks a bundle, asshat, I just wasted 5 minutes of my life thanks to you!

Re:The real solution

One day while sending an e-mail, Steve Jobs accidentally hit the "i" key before typing Mac.

Re:The real solution

One day while sending an e-mail, Steve Jobs accidentally hit the "i" key before typing Mac.

OMG, this demonstrates Jobs is a closet vi fanboy !

Re:The real solution

My best guess would be the iMac. With Colored Cases, and it all in one design, the G3 Processor (which at the time had good performance). What it did was offered something that was missing in the market. It made a computer that looked presentable in peoples homes. Before Computers Were limited to bedrooms, the basement or the spare room. the iMac made them cute enough as well smell enough to fit in the kitchen, living room, or different locations. As well its all in one design allowed it to be easily moved from room to room. So it could be in all these rooms, when it was handy. Secondly they were Cute, Which attracted the Female market, before the iMac the Female market Computer (Sexist or not, I have heard from most Woman when they see the iMac they called them cute and wanted one). So it really opened the market.

Re:The real solution

My best guess would be the iMac. With Colored Cases, and it all in one design...

I also think it's the iMac, but why was it an "accident?" Was it because it was initially designed to be Apple's version of Larry Ellison's lamebrain "$500 network computer" idea? I'm not sure if that rumor is true.

For you youngsters, that kook Ellison tried to convince everyone that cheap diskless computers (which couldn't boot without a network connection) would outsell desktop PCs with actual hard disks. Who really needs local storage and applications, anyway?

The iMac looked like it could have been a "network computer." Did the 'i' in iMac stand for "internet" Mac?

The 'i' in "iMac"

The iMac looked like it could have been a "network computer." Did the 'i' in iMac stand for "internet" Mac?

Why yes, yes it did. It was even considered "edgy" because the Internet (capital I) was abbreviated with a lowercase letter!

The degree of the industry's plagiarism of Apple's style decisions can be measured by the fact that prior to the iMac introduction, anything vaguely Internet-related was tagged "e-" (for "electronic) -- e-commerce, e-mail, e-this, e-that. Almost immediately after the iMac exploded on the scene, the e- was quietly dropped and new Internet things were tagged "i" or "i-".

Re:The real solution

the CRT iMac made big the impact though. 1) LCDs were still very expensive and not as common 2) the iMac was relatively cheap for a Mac. it was not the high performance machine, it was great for schoolwork and internet. the things that most people do on their computers.
think of all the translucent colored things that came out following the original CRT iMac. it was "cute" as opposed to beige and ugly. i realize the power of that may be lost on people reading /., but to a lot of people it became a piece of art/decoration as much as a tool to to schoolwork. there is definitely a segment of people that feel that "if i HAVE to own a computer, it might as well look nice".
obviously nice is subjective, but Apple hit it with a lot of people where other companies failed. when the original iMac shipped it was considered a disaster in the making, by techie people, because it lacked a floppy drive. i heard nrrdly fathers argue that exact point to their college bound daughters in computer stores. dropping that dinosaur thinking is what allowed Apple to break out from the 90s slump, while the rest of the industry scrambled to catch up. take that as opinion, but a lot of them came out with "iMac killers". they cared enough to design something specifically to compete with those little gumdrops.

Re:The real solution

Any bets on what the fortunate accident was?

That's just a lame cliffhanger so you go back and click his ads some more.

the fortunate accidents were:

- Steve Jobs coming back
- them hiring Johnathan Ive (iPod, iMac designer)

Them conspiring to make Apple a more branded, more complete experience, and hype it up, using their assets (OSX with a shiny interface, loyal designer crowd following them, the MS/Adobe/Macromedia software packs).

Re:Marketing style over substance?

When you watch Star Trek, you root for the Borg, don't you? Admit it, you admire their efficiency and lack of self-importance.

Since you made some generalizations about me as a Mac owner, I'll make some about you: You think that public art is a "waste of money" and you usually "don't get it". You can't imagine why someone would spend extra money for a prettier car. There should only be two types of cars on the market: Dodge Caravans (for folks with kids) and Honda Civics. You don't understand fashion and wouldn't ever just buy a shirt that you saw because you liked it - you would only buy it if you had some pre-existing need for a shirt. You hate people in business suits, but you also hate people who dress "differently" from societal norms: punks, goths, artists, etc.

That's fine - diversity is what makes humanity so interesting. Some of us like to enjoy our pointless existence for the short time that we're here, and others of us are border-line autistic.

Re:Marketing style over substance?

I still think that you have no soul

Maybe it isn't that he has no soul; maybe he just thinks it is more important to solve little problems like people starving in the streets and not being able to buy their medications before resources are expended on statues of politicians, "Piss Christ", and other random works of publicly supported art. I guess I can't really speak for him, but that is certainly how I feel. Every time I see public art, Christmas decorations, government-participation in parades, I grinch about it. I just can't see the government holding any legitimate position costing even one dollar in any non-critical activity, no matter if it is supposedly for the benefit of the citizens or not, until it has well and truly addressed all of the critical activities that it has been tasked with with regard to its base responsibilities.

I bought my first Mac (a PPC Mini) because a knowledgeable friend took the time to show me that her Mac worked better (a lot better!) than the two OS's I was running at the time: Windows XP and Red Hat linux. I was losing time screwing with things I didn't really have time to screw with just trying to get mundane business tasks accomplished. I'm buying my second Mac (an Intel MacBook) this week to replace my Windows laptop, which finally went nipples north. One reason I'm buying it is because the Mini lived up to the manufacturer's claims both in reliability and in functionality. I am looking forward to the MacBook and I expect to have a similar experience, despite being a pretty cynical person when you get right down to it.

Certainly it has nothing to do with "art." Do I appreciate how pretty the Mac interface is? Sure. But that wasn't a factor in going Mac. I was won over by the smooth integration of multiple languages in applications like OmniOutliner and 100% support for that by the OS; by the complete lack of need to mess with low level Unix issues; by the speed and fluidity and consistency of the interface; by the continual experience of having things "just work" (it may sound hackneyed and fanboyish, but that is the nature of the experience — OSX is as far from running windows as flying a plane on autopilot compares to hand-flying it.) It beats Windows in resistance to malware by orders of magnitude, and it beats Linux by never requiring me to screw with compiling some package or watching Gnome screw up repeatedly, losing my network connections.

There are lots of good reasons to go Mac, I could go on all day about things that I feel have worked out better for me with the Mac, no doubt boring some and annoying the rest. The bottom line hasn't anything to do with art, no matter how long I were to go on. It's simply (or maybe not so simply) a better product, and it won me over based on that. The applications I need are there, and that pretty much closes the case.

And as for your lauding tourism in Philadelphia... If you want to draw tourists, that's a task that it is primarily aimed at benefiting businesses. Therefore, those businesses that will benefit (and not all will) should be paying for it. Not the poor homeowners on the outskirts.

This is very similar to small town sports. The schools (hence, including the kid's parents and the old people in town) spend huge sums of money on everything from custom busses to playing fields. The kids play the same games they could have played in a field of grass, in jeans or shorts. The games begin, the visitors from the next town show up, and the local businesses see an upswing in sales. Those specific businesses ought to be paying for that, not the poor schlep of a homeowner.

These are areas where the government has been co-opted by interests that are not legitimate areas for it to focus, IMHO. Private support is the way to go for both art and sports above the level of casual social interaction or for exercise; and to that you can add parks, monuments, and any state-sponsored museums that might creep in here

they've turned things around since then

Why Apple Failed in the 90s

Because they had no clear corporate direction and their price/performance sucked an ass?

(just a guess)

Re:they've turned things around since then

There were reasons Apple went rotten to the core. I know because I have owned and operated many of their computers throughout the years. I would say the most important reason for my exit from using Apple was the concept they had regards software. I had bought the machines to program them for business applications unique to the industry I was in. The shop was small. We didn't have multi-million dollar budgets.

When we tried to program we ran up against limitations associated with the programming languages available. They were good programming languages but they lacked the adequate documentation for us to make them really effective and useful. We contacted Apple. They bluntly told us that information was proprietary and we should hire Claris Works to write the software. That was it. We were out in the cold. No more Apples for me.

Microsoft started with the IBM PC. The PC had a fortunate spy incident in which IBM OS basics were stolen before the PC came out. This opened up and allowed thousands of programmers entry into the business. It was this farm of people that Microsoft drew from. Apple had no such farm because it herbacided the crop every time they could. They viewed programmers as weeds.

Apple is succeding now with IPod etc largely because many many people can play. If they wanted to take out Microsoft, it would be easy. All they have to do is take their basic superiority in graphics and etc and lock the doors open to developers. It will be a short time indeed before MS is on the ropes.

Apple didn't fail...

...it lost direction. Had it continued on that path then yes, the company would have failed.

The comuting landscame might well have been different in Apple had made better decisions in the past, but that's life and mistakes are made

As I type this on my MacBook Pro though I can say for sure that Apple isn't going anywhere soon (I say that becasue this is the first Mac I've owned that has given me no reason to move back to Windows

Mac OS Classic and price

Apples failed in the 90s because Mac OS "Classic" was a polished turd and the cost of Apples was expensive compared to PCs. It's no wonder Apple almost sunk without a trace.

With OS X and hardware which is merely moderately expensive, they might stand a better chance, but it's hard to see how they'll ever really compete with MS Windows. I guess from Apple's perspective, even if their share rises from 2% to 4%, that is still a 100% increase for them even if it's still insignificant to to a market from a whole.

Profits

hard to see how they'll ever really compete with MS Windows. I guess from Apple's perspective, even if their share rises from 2% to 4%,

One CEO once said "US Steel is not in the business of making steel. We're in the business of making profits."

Mac's market share is not the most important number. Mac's profitability is much more important.

GM's got huge market share but is losing money. You don't see people saying "BMW will never really compete with GM."

Just because MS' self-imposed measure of success is dominating every market with 90% share doesn't mean that this is the only metric of success.

Re:Mac OS Classic and price

ven if their share rises from 2% to 4%,

Their share has moved from 2% to 6% already gartner [gartner.com] You'll need a new line now.

Re:Mac OS Classic and price

Their share has moved from 2% to 6% already gartner You'll need a new line now.

More importantly, their share of laptop sales [macobserver.com] is 12%, and growing rapidly.

It will be 18% in 3 months timen (Based on surveys of planned purchases within 3 months, which are alot less likely to change than the 1+ year buyer self assessments of 37%, many of which will actually not buy an apple computer).

They are rapidly moving to becoming a, if not the, serious choice for the home user. (Lots of those PC sales are to big corporations, for desktops - and Apple is going to struggle to sell corporations that they need iMovie, iTunes or iPhoto, no matter how good they are as apps).

Combine visible laptops with visible iPods, and alot of consumers are going to be viewing an apple computer as a normal purchase, rather than something obscure and unusual. In fact, if you haven't seen lots of apple laptops around the place, you probably aren't looking around much in the last year or so.

Anyway, my 2c worth, and its an easy bet because I'm not really saying anything other than extrapolating current market growth.

Michael

Re:Mac OS Classic and price

Sadly, that's US market share. Their worldwide market share barely moved. Which I can understand, cost isn't as important here, go to India or China, cost is everything. Even with the reputed higher maintenance effort needed for Windows systems, labor is definitely cheap enough to cover that.

I would agree with this (I haven't seen figures for Australia but I'm sure its similar to the US - you see those glowing apple logo's everwhere there are laptops now). In the emerging markets, cost is everything. Of course, Linux is cheap, and is a real threat to Microsoft there where people actually look at the true cost. (Thus the very stripped down cheap version of windows for the asian markets).

That software isn't a problem. That software can be removed. What might be considered a problem is a webcam in every computer. Some companies don't like that.

There is also application availability, many corporations need some obscure or custom app that's not available on OS X, and the cost of Parallels and the maintenance hassle of supporting something like that might not be worth it, that sort of arrangement would more than offset the ease of OS X maintenance.

I wouldn't argue with your analysis. There are lots of reasons why corporations may not be that interested in an apple computer, even if it is equal cost wise. Of course, when you consider the camera a negative, ignore the apps and have to add in a WinXP licence to each apple laptop, its not surprising that you see business passing over apple computers.

Likewise Apple hasn't put nearly the effort into enterprise that Microsoft has. Which is not to say that they have done nothing, but really apple is just starting to turn its attention there, and probably not that seriously yet.

What they have done so very well is aim for the home user. All those apps that many companies would delete (iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, etc) are the very reason that people buy a Mac. I know people who bought an apple simply to use the video editing alone (home use, not professional).

There is an obvious connection with the iPod here - very few corporate buyers, pretty good sales.

That is not to say that apple couldn't or shouldn't compete in the corporate world. But if they had chosen to do this directly, they would have gone against the M$ juggernaut, and lost badly.

The flip side is that M$ is producing an operating system that is primarily designed to be sold to enterprise. The home user sales flowed on from this because people didn't see a better alternative. And M$ wasn't that interested in producing it. The burden of antivirus software, for example, is alot lower in the enterprise when you have a team of IT people who manage all the machines anyway. They are going to enforce corporate policy, restrict individual users, and so on. In this fashion you can make a windows machine relatively secure. Few home users can do this properly for themeslves. Few ever will.

Look at where Apple is pusing things. Take automated data backup - aka - "Time Machine" in the lepoard release of OS X (10.5). This is something that home users should do, and that M$ have never bothered to do properly. Does this matter in the enterprise? Does anyone see corporations supplying individual users with a USB HDD and telling them to do daily backups?

So to expand on my original statement. The future for Apple is the home user market. There was a time when only a company would fork out the money (>$4000) to buy one of those expensive compter things. Back then the company that made an OS for that purpose was always going to win the day. Lots fought for this title. Microsoft won.

Today, that market still exists, and is huge. Its also commodity hell for the manufacturers. Today a $1000+ system starts to look expensive to the enterprise, but lots of home users will spend that sort of money, or more, on a variety of consumer electronics. This is a whole new market, but nobody really noticed its potential until a couple o

Re:Mac OS Classic and price

It would be my assertion that people would rather buy polished turds than unpolished ones, and would in fact pay a premium. The reality is that in the 90's, just like now, the Mac worked. It worked without EMM hell, without printer hell, and without driver hell. You could hook up a external mass storage drive without hacking the BIOS. You could, and still can, hook up a keyboard to any available port that the cord will fit in, and the keyboard will work.

What the article, and most analysis, misses, is the profound change in the market. A firm should have a plan to compete with other firms, and should try to anticipate future market trends, but cannot predict, and in fact should not build, massive unpredictable trends into the business. So, when the Lisa was in development, the competition was mostly the IBM PC, which was very expensive. Compaq came in around 82, and shifted the market. However, the compaq was still a very expensive machine, but cheaper than and IBM PC. The Mac was created to compete with the new reality.

To give some perspective on the time, let's look at a third player: ATT. ATT created a wonderful not unreasonable priced PC. It had the advantage of running Unix, the only really workable OS we had at the time. I used one. It was great. It failed because it did not anticipate the market as well as Apple, and becuase it did not have as polished a GUI as Apple.

So we are talking hardware here. What about the OS. Well, for most the OS did not matter. People bought computers to run an application or two. The Apple had Excel, just like the Apple had Visicalc. This was one of three things that caused great trouble for Apple. First, when MS Hacked together MS Windows, there was a cheap alternative to Apple. Second, when MS ported Office to MS Windows, the cheap alternative to Apple. Third, the price of the PC went into a sharp decline, and though Apple was still competitive with name brand PCs, the were no longer competitive with the off brand boxes. As a result, significant vertical market began to appear for the PC, often ported from Unix, and the PC became a single vendor solution, despite the fact the major MS FUD was don't buy Apple because it was a single vendor solution.

So how did the Computer industry respond to this. Well, Compaq began using commodity parts, but because it had to rely on MS for the OS, and because it was a serious company with serious research, it is now gone. The ATT machine was never able to compete, even when prices were high. The general quality of the whole industry declined, and we found ourselves in a situation where nothing worked. Except for the Apple which was an expensive machine.

This was until MS Windows 95 when most of the MS hacks were fixed. You could hook up a printer without selling your sole. You still have to do color coded keyboard and mouse. But after 10 years, the PC genuinely worked, and the shift to MS dominance was complete. As all articles state, the fact that the Mac had no serious OS through most of the 90's was also a major factor.

But I would like to state that all the major pricing changed occurred on the hardware side. MS never matched the changes in the price of the OS. This is the problem of the monopoly. Apple has competed hard in quality and price. Intel has competed hard in quality and price. This has given us the wonderful machines we have, and the wonderful OS to run them. OTOH, MS just gathers money, and only occasionally competes. The most annoying thing of all this is that for the most part, outside of few applications, MS Windows does not work well. The major improvements they have made in on the developer side, which is admittedly a good thing to do. But simple things, like account encryption, which would make everyone life easy, is still at least months away.

And there is still a major problem with the myth of the cheap PC. In almost every establishment, there has been a profound lack of support, which results in the PC not being used effeciently.

Re:Mac OS Classic and price

"You could hook up a external mass storage drive without hacking the BIOS."

So could the PC. That one makes no sense. No doubt macs were easier to set up. There were closed systems after all.

"The general quality of the whole industry declined, and we found ourselves in a situation where nothing worked. Except for the Apple which was an expensive machine."

That's complete bullshit. PC compatibility was spotty in the early years but it steadily improved. There was no idustry-wide decline in quality as you say. Exactly the opposite.

"You still have to do color coded keyboard and mouse."

You seem a little fixated on this as though it matters. If this were an actual problem then the PC world would have switched to USB by now. They haven't because it doesn't in spite of the fact that the PC industry developed the solution.

"This is the problem of the monopoly."

Microsoft didn't have a monopoly at this time. It competed with OS/2 for the desktop and many alternatives on the server side. Pricing for Windows at the time was modest compared to the hardware costs.

"MS just gathers money, and only occasionally competes."

So this explanation of Apple's failure is degenerating into a rag on Microsoft? What a surprise.

"In almost every establishment, there has been a profound lack of support, which results in the PC not being used effeciently."

That's also bullshit. There are reasons why PCs are in business and Macs aren't. One is multiple source, Another is the availability of business apps and compatability. Another is support. Vendors don't get into large accounts without being able to provide support. That's where IBM made its money, and vendors learned to compete by offering similar levels of support. There's a reason Dell is dominant and Gateway isn't. Dell learned how to sell to big business.

"And, with XP, with the admin lockout, the deficiency in support is even more evident..."

You're going crazy here.

"And these machines are not cheap. If support personnel was adequate, we would be looking at an additional $100 per years per machine, and that is just at the local level."

Sounds like your company doesn't know how to support its employees. The myth is that somehow that would be different with Apple. None of that matters because it isn't central to Apple's decline.

The fact is that PCs were an open documented standard that fostered a clone business that operated effectively under the umbrella of IBM's (and later Compaq's) high margins. The multiple source nature of the platform encouraged adoption as well as hardware and software development by 3rd parties. PCs ran multiple operating systems, came in all shapes and sizes, and could be used for a variety of applications. Meanwhile, Apple chose to keep their platform closed until their market share slipped away from them, and once they opened it they found themselves getting beaten by their clones because they didn't have the market position that IBM had when they were in a similar situation. Of course, IBM was eventually forced out of the market as well.

Microsoft was a ferocious and merciless competitor, but by the time they established Windows as a monopoly Apple's dominance was long gone. It was the ubiquity of the PC that did Apple in, not Microsoft. Large accounts are what made the PC and Apple was foolishly never a player there. Arguably they could not be since they weren't established in business like IBM and they were the sole champion of their platform, unlike the hundreds selling the PC.

Re:Mac OS Classic and price

'' Geez, the whole Apple is more expensive still perpetuates even though it is not as true as it once was. By using the same basic components, there is now more of a direct comparisons between PCs and Macs, yet people automatically dismiss Macs as more expensive without really comparing the machines. You can get a Dell desktop for under $400 which is $200 less than the cheapest Mac. Remember though that Dell is selling you a cheaper computer because it does not have as many features. Instead of a Core 2, you'll get a Celeron D. Instead of XP Pro, you get XP Home. There is no wireless Bluetooth option. You don't get a remote. You don't get any software like iLife or FrontRow, etc. It's like complaining that a Toyota Camry is more expensive than a Toyota Corolla. ''

A few months ago I had to help someone on an extremely limited budget to buy a computer. Sadly the budget was too limited for any new Macintosh, and used Macs are horrendously expensive. So I visited about half a dozen computer stores to get the absolute best value for money. (Interestingly, the local supermarket turned out the best value). There are quite a few machines out there that are cheaper than any Macintosh - they are not as nice as a Mac, but they are cheaper, so you get what you pay for. However, if you start looking at the more expensive PCs, like £800 to £1000, and compare to an iMac at the same price, then suddenly the iMacs are extremely good value.

This article does shed some light on why apple is

reticent to license OS X to other PC vendors or sell it to run on beige boxes now that it is Intel. They tried something along those lines with the clones, and as the article states it was a complete disaster. Ultimately besides a few loud people, most of the people who would buy OS X for generic PCs are the ones who would buy a mac anyhow, so Apple loses profit while barely increasing market share. Not a good tradeoff from the corporate perspective I would think.

The article is not complete

"The company now only had an improved platform that nobody had any reason to buy. The real solution to Apple's problem was stumbled onto by a fortunate accident." ... and this is where it ends, to be complete later. What a waste of time.

Simple answer

No Steve Jobs.

Performa line

The performa line from the mid 90s was probably their worste move. I know a number of mac fans that went out and purchased one of these machines not knowing how gimped they really were. Tons of the "good" mac software couldn't run on those machines as they had much lower quality components. The bigest problem was that they had no math co-processor.

Virtually none of the documentation for these systems mentioned that they were less than a real mac, so most of the people that purchased them just ended up thinking that the whole platform was a joke.

This is when I went from a strictly mac guy to a *nix fan, eventually being forced to move to the PC. I must say OSX has got me saving my pennies to get back into the mac world.

Can anyone say iPod?

I personally loved the Mac's back in the 90's. I built a very successful commercial retouching business where our primary software/hardware was Photoshop on OS9 Mac's. OS9 performed well as you could lock down memory and dedicate it to Photoshop (no OS swapping). This is something that is sorely missing from OS/X and Windows.

Yes, there were/are WIN32 calls to ask Windows to not swap, however, there is really no guarantee. (Maybe there is now?) Photoshop has a more efficient swapping mechanism based on image tiles rather than the OS with small pages.

For the general business or home computer user, I agree, the 90's Dell's years. Apple fell short of expectations.

I think Apple's success with the iPod and iTunes really boosted their overall marketing effort. Had it not been for those products, we probably would not be having this discussion.

-G

Article ends before the conclusion, sheesh

The article does not in fact give the answer! Presumably it will be unveiled in the sequel ("Coming up next...") advertised at the end of the page.

They mention the analysts were wrong that Apple needed more Apple market not more PC market, and that some execution (Performa) was done badly. That at least is true, and why Mom had to use a PC for a while until she got back to Macs.

Of course I was a Mac person in the 90s even though Apple had screwed me a number of times. Now Macs are better but PCs (with XP) are better too. If they can come out with Leopard this year instead of next year they will do much better at Christmastime I bet.

The goggles, they do nothing.

I didn't even bother reading TFA, as that website hardly comes close to displaying correctly in firefox. Out of curiosity, am I alone here?

I abandoned ship...

when it was clear Apple was going to take forever to deliver a next-generation OS.

Copland gave me hope, but then they scrapped it. At that point I was a little disappointed, but was in no big hurry to switch.

By the time Rhapsody was in the works, it was really time that Apple got a new OS. The poor multitaking and bad memory management were a pain to deal with, and I was exited that maybe there was hope. I installed a beta version of it and was quite impressed (even though there weren't many apps available).

But then (in 1998) it, too was scraped (or transformed into OS X), and it was clear it was going to be quite a while before X came out. At that point I jumped ship over to Slackware Linux, which fulfilled pretty much all of my expectations.

I patiently waited until recently, when I picked up a MBP and am again enjoying the Apple experience.

Apple didn't fail.

At the beginning of the 1990s, there was an Apple Computer. At the end of the 1990s, there was still an Apple Computer. Count it as a success, considering all the companies that did not make it.

Re:Apple didn't fail.

"...Apple was dyeing..."

And that's what saved it, it dyed all those iMacs all those different colors.

Speaking of different, with regard to your sig...

Show your support for free speech by moding down people who believe differently then you. Hypocrite Hippies!

...That should be different than, except that it shouldn't be, because when things (including people) differ, they differ from one another.

cloning

Something to mention about why the clones failed--Apple paid for all of the R&D costs while the clone-makers were the ones benefitting. In the x86/Windows world, R&D costs are generally spread out amongst the chip and board manufacturers. With Apple in the mid-90s, almost all of the R&D costs were squarely shouldered by Apple. The clones all used the reference board designs, even down to the add-in HPV video cards used in the 1st gen PPC machines. Now that they've moved to the x86 architecture, a lot of the costs are spread back out to other manufacturers. This time around, cloning might be possible, although they'd lose a bit of money from their very respectable hardware margins.

Apple didn't fail, they are still here...

There have been many companies that have failed during the 90-ties... the greatest loss propably beeing Digital.
  Apple did survive and they are now in a better position than they've been in the last 10 years... and it really doesn't matter if it is caused by a mp3 player or by the move to Unix.

--

Tru64, propably the best UNIX in the world... too bad some jerks killed it.

Commodity Hardware

The 90s and early 00s were a time of commodity hardware. In these new days of proprietary form factors and integrated sound/video/everything people have resigned themselves to the fact that they will not be upgrading specific hardware components during the life of their machine and are getting a Mac.

It wasn't just Apple

It wasn't just Apple. Nearly all of the integrated PC manufacturers, meaning those who developed integrated systems, from the hardware (in some cases including the CPU) through to the OS, either collapsed or nearly collapsed in the 90s. The reasons, of course, were first that Intel continued to increase the price/performance of its x86 architecture, leaving most RISC systems offering either worse performance, or only marginally better performance (at much higher prices), and second that Microsoft continued to improve Windows 3.x, in particular taking advantage of the revolutionary (for x86) improvements provided by the i386. Microsoft also released Windows NT, an OS architecturally comparable to Unix, but with a much lower price (than commercial Unix systems).

One notable exception to the shakeout of the early 90s was Sun Microsystems, largely because of its OS, but when Linux eventually caught on, Sun started to implode too.

On the whole, I think Apple supporters are far too harsh in their criticism of Sculley. In most ways, the original Mac was no match for its competitors, not only the Intel/Microsoft PC, but also other 68k-based competitors like the Amiga. The first Mac that really did outshine the competition was the Mac II in 1987. It was expensive, but unlike the original Mac, it offered state-of-the-art hardware. The core OS was still rather poor, but the GUI was amongst the better ones in the market.

Sculley's big mistake was joining forces with IBM and Motorola in the PowerPC debacle, but almost everyone at the time (apart from Intel) thought Risc was the future, and that the x86 would die, so it's hard to criticise him for that. If Apple had gone with x86, it could have continued to offer premium PCs (much as it did in the late 80s, and dies today), and channelled all of the money wasted on the PowerPC into developing a modern OS, as Microsoft had done with NT.

Apple's real problems came under Spindler, who tried to turn Apple into a producer of low-cost, high-volume systems (something Steve Jobs supposedly wanted to do with the original Mac as well), which is a business model that can't sustain the high R&D costs associated with developing a custom OS (and hardware, although Apple has gradually moved out of that market in most respects). All that happened was that Apple was reduced to offering inferior hardware at higher prices than competitors. With the switch to x86, Apple has finally caught up with Intel PCs (Macs are basically Intel PCs with stylish enclosures and a trendy OS), but is unlikely to ever be able to offer superior hardware again, as it did in the late 80s. That's simply the reality of a market where specialisation has made it impracticable to build integrated systems.

Definition of PC

"They couldn't run DOS or Windows, which was the definition of PC ever since IBM applied the letters to its first home computer."

This is where I stopped reading, and knew that the author was talking out of his ass. There was never a hard and fast (and agreed upon) definition of a PC, with the sole exception of what that first letter means: Personal.

The notion that a PC wasn't a PC unless it ran MS-DOS is ludicrous to say the least. PC was an attempt at a brand name rather than a generic description, but that isn't how it actually worked. The term PC instantly came to describe a class of computer that could be purchased by individual consumers. I had personal computers from Radio Shack (CoCo 2 and 3) which didn't run MS-DOS long before I had a personal computer from an IBM compatible reseller.

Several years ago, I booted up my old CoCo 3 and found that the BASIC ROM had a Microsoft copyright. So it's easy to argue that RS-DOS (Radio Shack DOS) was really MS-DOS in disguise. The RS-DOS BASIC syntax was remarkably similar to GW-BASIC. But I hardly ever ran from RS-DOS after getting Microware's OS/9. If you want to see just how pathetic MSDOS+IBM were for the time, fire up an IBM clone running MS-DOS and the CoCo 3 running OS/9 Level 2. The latter cleanly blow the doors (and Windows) off the former.

no neighborhood culture

It's always been much harder to be your own local apple store as opposed to being a local whitebox PC store. Apple had some rather hefty fees associated with retailing new products and aftermarket was dismal as well. For a long time they didn't even offer one penny discount to retailers, nada, although requiring a 50 grand bond/weird sales license deal IIRC and imposing severe restrictions on the sales, etc. The scrambling local vendor who jumped through that expensive hoops then got the privelege of paying full retail for his units and add ons (few anyway) from Apple, then had to try and make it with Apple inc undercutting their price via their online or at the end of the telephone store! Yes, it could and has beeen done to be a local neighborhood mac store, but it was and is still very difficult and expensive and mostly doesn't exist. They failed to take advantage of the local neighborhhod aspect.

    It's hard to buy an apple when you can't even see one any place for sale near you. This is 2006, I can go to various cities near me that have computer stores large and small, from big department stores that offer computers *blahmart, etc, and then like office depot, etc, to the smallest whitebox shop, maybe going on two dozen stores now locally to me in three different cities in a 20 mile diameter, and not a single mac for sale. It's unobtainium, and people aren't going to go out of their way to try and track it down and drop serious cash when they have right at their fingertips a huge variety of shapes sizes colors and functions and prices of computers they can just grab and go home. I can go out right now and get a used "$99 full bundle-internet ready!" package locally to me (which isn't all that bad a deal either usually there is so much good enough used stuff on the market), all the way to some high end stuff or custom built to order-but no macs, none.

Aplle: the biggest failure ever!

Slashdot apple summary:
If not for their hardware Apple would have failed in the past, is failing now and will be failing in the future. Their products were almost killed, are being killed and certainly will be killed unless they stop making hardware now and WHAT IF NONE CARED???

THERE IS A DEEPER REASON APPLE SURVIVES

This, from a novel written in the late Nineties - about the real reason Apple and the Mac exists.

MARY R147 [rogerborn.com]

GO HERE if that link is overwhelmed [mymac.com]

People do not expect this kind of thing, but it very well may be true on a completely different level, which exists beyond the thinking of most everyone else.

Is there any validity to this? If it is true, it changes everything, because it means that the current success of the Mac, iPod and OS X comes from a very unexpected place. You would almost have to watch HEROES to get a clue about where it comes from.

I know you may think this borders lunatic fringe territory, but you owe it to yourself to at least consider it.

~ 'Ro'ger 'Bor'n '' '''' '
"Glad to have gotten this off my chest. Your mileage may vary."

Article /.'d

From the article;

"Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.roughlydrafted.com Port 80" ...anyone have a copy/summary?

So what?

Okay. Same story, my vision:

At some point in the eighties, Steve Jobs told the rest of Apple "Okay, so we're gonna build really nice computers, shaped as cubes, running a *BSD, and charge a metric assload of $ for them."
Anwser : "You're fired."

Steve goes a little away and sets up a company to do just that... ... and ends up with an underpowered (for what only its OS was needing) machine, but a Real Nice one, for "only" $5000 (or was it $7000? With its printer, maybe. Can't remember off the top of my head.) It was a cube running a really nice Unix...
He never could sell enough of them to turn any sort of profit whatsoever, even when he finally equipped them with enough RAM to do something useful, though. He tried to make a pizza-box version, too, which was better (and nicer looking IMO).

While that company was going from Good Idea to Bankruptcy(sp?), Apple was following, what with that crazy idea for a hardware vendor to let other make *cheaper* clones... the idea not to cut their prices as a logical consequence was not a good one either...

Then with NeXt almost dead and Apple not far away from their Final Doom either, they call Steve back to save them. Then he says "And NOW we're gonna do what I'm saying and get it RIGHT this time", and goes on "and we're gonna make those cubes running BSD, and..." ... we all know the rest : iMacs, iPod+iTunes, and now i686mac.

Yes, but...

Does TFA use the word 'beleaguered'? (/.'ed already, so can't check) No Apple-is/was-in-trouble article can be taken seriously without it.

How did this get on Slashdot?

As someone who has been an Apple developer since 1989, the assertions made in this article are ludicrous at best. They show signs of someone that has perhaps read about the company's history, but not been involved with them in any significant way (nor was it researched with any depth).

That this meaningless trash makes it onto Slashdot and Digg simply amazes me.

I think i figured it out...

...Jobs wasn't there. next question?

Unreadable

That is far and above the ugliest and most unreadable "news" site I have ever seen. I wrecked three keyboards typing that last sentence alone because I keep bleeding from my eyes onto my keys.

A revisionist view

The move to PowerPC was Apple's big mistake. That was the point at which Apple market share dropped, and it never came back. Even today, Apple has much lower market share than it did the day the PowerPC machines were announced. The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.

In fact, when the PowerPC 601 came out, Motorola was shipping the 68060 [wikipedia.org], which outperformed the early PowerPC chips. The 68000 line could have been developed further; there was nothing in the architecture that limited it. But when Apple dropped it, that was the end of the demand for high-end 68000 parts.

The PowerPC transition killed many existing apps. The engineering community dumped the Mac at the PowerPC transition; existing CAD applications like AutoCAD were not ported to PowerPC, and most of the printed circuit board design applications were dropped at that point, too. So Apple lost a whole market segment, and one willing to pay for big screens and good graphics.

Copeland was actually a good operating system. The problem was that applications had to be revised for it, and Microsoft didn't want to bother. Apple no longer had the clout with developers it had had back at the System 7 transition, where all apps had to be revised. But Apple hadn't realized internally that it could no longer order developers around; the developers had the option of going to Windows. So backwards compatibility had become more important.

Copeland (the original "MacOS 8") actually shipped to some developers. It was almost ready to go. Acquiring NeXT delayed the release of a new OS by several years; it took much longer to get NeXT code onto the Apple platform than Jobs said it would. But it saved Jobs' ass financially; he was heavily invested in NeXT, which was headed for bankruptcy.

As for design, one of the coolest Macs ever was the 20th Anniversary Mac [apple-history.com], the first Mac with an LCD panel. In 1997, way ahead of everyone else. That was before Jobs took over and "Steved" the product, because it wasn't his.

The iMac clamshell looked like the Lear-Seigler ADM 3A [franken.de] from 1977, which was a very popular low-end terminal in its day. It wasn't an original concept.

Jobs' big contribution was to suck up to Gates and thus keep Microsoft Office on the Mac That's what saved Apple.

So that's what it looks like with the Reality Distortion Field turned off.

Re:A revisionist view

The argument for going with the PowerPC was that IBM was going to make Macs. Yes, that was the whole point of the deal. Didn't happen, but that was Apple's big plan. And that bad move happened under Jobs.

Wrong. The first PowerPC-based Macs were released on March 14, 1994, during Michael Spindler's tenure as Apple CEO. The alliance to create the PowerPC was formed before that, during John Sculley's tenure. Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with Apple switching to the PPC architecture. Apple announced their intention to purchase NeXT on December 20, 1996 and finalized the deal on February 4, 1997. During that timeframe is when Jobs and his influence returned.

But hey, don't let little things like easily-verifiable facts get in the way of you spouting your drivel.

~Philly

What is Going On Here?

Apple is making insanely great products again, all systems are go, and their have a hammerlock on an emerging market. So while we don't need cheerleader articles, why is so hard for these people to accept that Apple is successful and it's not going to go out of business anyday now? When Vista hits the stores (and let's face it, it will probably sell extremely well) are we going to see a myriad of articles on the complete disater that was Windows Millennium, or, Hey, what about a pathetic thing called Bob? I don't $@#king think so.

The accident: enter stage R

Bill Gates $150M and committment to Office on the Mac.

Microsoft needed Apple not to fail because 5% marketshare was all the evidence Bill Gates needed as proof that Windows was not a monopoly. For $150M, Bill got the room he needed to breathe out from under Anti-Trust and seeded further MS product, even if he lost a window sale or two. It was his cost of staying in business, without the US Gov't breaking Microsoft into separate operating units.

Steve Jobs got serious credibility on the Street, with businesses really nervous about being stuck with Mac's going out of business. Bill G. stopped all that bleed, angst and hesitation in the sales pipeline for Apple Computer Inc.

AUX worked...

During the early '90's, when OS 7 and OS 8 were crashing every 15 minutes, I had a couple of customers with 500+ Mac II's and III's that almost never crashed; they were running AUX. AUX was UNIX, and it still ran the Mac OS on top. At that time, a Mac III with a Radius monitor was the fastest AutoCAD system around.

IMO, the article (incomplete as it is) is right on about the weaknesses in Apple's strategy to gain market share. IMO, if they had contiued to expand in the UNIX area and done a better job of marketing AUX, they wouldn't have had to re-develop the idea for OSX. The Microsoft platform, with it's huge base of applications, is a great example of Kevin Kelly's proposition that "Value flows from Abundance" (Kevin Kelly, "New Rules for the New Economy", 1998). In short, Kelly claims that in the networked world, the more people you have using your product, the more valuable it becomes. His first examples are the telephone and fax machine: Both devices were in short demand until enough people had them so that owning one was a convenience rather than a curiosity. IMO, if Apple had done with AUX what they've done with OSX, the sheer utility of owning an Apple computer would have been enough to avoid some of the problms they had in the '90's.

Large business relationships

I have looked over, what was posted and couldn't make out if someone seen, few glossed over the idea, and I would like to emphasize it.
Apple does not have capacity to maintain large clients. They are big on promises, small on delivery. They key word here, is company to company relationships. Now you can order a swath of Dell PC's and most likely you'll get preferrential treatment from them. No so with apple. They make a point of that as well. Most recently they had gall to come to university here and sell computers, telling how wonderful their OS is. Well it is. What university students stand to gain from learning Carbon and Cocoa. Pretty much nothing. Most UI design jobs are nowadays with .NET and derivatives. (look at your favorite job board). So fine, their platform is superrior(i have a powerbook). However my professor and some other businesses had terrible dealings with apple, on business level. Professor worked at other university where apple had installed 2 large classrooms with early power pc computers and promptly proceeded to ignore the customers that suppose to become future developers and/or businessmen/leaders at large corporations, that possibly will order superrior apple hardware. Not so. No extra support beyond repairing hardware under warranty terms and having sales people calling about "more hardware", at a standard educational 15% discount.

So, it is small they like, iPod is selling at least for a while. But that would take you only so far. When you fall on hard times, you fall onto your relationship net that you had built up over number of years.

So during their presentation at the university, they have ignored questions about the relationship and his experience at previous university, only ignored the questions and continued their sales pitch. Needless to say, there are no orders of powerbooks, iMacs or MacPros.
The feeling you get is that they eager to extract money from you and run. Questions like, "will there be deeper discounts if we fully commit to apple platform?" , was no, just standard discount. Write us a check please. I don't know much about business, but unless they alter the way they handle business clients, in the end apple will end up in the same ditch.

The real solution was SELL DIRECT.

It wasn't the fancy colored iMacs, the iPod, OS X or any great products that Apple made. It was understanding that their failure was that M$ was locking them out of the market. The SOLUTION was to sell great products direct to the public. That's it. Period.

Re:The real solution was SELL DIRECT.

I don't know if it was so much the selling direct as it was simply having a place where display-model Macs were prominently displayed and well taken-care of, with staff who could answer questions about them correctly-- as opposed to dirty, broken/sabotaged, disparaged by the sales staff, and shoved in the farthest corner of the store from the entrance (CompUSA, I'm looking at you!-- even after the 'store within a store' deal you made with Apple).

~Philly

Unfortunate accident huh . . .

I thought Apple came back because of MS's ati-trust suit, which ended up with MS investing in Apple to spur "competition". They did make nice PCs and make a nice MP3 player and advertise the hell out of it.
But that was after they were "back"

Re:I must be blind...

Me too!

The wikipedia page is more informative than this article...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer [wikipedia.org]

Which after reading it, provides better insight than the article....

Re:I must be blind...

Oh no! I'm shocked! Nobody every mentioned that ever in all the years Slashdot exists in any article.
Do the admins know? Somebody should tell them!

You are blind

Because it is not really a technology news site, it started as a blog (before the word was coined), and developed into a community site. There are plenty of technology news sites that pretend to be objective. They are boring. Why should /. immitate them, when it has been pretty successful doing what it does?

Re:I must be blind...

People who hate Microsoft founded the site, and still control it.

I would say that a very high percentage of people who love computers, as opposed to simply making a living off them, hate Microsoft.

For many of us, Microsoft's invasion of pretty much everything we held dear made computing a gray, unlovable world whose primary feature was continuous crashes.

Windows 2000 came close to fixing the crashes, and Windows XP was less gray and grim than previous versions. Just as Microsoft started to look almost tolerable, an explosion of malware came, creating waves of horrible problems that required you to become a security expert just to run a PC.

At the same time, open source software, whether free as in liberty or beer, gave us new hope for an alternative that wasn't priced out of the market by the soulless commodity PC. It co-opted the commodity pricing but added an interface we're familiar with and like.

At the same time, it was still a commodity PC, a product that was slapped together by the cheaper-is-better brigade. It's great to save money, not so great to be saddled with hardware that scrapes our knuckles every time we added RAM.

So Apple came on the scene. Want a system that works at base like Linux, but has style and flair and beautiful fonts? Want something more modern than that awful X-Windows, that wasn't even that great when it was founded 30 years ago? Want some cool ways to get reative with photos, music and video?

Well, then, Apple's stuff was made for you.

Apple has created an interesting split among us. Those of us who like using our computers instead of tinkering with them, and who have some disposable income, love Apple. Those who think the principle of open source is better than having things work out of the box, or who don't have the extra bucks, love Linux. Sometimes we'll have fights, sometimes bitter ones, but in the end we're really cut out of the same cloth.

(Have you ever noticed the bitterest fights often come from people who are almost the same? But that's a question for another day.)

I hope that has explained something of the reason for Microsoft hatred, and why Slashdot covers the stories it does, the way it does.

D

Re:I must be blind...

(Sorry, have to respond anonymously since I moded you insightful; just a couple comments):

Want something more modern than that awful X-Windows, that wasn't even that great when it was founded 30 years ago?

Apart from the fact that X11 is not quite 30 years old (From the appropriate Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]: X originated at MIT in 1984. The current protocol version, X11, appeared in September 1987., I think this comment is slightly unfair. Even if XWindows is clumsy in some aspects and can be a hog on a network, you really need to consider the context. It isn't an architecture, which is totally owned and controlled by a single manufacturer. It needed to serve a diverse variety of platforms, which weren't owned and controlled by a single vendor. And I'd wager that it does that pretty well.

Those of us who like using our computers instead of tinkering with them, and who have some disposable income, love Apple.

For those that love a rock solid foundation, without spending 6 month to get everything right on a laptop (and yes, I know the pain) there's Ubuntu [ubuntu.com]. Granted, the Gnome interface isn't quite as slick as OSX on my sweeties Powerbook (which you have to claw from her cold, dead fingers; if you ever want to supply her with a different computer), but in essence it does exactly what you expect: It is an OS, which essentially just bloody works. Sure, you may have to apt-get an ATI package, to get the screen to resolve appropriately and it's probably not your first choice if you don't know and don't want to know anything about operating systems. Else then that and in terms of usabilty (save for the really slick design of the OSX UI) it does exactly that.

Re:I must be blind...

I sort of speak from a mid-90s perspective here, when I was using SGI computers because I just couldn't take how ugly X-Windows on Linux looked. SGI's sense of aesthetics was class-leading until Steve Jobs unveiled MacOS X. No matter what else you may say about Steve, his mastery of computing aesthetics has been absolutely unsurpassed in our largely beauty-deprived industry.

The mid-90s were where I founded a lot of my deepest views about computing, and this is an intersting problem for Microsoft. I would never buy an American car beause I hate the way US automakers made inferior junk in the 70s, and don't trust them. I can say the same thing about Microsoft; however much their OS may have improved, I still remember how horrible it was back then, and fear that if I use it it will once again leave me bitterly disappointed as it has in the past. (Even the machine I use to test my work on Windows makes me think this is still all too true).

I have a comparable problem with Linux; I love my MacOS X products, they serve me exceptionally well, so there is little point in trying something new, especially if it's still at least somewhat inferior. (Having to apt-get display drivers is a bit of a clue that this is still the case.)

In the 90s, where SGI was too expensive, Windows too crashy and Linux too raw, I was ready for something new. That opening seems to have pretty much closed for me today since I'm so happy with where I am, and - amazingly enough! - my chosen side has even been gaining considerable market momentum..

D

Re:I must be blind...

I sort of speak from a mid-90s perspective here, when I was using SGI computers because I just couldn't take how ugly X-Windows on Linux looked.

You weren't using X, you were most likely using CDE, which I also consider to be ugly.

No, he wasn't. He was using IRIX's proprietary desktop, which had nothing to do with CDE. The IRIX desktop was lightyears ahead of anything else coming out of the *nix camp at the time. Nice object-oriented file manager, excellent support for audio, video and 3D graphics and even its own widget toolkit. [toastytech.com]

And to say that you weren't using X, you were using CDE, is as silly as saying that you aren't using X, you're using GNOME.

Re:I must be blind...

There is much more to a nice interface than eye candy. Aqua is more about usability than it is about eye candy. All of the features of OS X, from the dialog sheets for opening and saving files, to Expose, to fast user switching, to Spaces and Time Machine in the Leopard demo, have a wonderful way of integrating eye candy with usability to create the ultimate user interface.

I was a longtime KDE user on FreeBSD before buying a Mac a few months ago. KDE is a very great desktop environment. However, I feel that its default themes and artwork are created by programmers who want eye candy for the sake of having eye candy instead of seasoned graphics artists and designers who know all of the theories and practices behind graphic communication with user interfaces. Look at the fonts and icon sizes of a typical KDE desktop, for example. Look at that of a OS X desktop, and compare. I'm not saying that KDE is a bad desktop (it's a very great desktop); I'm just saying that some more polish is needed for their themes. Eye candy for the sake of having eye candy hurts my eyes. Eye candy with a regard for graphic communication and UI makes for a very pleasing computing experience.

Re:I must be blind...

yes, but that's easily fixed with a few changes to the wikipedia page!

Re:I must be blind...

Thanks for calling me a young kid. I've been feeling like an old man for a while now, so that makes me smile.

I've used Macs since 1984 (although I was just drawing pictures then), and before that I played on the Vic20, Apple II's, the ST, the Amiga, an Apple IIGS.

I've managed million dolllar IT budgets for Microsoft enraptured dotcoms as they went under, and I followed NeXT while they whimpered out into irrelevance.

I was a developer through the move to Rhapsody and Mac OS X, and I'm a bit happy to see somebody with vision and a pulse injecting a challenge into the waters of IT.

Apple has also pushed POSIX (the same Linux/UNIX platform) into the mainstream, and helped Linux to challenge the NT monoculture.

So fogive me if I bubble enthusiastically about seeing a product I like be popularized by a fascinating company with interesting personalities and class and charm.

Also, if you are going to blow stink about my "inaccuracies," please lay them out instead of just making unfounded bullshit claims. I think you really are just bitter because you have nothing really interesting to say.

And for what its worth, I've written well over a hundred articles this year, and three have been posted to Slashdot in my lifetime. EVER. THREE EVER. So don't rain on my parade just because you have nothing to contribute to the world but your worthless trolling.

Re:Behold the power of the journalist

Coming up next: why journalists failed in the 90s!

Or perhaps a journalists job is to report on what's happened, not stuff that hasn't happened.

Re:the day after Jobs

No... that's why they had to get him back

Re:Behold the power of the journalist

>After Columbus discovered America, everyone and his dog can give 1001
> reasons why columbus has succeeded. Where were these expects before then?

Actually he failed.
His goal was to reach India (to establish trade os spices/etc through sea).
He end up in Caribbean islands with no spices to trade (he found some gold there
tho it was not much).

King John II of Portugal refused to sponsor him based in the advise from a council of astronomers and seamen (they said Colombo's calculations of longitude were wrong).
So I guess the experts were in King's John II court.

Re:Cold truth

If my computer help days are any indication, J Random User expects YOU to tell him about Macs, no matter how unsatisfied he is, he will NOT try to learn about the alternatives. He will just bitch and moan about how expensive it gets to maintain this computer, while trying not to spend a cent more than he has to, and hoping he could just junk it. When non-techies have a bad experience buying technology, they don't assign blame to themselves(for making the wrong choice) or to the maker of the technology(since for them it's all the same). They blame technology in general. As a better educated user, you can(if you are so inclined) let them know the experience can vary with the provider, and not despair. You can also share stories, either of what worked for you, or what didn't. Some of it may even be good business for you(they might pay you to install them a Mac). Then again, Macs tend to be lower-support than PCs, especially on AppleCare YMMV.

Re:If Apple had just sold an OS with any Computer

If tomorrow they made their OS X available to run on any Intel type processors they would take 50% of the computer market in one year.

You're dreaming. *IF* they could convince a major OEM to "prefer" OS X, they might be able to get close to that figure in 5 years.

That's assuming Microsoft did nothing in the interim.

Re:This dude said this about Apple.....

That's a bunch of complete and total horseshit. Apple's hardware margins are the envy of the industry-- even in the darkest days of the late 90s, Apple still made a pretty penny on the boxes they sold. They just weren't selling very many. I can't find the article I read earlier this week, but I believe their revenue breakdown this quarter was 60% from computer sales and 40% from iPod sales.

Everyone else is killing themselves to cut expenses so their boxes can be a couple bucks cheaper than the next guy while still eking out some profit. That's why their hardware feels cheap and why their first-line tech support is outsourced to script monkeys sitting in call centers on the other side of the globe, and why their customer satisfaction ratings have taken a nosedive in recent years.

Re:I must be blind...

The article's not even finished. The fragment quoted above is the end of the article, as posted, not the beginning.

Why the hell was this put on Slashdot's front page?

Re:If Apple had just sold an OS with any Computer

If tomorrow they made their OS X available to run on any Intel type processors they would take 50% of the computer market in one year. Prove me wrong Apple, try it.

If Apple sold OSX for any computer Apple would see a big drop in hrdware sales. Apple did allow Mac clones but they lost more in reduced hardware sales than they made in sales of MacOS, Apple isn't only a software company they are also a hardware company. Here's a list of companies that made Mac clones [everymac.com].

Falcon

Re:Where comes this notion

>> That the classic Mac OS was no good? It was certainly scads better than anything M$ was dribbling out.

> No it wasn't. Classic Mac OS lacked virtual memory, memory protection, multitasking, shared libraries and on the whole
> was way behind Windows technologically.

Not exactly... Windows 1.0 didn't have memory protection, and its virtual memory was software-based and on the whole not really superior to the Mac's "purgeable" resource mechanism. For multitasking, Switcher was available in 1985, but that was more like a TSR than true multitasking, and you needed a Fat Mac with 512k RAM to run multiple programs anyway.

Windows had DLLs before the Mac had Shared Libraries, but they were mostly a joke technologically, causing more problems than they solved. When the Mac finally introduced Shared Libraries, they were fairly sophisticated and transparent.

> Windows had gradually evolved to take advantage of improved hardware, and become a more 'modern' OS.
> Meanwhile, Mac OS had mostly stagnated, with only modest improvements in System 7

To be fair, System 7 was light-years ahead of the original Mac OS in terms of features, but after that Apple didn't quite seem to know what to do with it. Not that they weren't trying; they developed A/UX in this period, and started work on Pink/Taligent, which would have leapfrogged Windows if it had been successful.

The big problem with the original Mac OS was that it wasn't very forward-looking. Jobs insisted that the Mac would be self-contained and never need expansion, which was a recipe for stagnation. Fortunately he was gone by the time more sophisticated Mac models were introduced.

The 'mob of managers' architecture of Mac OS gave developers a lot of flexibility, but it also made it hard to advance because any time you changed something in the Toolbox ROM, any number of things at different levels could be affected by it.

> before OS X, the underlying OS was always a joke, and could never technically stand up to Windows

Mostly true, but remember that the Mac OS was much more complex than DOS/Windows at first. It was a Herculean effort to develop, and the result was effective not because it was more technically advanced, but because it DIDN"T MATTER if it was-- the user did not see the difference, and didn't care, because it just worked! Only when Apple tried to carry the Mac into the future did users suffer the growing pains that you describe.

Apple was so convinced of their superiority, they developed the OS through navel-gazing rather than looking outward to what other advances were being made in operating systems. Whenever a feature was suggested for improving the design of Mac OS, Apple shouted "Not Invented Here!" Microsoft at least was hiring OS experts and looking at what PCs would be capable of in the near future. And for all the advances Microsoft made, they still didn't have a decent file system until NTFS in 1993, and most users didn't benefit from it for years afterward.

Personally, I think Amiga was the benchmark Apple should have compared the Mac against. As soon as they saw what the Amiga could do, they should have said "okay, there's the bar-- anything we release from now on has to be AT LEAST as good as what the Amiga can do!"