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Why Apple Failed in the 90s
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Oct 22, 2006 07:24 AM
from the no-ipod dept.
from the no-ipod dept.
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. "
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they've turned things around since then (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Mac OS Classic and price (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Mac OS Classic and price (Score:5, Informative)
Their share has moved from 2% to 6% already gartner [gartner.com] You'll need a new line now.
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Re:Mac OS Classic and price (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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Re:Mac OS Classic and price (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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This article does shed some light on why apple is (Score:5, Interesting)
Simple answer (Score:5, Insightful)
Can anyone say iPod? (Score:5, Interesting)
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
I abandoned ship... (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple didn't fail. (Score:5, Funny)
And that's what saved it, it dyed all those iMacs all those different colors.
Speaking of different, with regard to your sig...
...That should be different than, except that it shouldn't be, because when things (including people) differ, they differ from one another.
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cloning (Score:5, Insightful)
How did this get on Slashdot? (Score:5, Interesting)
That this meaningless trash makes it onto Slashdot and Digg simply amazes me.
Re:I must be blind... (Score:5, Informative)
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....
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Re:I must be blind... (Score:5, Funny)
Do the admins know? Somebody should tell them!
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Re:I must be blind... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:I must be blind... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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You are blind (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The real solution (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Re:The real solution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:The real solution (Score:5, Funny)
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 !
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Re:The real solution (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The real solution (Score:5, Informative)
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).
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