Amelio, Raskin, Gassée On What Apple Means 317
John Paczkowski writes: "SiliconValley.com is currently hosting the third in its series of online Roundtable discussions. Our topic is 'Does Apple Matter?' and as you might imagine conversation has been quite spirited. Among our guests: Jean-Louis Gassée -- chairman and CEO of Be and former head of head of product development at Apple, former Apple chairman and CEO Gil Amelio, former Macintosh project manager Jef Raskin, and Mark Gonzales, a former senior Apple product manager who worked on the company's 'Star Trek' project. You'll find the introduction to the event here and the discussion itself here."
Innovation (Score:5, Interesting)
The home PC. Would it have happened? Yes, but Apple was there first with some innovations like built in video with color, built in BASIC etc.etc.etc... Apple was the first to offer color in the personal computer industry. And by the way Woz designed the whole damned thing. Apple I and Apple II........ himself. No engineering team needed until packaging and optimization were required.
The GUI thing has been hyped to death and yes I know that they bought the rights from Xerox. But what about the CD drive? Remember having to install applications using floppies? Hell, M$ office was a little skyscraper of floppies. Apple adopted the CD drive mechanism and ended up paying the cost via a lawsuit from Apple records claiming music infringement. And while we are on removeable media, Apple essentially standardized the little 3.25 in hard plastic floppy. Yes they were around, but nobody in the PC business was using them until Apple in the IIe and Lisa.
The first real portable computers. Yes I remember the Osborne. But at 50 pounds with a 4in screen I hardly call that portable. The Mac Portable was still 25 lbs but you could carry it on an airplane and fit it under the seat. However the first real portable that we consider being laptops was again Apple with the original Powerbook. This computer standardized the palm rests with they keyboard in front and the pointing device between the palm rests.
What about USB? Yes it is an Intel standard but nobody was really using it until Apple standardized it on the iMac. And what about Firewire? Again, Apple.
The PDA. The Newton was way ahead of its time, but would we have Palm Pilots without it? Probably not.
How about Colorsync? Thats color matching software for those that don't know. It was a bit of a stealth software package but many industries rely heavily on it.
Hey, BUILT IN NETWORKING!!!! Back in 1985 Apple started shipping systems with built in networking presaging the concept of networked computers and the Internet.
Apple was the first company to combine TV with a PC. Back in 1993? I think I can remember seeing MacintoshTVs in our campus bookstore. They were black. Pretty cool. This essentially is years ahead of where we will be in the next three years with TV and PC's.
Speaking of multimedia, Quicktime. Back in 91 I think, Apple comes out with this cool software that does it all. Video sound and other multimedia that is cross platform.
Plug and play. Apple was years ahead of anyone else here and they still are. Damn, remember all of those ISA bus conflicts and how hard they were if you happened to have two or three cards installed at the same time? Also Apple allowed any configuration to be done in software instead of cracking the case and playing with DIP switches.
Essentially fronting the development of the laser printer and making it practical. Apple funded Adobe to get their start and produce software to drive laser printers. Thus starting the whole desktop publishing industry.
Case design. I am not talking about iMac juicy goodness. I am talking practical case design to allow one easy access to the guts. The 8600 and 9600 models started this with easy open sides and flip apart cases that allowed easy access to memory and PCI cards.
We could go on and on here with past innovations, but is Apple still relevant and is the industry still following their lead? Yes. Apple is the first company to really take UNIX by the horns and make it a mainstream OS for the masses that still retains the power and flexibility of UNIX. This is huge. They are still driving engineering with Firewire (something the rest of the industry is now adopting. Even Intel) Quicktime has yet to reach its stride. Eventually it will become a platform of its own for the dissemination of media. M$ knows this, they know that Apple has better technology and it scares the piss out of them.
iMovie and iDVD are revolutionary in the power they give to the average consumer that never before was available unless you wanted to spend $5-10k on software and hardware. Now you can purchase an iMac for less than $1000 that will do this.
Apple was the first company to go to an all LCD line. We all knew this would happen, but Apple is again the first company with the balls to do it.
One has only to look at M$ in their software products. M$ Windows certainly owes much to Apple, but so does their bread and butter product Office. Apple fronted development of Excel for the Mac and Powerpoint from another company. Even today M$ borrows heavily from Apple in all of its software. Control panels, trash cans, in older software, newer software contains all sorts of appearance issues, interface issues and applications that can all be seen cropping up in XP and their product previews for after XP.
Again, we could go on and on here, and I have no idea why Apple does not spend any marketing efforts on showing the world how innovative they are, but as any individual or company that is truly innovative and running so far ahead of anyone else, they are busy doing the next big thing and not focusing on the past.
Re:Apple (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not saying at all that Apple doesn't count, but I've really gotta take issue with one of your points.
The introduction of third party hardware showed that Apple was gouging their customers. Those cloners were putting such a hurting on Apple that the company was bleeding money to the point that they finally killed off all the cloners.
My $0.02 ($0.03 CAN) (Score:3, Interesting)
For some reason I have always had a predilection for underdogs... and that's why I'll always have a soft spot for Cupertino. Without Apple I really do feel that the computer industry is headed in a very dull and bloated way, especially with the Gates-and-Uncle-Fester mantra of "all your base are belong to us".
At the same time I am frankly quite tired of fighting that old fight. OS X is good, but frankly, where are the big apps? Adobe is shamelessly dragging its feet, even after Apple went out of their way to create Carbon as a way to port the "classic" apps to the new OS natively. Apple itself has dumped some technologies that were pretty essential to the old OS (like Input Sprockets), and for all its UNIX underpinnings OS X remains a classic Jobsian top-down project. Sure, you can hack it, but only to a certain extent. So it fails in achieving the sheer usefulness in graphic design that the "classic" MacOS has, the do-it-yourself aspects of Linux, and the ubiquitousness of the lowest common denominator, which shall here remain nameless.
Technologically OS X was a great idea. In the practical world it didn't quite turn out that way. This isn't about whether people like Aqua or not, this is about whether the OS can deliver a platform which is useful in my daily life, and sadly I can't say that it does at this point.
And that's why my Mac gets used less and less, and my cheap "roll-your-own" Linux box with a 1.3G Athlon processor gets most of the attention at my place these days. "Back in the day" I was an ardent a fan of Apple as they get (I'm one of those weirdos with a tatoo, of all things), and I don't regret those days, but people change. Computers change. And computer companies sure as hell change. I just think that Apple has seriously lost its way, and that instead of concentrating on their concrete, established strengths they have decided to open whole new cans of worms for the sake of some abstract (though very valid) OS concepts, and in doing so they really lost track of what put them where they were -- not the majority by any stretch, but a strong minority that was loyal as hell and a constant pain the Borg's butt.
Raskin's view of innovation... (Score:2, Interesting)
In 1969, Raskin wrote a paper called "The Quick Draw Graphics System," or something like that. His argument was that processing power should be devoted to aiding the user, by drawing graphics to present an interface.
That was pretty unthinkable at the time. Parc hadn't been founded yet, and for those who don't know, it was Raskin who started the Macintosh project at Apple, before they ever went to Xerox.
Historians take a look at the past from primary documents. News reporters don't, and there are a lot of false truths out there, like "Xerox invented the GUI, and Apple took it and popularized it." Don't believe it's true unless if you hear it from the horse's mouth [jefraskin.com].
He helped change the course of computing. He doesn't feel Apple's doing that anymore (and they're not, they're just helping it evolve).
Still, I think he wants Apple to do too much too fast. Apple could have made landmark changes with Mac OS X's interface, but who would have wanted to use it? If it can't run Office, people won't buy it.
At this point, Apple's best off bringing change in bits and pieces, because Mac OS users are already freaking out with the changes in OS X.
Does Amiga matter? (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
1) They have created a user interface that their users have grown to love and protect (in holy wars). The 20% grey philosophy of their ui with allowing their users to throw in accents if they saw it fit was what held their user base for as long as they did. The single function buttons and uncluttered desktop mindset has also allowed Apple to maintain the same interface for YEARS. (are you listening micro$oft?) Simplicity also yielded stability and made the interface adaptive for designers and artists who wanted as little as possible when interfacing with their machines.
2) They have a reputation for building solid hardware. The introduction of third party hardware with Power Computing showed that Apple's OS wasn't all that was essential for their reliable systems nor was it all that they had going for them.
3) They have been able to adapt their technology as time forces them to change it. OS X (that's ten, not "ex", I've been corrected time and time again) is Apple's answer to the market demand for businesses that want machines that they can reliably network and don't want Dells. Before OS X apple+network = no as many frustrated admins know. Damn that NETATalk.
And above all these reasons for apple counting are coming from a biggoted PC user!!!! I've never seen such a strong following from a fringe operating and hardware system, and until recently I saw practically no reason for it. Well, I see you Apple, and yes you will be a contender for some time.
Does Apple still matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think one of the panel members summed it up best by saying something along the lines of... "If they didn't, why would we be talking about them?"
=)
Can somebody tell me (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:ooooh, big media wants banner clicks (Score:3, Interesting)
That may be, but if you put me and another guy on two different (or even the same) linux machine, setting it up for a few days, and come back and compare, you'll see two completely different environments.
On the Mac, 15 minutes later we'll both have made change that can be undone in less than 3.
which tells me that although the mac interface is intuitive and simple, and there is not much setting up that needs to happen... there also isn't much change that can happen. We'll both be conforming to someone else's vision (probably) and that is unacceptable to me. Vi and Emacs are both extremely powerful, speedy editors---but only for those who have taken the time to learn them. By the same token, whenever you watch someone edit their Autoexec.bat in Notepad, you see how slow and inefficient the "intuitive" means can be.
Use Ion [students.tut.fi], your efficiency will triple because you won't touch the mouse and won't screw with any windows. It's the pinnacle of the "steep curve = more better" debate for window managers.
Daniel
Re:Apple? Doesn't matter. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not trying to draw fire here, but Linux is just not ready for consumption by the general public. Some of it the difficulty is because of drivers (which will be quickly cleared up as soon as manufactures stop making new hardware
Apple is shaping the future by permitting -albeit slowly- the "freedoom" that GNU users enjoy to permeate its way into the mainstream. And I'm not just talking about OS X being built on a BSD kernel. Maybe Apple's "open" source license isn't perfect, but it is a heck of a lot more free than Micro$oft's efforts. Also, IMHO, Apple has been far more lenient than most of the other mainstream computer manufacturers when it comes to proposing and enforcing copy protection schemes.
These things lead me to state that Apple is contributing much more to the future of computers than fine industrial design and intuitive interfaces.