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Apple Businesses

Interview with John Scully 229

Posted by michael from the old-timers dept.
worm eater writes "CNet news has an interesting interview with John Scully, CEO of Apple back in the day. He talks about problems and potential in the computer industry, and expresses regret over the opportunities Apple missed with some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton."
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Interview with John Scully More

Interview with John Scully

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  • ...and in other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kandel ( 624601 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @01:50PM (#7133152) Journal
    "Tonight, on CNET, we reveal the interview they didn't want you to see."
    Scully VS Jobs
    Only, on CNET Cable...

    • It'ScullEy (Score:3, Informative)

      by soloport ( 312487 )
      Argh!!! It's "Sculley"! "Scully" is the "Jones" of the county of Kork, Ireland (i.e. the correct spelling). Sculley's ancestors didn't bother to explain the proper spelling to the folks on Ellis Island, apparently.
      • You're probably right about how Scull(e)y should be spelled, but you seem to forget a simple fact:

        The majority of immigrants from Europe probably didn't know how to read or write. Many came from very poor conditions, where trying to survive was more important than education.

        So I guess it's just as probable that Scully's ancestor didn't know the spelling themselves, as it is that they "didn't bother to explain the proper spelling".

  • The newton.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Lord_Slepnir ( 585350 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @01:52PM (#7133159) Journal
    The newton was origionally going to be called the iPalm. However, when someone wrote that into a prototype iPalm, the thing read it as 'Newton'. And so it remained.
  • ... some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton.

    Now call me ignorant, but I haven't heard very much about those two technologies recently at all.. Are/were they really that 'key'?

    • Re:Key technologies? (Score:4, Informative)

      by runenfool ( 503 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:00PM (#7133197)
      You serious?

      The Newton was the first "modern" PDA to be sold in any quantity. Yea, the first ones had pretty poor handwriting recognition, but it rapidly improved.

      Hypercard was a rad tool that could have been used to build something very much like todays web - but a few years earlier.

    • Re:Key technologies? (Score:5, Informative)

      by The_Bagman ( 43871 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:07PM (#7133229)
      Both HyperCard and the Newton were innovative, influential, and as is often the case, poorly timed relative to technology trends.

      HyperCard: here was a programming and publishing framework designed to be approachable and usable by every-day people, with the added bonus of "immediate gratification"- the act of writing code immediately produced a tangible artifact, much like writing HTML today immediately produces a web page that anybody can visit. But, HyperCard predated widespread Internet usage and the Web, and nobody could figure out what it was good for (except fancy slide shows and choose-your-own-adventure style storyboards).

      Newton: to be sure, the Newton borrowed heavily from previous projects and products (including stuff from Xerox PARC and Marc Weiser's ubiquitous computing vision). But, once again, Apple innovated. The device was (almost) powerful enough to run useful software while disconnected, the UI was pen-driven, and the device was energy concious enough to be usable throughout the day without docking it for recharging. Here was a physical appliance targetted towards being a useful digital assistant, and here was a computing model radically different than desktop PCs that everybody was used to. Unfortunately, mobile processors weren't fast or energy-miserly enough yet, handwriting recognition was poor and graffiti-like techniques weren't there, the device was the wrong form factor, and a bunch of stuff was thrown in there that wasn't useful (like the "soup" programming paradigm).

      Tons of innovation, tons of influence, but before their time and hence market failures.

      • Re:Key technologies? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Rimbo ( 139781 )
        You forgot the single key failure of the Newton, the one thing that made it useless compared to the Palm -- not power, not cost, not market timing, but the inability to sync the data on-board with a PC. I think they added the feature very late in the development, but by then it was too little, too late.

        And with Hypercard, they didn't know what to do with that, either.

        In other words, Sculley didn't understand how to make these technologies into things people would actually be able to use. And therein lie

        • Re:Key technologies? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @03:01PM (#7133524)
          So the Newton I had with the PC serial cable and the PC syncing software ws what now? The Newton could sync with a PC just fine. Id say the failing of the Newton is due mainly to missinformation from people who never used the product.

          • Re:Key technologies? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) * <oculus.habent@gm ... Nom minus author> on Saturday October 04, 2003 @04:02PM (#7133835) Journal
            Newton's problems as I saw them:

            1. Too heavy. It was big, especially the MessagePad 2000. It was unwieldly where the PalmPilot was sleek and comfortably fit into the hand or a pocket.

            2. Too early. Apple has a history of putting out things on the cutting edge, but early adoption wasn't as common back then. "Trendy" is much more important now than it used to be. So, the Newton came out, and it was a great tool, but it was hard to get people to buy something completely new that replaced substantially cheaper notepads and organizers.

            3. Wrong market. The people who benefit most from PDAs are those with lots to remember - professionals, doctors, etc. Apple just isn't big in those markets, and, especially then, it was hard for them to separate a new product from the Macintosh platform. It wasn't until the iPod came out with a Windows version that Apple could show they made things not tied to the Macintosh.

            4. It's tough being first. The PDA was a revolution. They are being replaced with/morphing into handheld computers as desires for additional functions become common. The Newton had the power years ago to be a handheld computer, and it's Soups and association capabilities were amazing. It isn't easy to convince people they need something they have always done without, and Apple just didn't manage to do it.
      • Actually, I wish I had HyperCard for OS X. I don't know crap about databases but I have to make a relatively simple one. Back in the HyperCard days, I made something like this in a couple of nights, and was working with it almost immediately. It kept track of quotations from articles and books and kept all the bibliographic information and generated bibliographies in Word (4.0 I believe) formatted to my liking. I also used HyperCard to make a database for a class I was teaching -- it kept track of stude

        • Re:HyperCard (Score:2, Informative)

          by litlnemo ( 24249 )
          You might want to try SuperCard [supercard.us]; you can even import your old HyperCard stacks in and they will probably work. (Mine mostly worked when I tried it; I did have to make some small changes but not too much.) SuperTalk is pretty much HyperTalk with some additions (and a couple of things removed), and color works much better in SuperCard than the hack they did to include color in HyperCard.
    • They must not teach these in high school. You can read about them when you get to college

  • Damn! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mr.henry ( 618818 ) * on Saturday October 04, 2003 @01:56PM (#7133176) Journal
    I was hoping this was a Slashdot interview call for questions. Ahem..

    John, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water? Or do you want to change the world?

    • Given that Steve Jobs has proven, by turning the company around and restoreing relevance and profitability after the bungleing incompetence of gil amelio, that he *IS*, in fact, the one person who should be, and should have been, running Apple...

      ... where do you think Apple would be today, had you not fumbled the ball by fireing Jobs, and pissing away much of Apple's once-dominant market share?

      cya,
      john

  • HyperCard technology lives on in these products... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 5n3ak3rp1mp ( 305814 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @01:58PM (#7133187) Homepage
    Runtime Revolution [runrev.com]
    Compile on any platform, to any platform- including a ton of *nix variants. A very nice cross-platform rapid application development tool with a very complete set of functionality (interface, database, tcp/ip ports, etc.), all coded in a HyperTalk-descended language.

    X-Builder [acruxsoftware.com]
    Mostly designed for multimedia, I don't know as much about this one...

  • Not tech related but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MisanthropicProggram ( 597526 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @01:59PM (#7133192)
    what I never got was, why didn't he price Apple Computers more competitively with the Wintel stuff? He was after all the President of Pepsi at one time and you can't get into a more price competitive market than soft drinks. I think that was his biggest mistake with Apple.

    That's what killed me in the mid 80s to the early 90s - the prices. I love Apple products, but at the time, I just couldn't afford them. Whereas PCs were becoming cheaper and cheaper.

    • Because (Score:3, Informative)

      by linuxislandsucks ( 461335 )
      Hardware and software have different volume relationships..

      while software once created can be sold at huge volume with low fixed startup costs..

      Hardware has high fixed costs to produe it it high volume..

    • Exactly. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by InterruptDescriptorT ( 531083 )
      Remember back in the day when the original line of Macs and their immediate successors had maybe not a huge, but at least somewhat significant market share? You could see that looking in the Byte magazine articles of the mid-to-late 80s. They actually made software for Macs! You don't see too much of it anymore, sadly.

      You are absolutely right. They were able to charge more because they worked better, offered better features than the Wintel boxen with its myriad, incompatible graphics adapters, and wer

      • Re:Exactly. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Oculus Habent ( 562837 ) * <oculus.habent@gm ... Nom minus author> on Saturday October 04, 2003 @09:19PM (#7135164) Journal
        Actually, I went and priced Laptops on Dell and Apple today. A 15" PowerBook and a 15.4" Inspiron 8600 are almost even on similar configurations (Dell comes out $50 less in my comparison). If you max the Inspirion to match the 17" PowerBook (2GB DDR333, 80GB, 802.11g, Bluetooth, DVD-R, 64MB Video, Extra Battery, No Floppy, 3yr Warranty) you can add a 40GB iPod, an iSight, and the high-end AirPort Extreme Base Station on and still not hit Dell's price. Dell's has the $200 mail-in rebate (Dell rebates are a PITA, just ask Young America [young-america.com] who handles them...)

        All-in-all, the prices are pretty decent. The high-end G5 costs plenty more than the high-end Dimension XPS, but it's barely $100 more than a similarly-equipped Precision 360, but it can double the RAM, has FireWire 800, Bluetooth and 802.11g support, and a bit more processing power, depending on who you ask...

        Sure, they can't compete with the Dimension 2400's $599 price tag, but the low-end eMac is $800 to the Dimension 4600's $849.

      • Re:Exactly. (Score:2, Insightful)

        by cubicledrone ( 681598 )
        Anyway, what Apple needs to do now is lower their prices even further to bring them on par with the likes of the mass-market Dells. Otherwise, Apple may find itself a thing of the past.

        As long as they keep building stuff like the G5, iPod and 17" Powerbook, there is no commodity manufacturer that can compete with Apple.

        Apple builds a premium product and charges a premium price, and there is always room in any market for such a company, because they don't compete on price and volume.

    • Re:Not tech related but... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:32PM (#7133369) Journal
      why didn't he price Apple Computers more competitively with the Wintel stuff?

      Because it wasn't in Apple's interests. Mac users are willing to pay Apple prices, so Apple has enormous profit margins.

      Think about what cutting prices would actually have done. It would have placed Apple in direct competition with Dell, with Compaq, with Micron, with HP, with a host of large manufacturing companies that are very, very good at shaving down manufacturing costs and operating with tiny profits. There's so little profit in the desktop market today that companies have been exiting market for some time -- focusing on the higher-profit laptops and servers.

      That would have been a difficult-to-compete arena for Apple. Apple made a decision that has kept them a successful business -- it was probably the right one from a business standpoint.

      Of course, I agree with you WRT to use of Apple products. I gave up on Apple when they revoked clone makers' licenses. People that choose Apple are choosing to work within a niche market, pay significantly higher prices, and have less software and hardware choice. That makes sense for many people (you get a black-box solution that works out of box, which anyone, even the tech illiterate, can comfortably use). It was not a product that I was particularly interested in, but that doesn't make it an invalid business -- Apple's done pretty well for themselves.
      • >Because it wasn't in Apple's interests. Mac users are willing to pay Apple prices, so Apple has enormous profit margins.

        But low volumes!
        Low volume imply fewer software written for MacOS, so people won't buy Apple's computer because there are fewer software --> dwindling market share.
        This is a vicious circle which has caused Apple to catter to niches where it was successfull.
        But this niche strategy is fragile: it is quite easy to loose a niche (education has been lost), it is very difficult to build
        • I wouldn't quite say that education has been "lost", even if they did take a beating there. As long as they stay in the double digits, and continue to have successes like Henrico, Maine, and the dozen or so smaller copycat deployments that I have heard of - then Apple is still in the game when it comes to education.

          When the school districts that are Mac districts are running THAT much better than their struggling Wintel counterparts then they still have something viable to sell.

          If Microsoft dropped Offic
          • I wouldn't quite say that education has been "lost", even if they did take a beating there. As long as they stay in the double digits, and continue to have successes like Henrico, Maine, and the dozen or so smaller copycat deployments that I have heard of - then Apple is still in the game when it comes to education.

            You're splicing hairs. Apple was *was* educational computing at one point, and is now a bit player in their own niche. Yes, there will be Macs around for years, no matter what, but they have
            • Rumors [thinksecret.com] have it that Apple's working on their own MS format compatible office suite. It'll consist of Keynote (Powerpoint type app), Document (word processor), a spreadsheet app and a database app. It's doubtful Apple would release something that was half-assed (OK, there was OS X 10.0). Keynote seems pretty good. Hopefully, Document and the rest will just as nice.

              While the Apple market is signifigantly smaller that the Windows market, it is still large (25 million users is the usual number bandied about).
            • Apple was *was* educational computing at one point, and is now a bit player in their own niche

              Calling Apple a "bit" player is wrong. Apple still has major market share. The big news was when Apple's market share in education dropped below 70%.

      • what are you moderators smoking?

        the original post refared to the period where Scully was incharge of apple, back in the mid80 to early 90s - where Apple could have monopolised the PC market easly - by pricing thier machines to get 20% profit margins and not 50-60% as Scully priced them.

        THERE WAS NO COMPETITION from the PC market to the mac os at that time. NONE. what? DOS4? windows 1.0?! there was no GUI worth talking about on the PC, untill win 3.11 (which was still years behind the mac) if apple would
        • You forget that in those days PC users looked down their noses at GUIs. Further Apple didn't support Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect natively. There also was *more* of a software compatibility issue rather than less.

    • Suppy and Demand (Score:5, Interesting)

      by IntlHarvester ( 11985 ) * on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:44PM (#7133430) Journal
      Back in the day, Apple computers were loaded with custom chips that gave them unique capabilities. The downside to this design was that it limited Apple's ability to manufacture machines.

      So, they basically had more potential customers than they had computers. There's two ways they could deal with this situation:

      a) Move to an 'open' architecture and bring in 3rd party manufacturing
      b) Keep raising prices until the demand curve falls off.

      Scully chose Plan B, which pretty much permenently doomed them to a nitch player. The upside is that their profits were so high that they built that $4 Billion bank account that people are always talking about. Apple is really more of a mutual fund now days than a computer manufacturer.

      There's a history of Apple by Jim Carlton that covers the decision not to allow 'cloning' in great detail.
    • ...why didn't he price Apple Computers more competitively...

      I believe this was where Scully and Jobs clashed. Jobs wanted the mac to be priced low enough so almost everyone could buy one. Scully wanted big profits immediately.

      The board of directors listened to the one who would make their stock options go up sooner.

    • Well, if he did price Macs like Pepsi... (Score:5, Funny)

      by MadAnthony02 ( 626886 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @03:07PM (#7133553)

      the iBooks would normally cost $1500, but every other week would be on sale for $799, or $699 with bonus card, limit 4

    • Re:Not tech related but... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bellings ( 137948 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @04:36PM (#7134028)
      you can't get into a more price competitive market than soft drinks

      Are you trolling? Pepsi, Coke, and Dr. Pepper cost about 50 cents a can, retail Just about every other soda on earth costs about 25 cents a can.

      There's about 2 cents of can, .5 cents of sugar water, and 47.5 cents of advertising in a can of soda.

      There probably isn't less competitive market than market than soft drinks.

  • NOT the Newton -- that's Sakoman's! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:02PM (#7133207)
    The Newton was the sole creation of Steve Sakoman (ex-Be, now back at Apple) under the supervision and the "protection" of ex-Be's JLG (ex-Apple executive as well). Sculley had VERY LITTLE to do with the Newton, at least in the beginning.

  • HyperCard lives on? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Doppler00 ( 534739 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:03PM (#7133209) Homepage Journal
    I remember using HyperCard in 6th grade. There really was not too much programming involved, just placing buttons and having them perform actions. It was really the first time I ever had experience with GUI based programming. It seemed to have some potential, but once Visual Basic 3.0 came out HyperCard really didnt seem to matter to most people.

    I haven't checked it out myself but PythonCard [sourceforge.net] is supposed to be good.

    • HyperCard: Its Effects On The World Today (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bones3D_mac ( 324952 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:41PM (#7133417)
      HyperCard was an incredibly powerful and flexible tool for development. You just had to know how to code for it so you could extend its capabilities.

      Any tool today that allows for drag-and-drop interface design is a descendent of HyperCard. Macromedia lives off it, by creating products like Flash, Director and Authorware. Even high end development tools, like Metrowerk's CodeWarrior borrows from it.

      It's easy for people who only saw the technology later in the game to blow it off. But for those of us who have seen and worked with the technology since it was first released in 1987, it was a major deal. HyperCard showed us that Apple was already preparing for the multimedia-governed future we take for granted now.

      This was later proven in 1993, when Cyan used HyperCard to create its smash hit game, Myst. The game showed us all the true power hidden inside the deceivingly simple-looking HyperCard, and ultimately shaped the multimedia industry we know today.

  • Hypercard (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sirmikester ( 634831 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:04PM (#7133215) Homepage Journal
    Scully mentions how hypercard was sort of a predecessor to HTML interfaces. I disagree, it was more like an early version of Visual Basic or Python.

    I learned how to program on Hypercard in highschool. It was a huge thing to be able to code simple visual applications quickly because before that it required alot of work to get GUI apps working. Its too bad that Apple ditched hypercard because it could have turned into a very useful tool to teach people how to program.
    • I disagree, it was more like an early version of Visual Basic

      I'd agree -- Except that Apple never really positioned HyperCard very well, so it primarily got used as a "toy" educational language.

      Meanwhile, VB was aimed directly at corporate programming and had support for DB Access, "grids" and so on. This was painfully obvious at the job I had 10 years ago where several thousand Macs were dumped because they didn't make a good "client-server" platform.

    • Re:Hypercard (Score:3, Insightful)

      by worm eater ( 697149 )
      HyperCard resembled a lot of things that we have now -- it was kind of like HTML, Visual Basic and even presentation apps like PowerPoint or Keynote. I can't remember if you could create links between stacks (which would make it more like HTML). The fact that it was so open-ended and easy to use meant that it had tons of potential, but as Scully says, nobody at Apple really saw that potential and ran with it. Imagine if you could easily pull up cards from stacks on other computers across an AppleTalk netw
      • Imagine if you could easily pull up cards from stacks on other computers across an AppleTalk network -- it would have very much resembled an early version of HTML -- only more powerful.

        Yeah, but remember that just like Word, hypercard has them crazy macroviruses... it would be a bitch to get a trust-model worked out that would protect against macrovirus and cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. Even under OSX, where you could chroot / su it into a very small sandbox, you have to worry about CSS: if it co
        • if it could redefine a procedure in memory, used by more trusted stacks, you could end up screwed anyway.

          Then you've done your sandboxing wrong. Any program with C linkage can have a sqrt function, but it won't overwrite the libc sqrt function. Why is that so increadibly hard with hypercard?
      • I can't remember if you could create links between stacks (which would make it more like HTML).
        Yes you could: open card 5 of stack "addresses"
      • I know that as of 2001, there were some plug-ins that would allow hypercard to access stacks via IP address. There was also a gateway software tool that would provide addressing to stacks on a machine, sorta' like Apache. I haven't really looked into Hypercard since, then.

        If Apple had picked up on the concept of connecting stacks across the network, it would have been a major coup. Especially when you consider how easy Appletalk networking was/is.
    • I think they ditched it because of Filemaker Pro. Filemaker Pro and Hypercard are in many ways the same thing. They are both extensible through small program objects which can be scripted into them. However FMPro has a much more powerful set of functionality for storage of data. Since FM Pro comes from Claris, and Claris is somehow related to Apple (perhaps someone can fill me in on that one; IIRC they were founded by some people involed with Apple somehow, put out some stuff, and were later purchased by Ap
      • As far as Hypercard goes, it's still in use, at least in one place. I was called in to save a PowerMac 7100 running OS 7.5 that held the sole copy/version of a certain museum of surrealist art in the south-east US's collection database. I was told it was a custom program and it really didn't look like what I remembered a Hypercard stack to look like. This database kept track of the location of every piece in the collection. The nice thing about this was that I was able to transfer this setup to an G3 OS9 ma

    • Re:Hypercard (Score:5, Interesting)

      by alangmead ( 109702 ) * on Saturday October 04, 2003 @06:04PM (#7134421)
      Scully is echoing comments from Tim Berners-Lee during the development of the web. The original proposal for the world wide web [w3.org] specifically mentions Hypercard when describing what the system does.

  • Did anyone 'read the article'? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:08PM (#7133235)
    The poster, and the editors apparently did not, as the man's name is not John Scully, but John Sculley. I can't wait until the fascinating interview of Steve Bobs.

    • Koppel: Mr. Forbes, the reference in your book to "Teve Torbes" clearly refers to you!
      Forbes:I just don't know, Ted. Whoever wrote this book did a great job at concealing identities. He could have been thinking of Fleve Fnorbes.

  • Who cares what this tool thinks? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's nothing interesting about an interview with a coulda-shoulda-woulda Monday morning quarterback, especially Sculley. He damn near killed Apple singlehandedly with his poor leadership. Why would anyone think his opinions today are any better?

  • Hypercard (Score:2, Insightful)

    by thesupermikey ( 220055 )

    I miss the days of HyperCard. I spent most of my middle school years in a small little computer lab teaching myself how to you it. Then the school got read of it for that bastard program hyperstudio with its color and sound. I weep every day for those lost days.
    • I know how you feel. HyperStudio took all the fun, challenge, and interest out of it. Drop in a button with existing effects and scripting - where's the fun or thought in that? Might as well use PowerPoint.

      HyperCard was great. You could go as far as you wanted. Catching system events and idle loops, even creating/changing menus.

      Our middle school computer lab used a customized HyperCard called StudentCard for an interface for the computers - it let you launch programs and such in Mac OS 6.0.4 on Classics a
  • opportunities Apple missed with some key technologies -- such as HyperCard and the Newton."

    Atleast, Newton did not miss his opportunities with an apple.

  • Newton... (Score:3, Funny)

    by statikuz ( 523906 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (egobjd)> on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:44PM (#7133428)
    Wouldn't that make it the "Apple Newton"?
    Couldn't that be confused with a cookie?

    Disclaimer: This product not to be eaten.

  • Isn't he... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 04, 2003 @02:57PM (#7133500)
    ...that big hairy dude from Monsters Inc.?
  • he was hired away from Pepsi to work at Apple. I think Jobs gave him that old "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?" speech.

    The Newton was fine, except that it cost more than the average person was able to pay, and the handwriting recognition needed work. They fixed it later.

    Sculley brought about the Color Macs, under Jobs it was still greyscale and B&W. I have a Mac IIcx under my desk which I don't use. One day I may hook it back up. Maybe run Linux on it or System 7?

    Microsoft beat down Apple, Windows kept taking marketshare, and Apple did the best it could to compete. The Creative Content market was the bulk of Apple's marketshare. This helped to cotribute to Apple's Dark Ages and loss of revenue. Microsoft was to blame there, even if it did make software for the Mac, it favored Windows first.

    Sculley tried to fill Jobs' shoes, but couldn't. He didn't have the reality distortion field or the creative marketing genius that Jobs had. Meanwhile Next wasn't doing so well and could barely hold it's own. Unix was the future, few people saw that at the time. Jobs knew it because he invested in Unix technology for Next. Meanwhile Linux was getting started and slowly started to gain marketshare. Apple's A/UX needed work, but was put on the back burner to favor MacOS.

  • Live Picture and Flashpix (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jayrtfm ( 148260 ) <jslash AT sophont DOT com> on Saturday October 04, 2003 @03:25PM (#7133655) Homepage Journal
    he shoulda stuck with the sugar water.
    After bonehead moves with Apple, he aquired the program/company Live Picture.
    Back when RAM would cost you over $6K/gig, it allowed you to do retouching and composites of really big files on a 256meg machine. They also promoted the Flashpix format, which let you zoom into pictures online.

    After ignoring many suggestions of how the tech could be used to do some really innovative, useful things, and more bonehead moves, the company dies (assets bought by MGI)

    a good page about this can be found at:
    http://www.goingware.com/tips/resignation.htm l
    and
    http://www.goingware.com/tips/misery.html
    quote:
    "The bad VC comes up with ideas about what might appeal to Wall Street or to a possible corporate purchaser and orders you to drop what you're doing and pursue his misguided goal.

    A specific example of this was when John Scully directed Live Picture, the company, to abandon development of Live Picture 3.0, the program, and instead pursue development of internet technologies involving the very complex and proprietary Flashpix file format.

    You could do really cool things with FlashPix, admittedly, but it's not really what users wanted. Very few people use Flashpix these days, even though Kodak, Microsoft and Live Picture went to no end of trouble to develop and promote it. Instead, people who browse the web still get JPEGs, plain and simple.

    But the specific reason John Sculley felt it was important to develop and promote Flashpix - he said as much in a company meeting - was because we were preparing for an IPO, and "Wall Street is not interested in tools companies. It is interested in Internet companies".

    • and Zapa. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by eshefer ( 12336 )
      an israeli company, who had some interesting web stuff going on in the early 90s. he turned it into gizmoz.com - a charecter animation "web-charecters" company.

      It died. big surprise.

  • The entire industry is pretty grim right now, and I wouldn't be fooled into thinking the economy is picking up much. You can be fooled by all the garbage such as "Bull Market" and crap like that, but if you look at stock charts, you'd see it pretty much is in the same state as things were a few years back.

    There are too many uncertainties nowadays for companies to spend spend spend on R&D and other things which really sucks, so I would hold my breathe waiting for the 'next big thing'.

    Latest Comprelated

  • What about OpenDoc and CyberDog? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by axxackall ( 579006 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @03:48PM (#7133767) Homepage Journal
    I think one of the biggest keys created by Apple (and killed by Apple too) was OpenDoc as an DOM precessor, and based on it CyberDog - what Mozilla is trying to be today, but at time when Netscape and IE could barely run longer than 10 minutes without being crashed.

    Where was that Scully when the technology was closed? Why wasn't it at least open-sourced?

    So many stupidy-based decisions were, are and will be driving Apple.

    • Jobs killed OpenDoc. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by solios ( 53048 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @08:38PM (#7135019) Homepage
      Due to industry pressures. Period. The fact that you could make modules for OD and string modules together to make an application meant, essentially, that you could drop a type module and a paint module together... and a spell checking module... and BLAMMO! Be running what Adobe didn't get around to doing with Photoshop until v.7 back in the days of OS 8.

      Adobe and several other major software houses took notice of this, realized what it could do, and essentially told Apple "Drop this shit like a ton of bricks or we drop support for your platform. Now." (this may also answer your question as to why it was never opened- though asking why older software wasn't open sourced is kind of like asking why I can't get m '57 Chevy with factory air and CD player...)

      Same thing with the memory management system that had been planned for MacOS 9.3. Publishers pissing an moaning about "OOOOH WE'LL HAVE TO REWRITE OUR APPS AND YOUR A NICHE MARKET SO IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO JUST DROP IT" has kept Apple hogtied in more ways than one for some time.

      Fortunately, OS X and Final Cut Pro are serious coups in this department- Adobe dropped Premiere (which sucks rocks regardless) in response to having to compete against Apple. The fact it was Apple must have pissed them off something fierce- if Macromedia had continued FCP development instead of selling it to Apple, I'm sure things would be a bit different.... and I'm sure FCP would suck. :P

      Anyway. That's the long form. The short form: Get a clue. Talk to a few developers who've actually been to the Apple campus and have been doing work on the platform since the 80's. Get their views.

      That said, OD was whacked after Jobs came back, and the OSS buzzword was barely a blip on anyone's radar back in the days of MacOS 8.
      • the OSS buzzword was barely a blip on anyone's radar back in the days of MacOS 8

        Not exactly true counting the fact that Apple has even supported MkLinux those days.

        • True, but that was Back Then. These days, the terms "Open Source" and "Innovation" are about as gratingly pervasive as Britney Spears or N Sync. :P

          Even if OSS was as trendy then as it is now, it's doubtful Apple would have opened it up, in part for some of the reasons I stated.

  • The Sculley love/hate relationship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by theolein ( 316044 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @05:49PM (#7134367) Journal
    John Sculley probably did the right thing booting Jobs out of Apple at the time, as Jobs was simply too young and brash to take responsibility for his actions. I think the time at NeXT where Jobs had no one else but himself to blame for the company's failure to promote the Cubes and Stations was what taught Jobs to think about what he did before doing it.

    Sculley certainly had good idea, the Newton being the chief one amongst them, but he didn't have Jobs' feel of design appeal to get that thing to a point where everyday joes would want one. Take a look at the phenomenal success of the Apple iPod and you realise what Jobs could have done with the Newton if he had been the one to introduce it. It's sad but it's the way things are and Jobs is certainly correct in not getting Apple to try and compete in the desasterous PDA market of today, which is dying due to competition from mobile phones.

    I think that there were many other technologies that Apple introduced that could have made more of an impact in the market, but which, mainly due to Apple's poor marketing and market position at the time, never made. Hypercard was one, although Applescript can today do a lot of what Hypercard did then. OpenDoc/Cyberdog was another. openDoc was such a phenomenal innovation that Bill gates made it part of Microsoft's contract forbidding ex MS employess to work on OpenDoc for 3 years after leaving MS. The concept was in competition to and superior to MS' OLE and that worried Microsoft a lot at the time. It would have meant that components could be placed from one programe into another, such as being able to, say, do image editing in word processing and vice versa. Brilliant.

    The strange thing today is that the services which are part of OSX are very neglected und undermarketed although they serve a similar purpose. Perhaps Jobs just doesn't get it?

  • Skully is the man who lost the schools for Apple (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Saturday October 04, 2003 @05:53PM (#7134380) Homepage Journal
    When he made all educational sales direct.

    He made the fatal assumption that all of the schools were loyal to Apple as opposed to being loyal to their local dealers.

    When those local dealers couldn't sell Apple products anymore, they started to sing the praises of Compaq and HP, the schools believed them and slowly started to switch.

    LK
  • Jimbo Jones: "Make a note on your Newton to beat up Martin!" Dolph:

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