Top 10 Apple Flops 993
Kelly McNeill writes "Though Apple computer is known for some of the computing and technology industry's most notable innovations, its not as if the company hasn't also taken its lumps. Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial contribution to osOpinion/osViews, which supplies us with his top ten list of Apple's (and some of associated partners) most significant flops throughout the company's history."
So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:1, Insightful)
I suppose it's inevitable that (with the current flurry of Apple success stories) someone would come up with a list of things they got wrong. Wonder if he's an Apple fan, or if their current success is eating at his liver...
Show me a single computer company (hell, any company) that's been around for 25 years or so and hasn't made any mistakes. To succeed, you have to play the game, and playing is a risk.
So they screwed up a few times. So what ? I'd actually be defending MS on the same charge, even though I despise their OS. Linux has screwed up badly now and then as well - brown bag releases aren't unknown after all...
I just think it's a bit sad to concentrate on someone's failures. It seems such an
Simon.
Cube? (Score:3, Insightful)
At least... (Score:5, Insightful)
3 words: HOCKEY PUCK MOUSE (Score:1, Insightful)
Two words... (Score:3, Insightful)
(For every Cube Apple produces, Microsoft is happy to come back with a Windows ME or MS Passport. At least with Apple, the flagship OS doesn't kick you in the jewels every time you sit down to use it. ^_^)
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:5, Insightful)
I think if you were to look over the last few years of posts on slashdot, regarding Apple, you'd see that "we" have been concentrating on their successes, with very few exceptions. I don't think an article that will probably generate interest for a few hours will do Apple's rep any harm.
Thank goodness for the flops (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Most recent blunder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:1, Insightful)
An overlooked flop (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember going to OfficeDepot and looking at the Performas and they along had like six different models with six different model numbers. Something like 6510, 6511, 6512, 6514, 6515, etc. (I know the actual numbers were different. These are to illustrate my point.) There were just very subtle differences between the models but for whatever reason, it warranted a different number. Basically it was a nightmare trying to remember what was the difference between any two numbers. That whole scheme of trying to provide a range of configurations was a flop. Fortunately, Steve undid that and cut down the product line into four basic models. I, for one, welcomed that.
Apple ///, no. Apple SOS, yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Now, Apple SOS (Sophisticated Operating System) for the Apple
-Mark, who's having SOS coding flashbacks now, thankyouverymuch
Re:Limits of Innovation (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"Apples == expensive" not a stereotype (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flops at Apple are predictable (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this also represents a huge problem for Apple down the road. As much as Jobs has dictated that which is desirable, genius tends to have a shelf life. A time will come when he just can't produce the same way- I hope to hell that he is grooming some manner of successor.
II GS (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't forget the II GS [wikipedia.org]. That was a killer machine with sound processing to die for. When it was released it made the available Macs look a bit weak (I think all there was available was the 128/512K models, the Mac Plus, and the Lisa/MacXL). All monochrome, very dull, totally unexpandable. Very pricey!
People who say that Apple's rot began when Jobs was fired miss the point. Jobs had managed to convince the execs (both regulars and the people who replaced him) that the II line was dead as a dodo and they should focus on the Mac. So Apple did, basically letting their mindshare evaporate within the personal and education markets. Apple had an extremely strong position but managed the transition to Mac very badly, or in fact failed to manage it at all. The II died from neglect.
One reason lots of other companies that emerged as PC makers in the 80s went on to massively outgrow Apple (think, Compaq...) is that they managed their transition from the 8/16 bit IBM PC through lots of architecture and CPU generations without suddenly dropping support for their existing customer base or alientating them completely. That kind of demonstrated lack of commitment to preserve existing relationships is why so many companies and purchasers found and find it hard to trust Apple, or to believe that its direction or strategy will endure past a few quarters.
Apple has always had problems as a company splitting its focus between different product lines. Witness the prolonged dullness and fading away of the Mac line the past few years as the iPod has obsessed the one-track-mind of Jobs.
The best thing for Apple the *computer* company right now might be to spin off or float iPod as a separate division, much as 3Com spun off Palm. use the massive cash raised to do something exciting for the computer line like, I don't know, buy Sun or something! Apple would then be selling both low-end, mid-range, and high-end Unix products!
Or given undercurrent of US regulatory resistance to Lenovo's purchase of IBM's PC business, why not buy that? An Apple-IBM PC combination would easily pass regulatory hurdles, and uniting two premium brands might work quite well. And of course, the ironic denoument would be priceless.
Re:At least... (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong, I'd take the money too... but you've got to have some pride in your workmanship.
Agreed (Score:3, Insightful)
I kept my
Well that's all water under the bridge at this point and I'm happy to see Apple doing well but now they are up against Linux/BSD for the hackers market and of course MS will not go quietly.
Re:What is a "brown bag release"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Limits of Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
Is Apple a success? Depends on how you measure it. In terms of market share for boxes and OSes, they're pretty much a failure.
In terms of changing the world with the Apple II, then the Mac, putting style into computers, creating the iPod, launching iTunes... well, yes you can (correctly) point out that they weren't exactly first with these things. The Altair was the first home computer, Xerox did a lot of the GUI innovation, Apple wasn't the first to make a high-capacity MP3 player. But Apple has been revolutionary in doing more to take these technologies mainstream than anyone else. In those terms, they're a success. Apple is a success at making incredible products that people feel very emotional about (love AND hate, speaking as someone who got into computers through the Apple IIe). Microsoft is an insanely great money-making machine, Apple has a legacy of creating insanely great (sometimes just insane) machines and software.
So who would you rather be? Gates, with enough money to buy Bolivia? Or Jobs, who has less money (still more than you could ever use) and a legacy of cool innovation?
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, and I am entitled to mine.
There's no MP3 player on the market that's anywhere near as easy to use as the iPod. I can't imagine bothering with anything else.
Love my Powerbook too.
Apple flops? No Newton? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Newton was a Palm Pilot before there was a Palm Pilot, and it was supposed to have handwriting recognition, but it didn't live up to expectations. The breakthrough of the Palm was that you had to relearn your handwriting in this gestures thing the computer could understand.
Re:Cube "Cracks" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cube? (Score:2, Insightful)
price.
Even for an apple, the cube was too expensive. But they still sell extemely well and are very popular.
Re:At least... (Score:4, Insightful)
I do support, I deal with people who use windows to do their jobs. The fact is its not user friendly and it has a lot of particular quirks that get in the way.
I'm not saying its any worse than say Linux in that regard, but at least Apple can be proud of OSX. Windows may not be a business flop but it is in terms of quality.
Re:"Apples == expensive" not a stereotype (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Most recent blunder (Score:3, Insightful)
The scary thing is, I've always been a PC Linux guy, but after my advisor bought us a round of ibooks to do our coding (computational physics) I think I'm on the path to turning into a mac zealot. Chalk up another win for Apple.
Re:Limits of Innovation (Score:2, Insightful)
no one in their right mind would say yes to this.
Does the quality of a product determine it's company's size?
Well, the quality of a company's products should contribute to its growth, and thus size.
On to TFA. I think that a company without a history of great failures will never have great innovations. The history of a willingness to accept the risk of failure is a sure sign that they are interested in innovation. I think Apple's problem has been less their products and more a misunderstanding of the market.
The Newton was pretty cool and innovative for the time. The market just wasn't ready at the time, and their marketing left a lot to be desired. Palm came in a few years later (with a less functional product) with some kick butt marketing and succeeded.
Now to argue against myself: Success in business comes from knowing the market, the product is secondary. For example, McDonalds sells the absolutely worst hamburger of any fast food chain. They also sell more than all the other chains combined.
Re:"Apples == expensive" not a stereotype (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's already not as good a value, even before you start getting into "intangibles" like OS X. Sorry.
Re:Flops at Apple are predictable (Score:1, Insightful)
Probably about time to let go, methinks. Jobs didn't kill the Apple ][ -- the IBM PC killed the Apple ][.
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Apple's biggest failure (Score:5, Insightful)
The original Mac ran on a 68000. A slow 16/32-bit processor with no MMU or support for VM. It also had limited memory.
There is nothing wrong with assembly language or cooperative scheduling, if you are willing to take the time to do it well and in a disciplined manner.
The Mac team did their best with what was available at a reasonable cost. I'm not going to blame them for decisions that were suboptimal on processors that would not exist for many years.
If you wanted a Xerox workstation, they were available, at stratospheric prices.
Re:II GS (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the major peeves I have with the x86 architecture is that the whole instruction set is a kludge. And seein' as I _am_ otherwise a PC fan and have some years of x86 assembly programming experience, I think I can say that as a fact, not trolling.
We've been stuck with, what, 8 general purpose registers? And for what? Just so someone could theoretically still run an ancient 8086 piece of software on it. Except it still won't actually run any software from that era, except in an emulator like DosBox, because of other factors.
And in turn the 8086 was hardly more than a 16 bit hack of the 8080 architecture.
And for an awfully long time, those 8 weren't even that general purpose. E.g., "LOOP" (decrement a counter, jump back to the beginning of the loop if not zero) would _only_ work on CX. E.g., integer multiplication or division again, were hard wired to use only AX and DX. Etc.
And this isn't just about assembly programming. Yeah, you could spend days rewriting stuff to get juuust the right combination of registers for it to work right. It also hurt compiler generated code, and even today it still does. Probably 99% of the speed advantage an Athlon 64 gets in 64 bit mode comes just from AMD's _finally_ breaking byte code compatibility in that mode, to provide twice the number of general purpose registers.
Now kindly get your old Apple II manuals and look at the 6502's instruction set. Egad. Just the thought of giving that one 32 bit registers and calling it a day, is not a pleasant thought.
No, IMHO Apple did the right thing there. They could have emulated the 6502, though, like they did with the 68000 when they moved to PowerPC.
Re:Limits of Innovation (Score:3, Insightful)
So is BMW. Not all business models are alike.
Unfortunately, the only measure of success for a public corporation is whether it makes money. Apple makes money. Apple is a successful company. Just because Microsoft makes even more money doesn't mean that Apple (or any other successful company) is a failure.
Re:"Apples == expensive" not a stereotype (Score:5, Insightful)
My dad got one for $999 with DVD burner, 80gb HD, etc.
Not only is this laptop sub-1000$, it specs closely to the Mac and is a much better deal than the 12" iBook. In fact, I bought one myself when I was shopping for a laptop and even w/ the Apple education discount, the Averatec was a better deal.
Re:So much easier to knock down than to build up (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell, look at the C5! A single person electric vehicle? Don't be silly! Oh, wait look at that Segway, and the thousands of little electric or small petrol engined scooters, or....
When someone is successful and respected, a little light rib-poking is generally considered acceptable.
Just to clarify ... (Score:3, Insightful)
This manipulates the supply side, not the demand side, as was implied. They're not "creating demand" they're "preventing a supply spike" caused by old and new models overlapping. You can't "create demand" by manipulating supply, you create demand by e.g. doing more marketing. Most shoppers aren't after a particular model, they just want a X or a Y, and could go either way while shopping depending on how they feel that day, which means X and Y effectively compete. By clearing stock of X before introducing Y you lower the supply and variety of choice.
Of course, by clearing stock totally before introducing a new product, and leaving a gap inbetween, with the hopes that those shopping during the gap will then wait until Y because they can't buy an X, is unwise because that shopper is more likely to just use that gap to switch to a competitor's product Z .. this is especially true in the PC market, where there is mostly competition amongst component manufacturers, e.g. ATI vs NVIDIA, Seagate vs Western Digital, and so on. For an Apple user it might mean buying a PC.
Re:II GS (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you missed the point at last Macworld.. Jobs is going for the total, "rich" computing experience and that means Ipod/Itunes is central to the strategy. Spinning off Ipod/Itunes would basically mean nothing has changed since 1999.. The MiniMac and Ibook range are tog et new clients into the fold.. as Jobs puts it, to get the new users introduced to OS-x and annex all the integrated software, I-Life... Once you have a mac in (almost) every (pc)household you can be sure that Itunes will be the monopolist on the music segment. I suspect that Itunes may just be what necks the music industry as we know it, they will all be slaves to Jobs,. Just look and see what Sony does.. they would like to compete with Apple on Music but they won't, they will bend over and take it up the firewire...
Re:an old, tired rant (Score:3, Insightful)
So I'll say the opposite: I keep hearing the "old, tired rant" that performance doesn't matter, architecture doesn't matter, even developper or code quality doesn't matter. Let's just make a turd and let the compiler handle it.
Nope, sorry. Just isn't true. The performance difference in the A64's case _is_ there. That's what 64 bit vs 32 bit benchmarks measure there: the speed with and without the extra registers.
You may notice how for any other CPU, 64 bit mode is actually _slower_. E.g., the UltraSparc comes to mind. In case you wondered why most applications on a shiny new UltraSparc machine are still 32 bit. On it a 32 bit program actually runs measurably faster than the same program compiled as a 64 bit program.
Because when you have the exact same instructions, and the exact same number of the registers, transferring more data slows you down.
But not the A64. There 64 bit mode is actually faster. What's different? Twice the registers, that's what's different.
Compilers have come a long way, yes. They can do much better with a bad ISA than 10 years ago, yes. Indeed. And you can even take the tired old argument that "bah, for Word and Internet explorer they don't need a faster CPU anyway."
But completely polish a turd into a gold nugget, no, they can't. They can bring it sorta close enough, but no more.
Taking Risks (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes, as with the iPod, they come up with the right product at the right time and win big. However, sometimes they get there too early: the Newton was ahead of it's time and much better than the other first generation PDAs, but people just weren't ready to buy them yet.