Someday You'll Hate Apple (And Google Too)

jfruhlinger writes "Think today's world, where Apple is the innovative underdog, Google is the company that does no evil, and Microsoft sits atop its throne as ruler of an evil empire. Will this state of affairs last forever? You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstart Bill Gates. Don Reisinger muses on the fickleness of consumer loves and hates. 'It's that same [level of] success and its own questionable privacy practices that will lead to Google's PR downfall and propel it into a position of disdain going forward. Trust me, the future of Apple and Google may look bright from an economic standpoint, but these companies will be hated one day too. Sad, but true.'"

Re:Not quite the same

[linumax]

Apple and Google wrote their own software from the ground up. Bill Gates bought DOS from another programmer

The only thing they use that isn't theirs is *occasionally* zope/plone and whatever web server du jour.

Umm... Google Maps?! Youtube? Picasa? Google Earth?

and in Apple's case, Darwin that you conceded, Filemaker? iTunes (not the store) ?

others are pointing out more.
Are you RDF positive?

Re:Not quite the same

[Detritus]

Woz wrote Apple BASIC, also known as Integer BASIC. Applesoft BASIC was a later product.

Re:Not quite the same

[scubamage]

Watch Revolution OS, and the Pirates of Silicon Valley and rethink that. Bill Gates stole a large amount of publically available code to create Altair BASIC. He did some work with it, but nothing compared to what he took - without attribution.

Re:Not quite the same

[bhtooefr]

Um, what?

The Apple ][ family was MOS/WDC. There might have been 1 or 2 Intel chips on some of the motherboards, but the CPU was an MOS 6502 (or a second-source clone, usually Synertek or Rockwell,) WDC 65C02 (actually, an NCR second-source clone,) or WDC 65C816 (a VLSI second-source clone.)

Nope.

[lancejjj]

You must not remember the days when everybody loved that scrappy upstate Bill Gates.

I don't remember the days when everyone loved Gates, and I lived through them all.

In fact, we all remember when Bill Gates announced to Homebrew that he was planning to sell his BASIC interpreter for cash. Trust me, there were quite a few displeased people - not because they wanted "good stuff for free", but because it corrupted a community that was sharing its work for the great benefit.

I thought it was fair - even smart - but I also concluded that his approach turned off the exact community that he was trying to sell to. "Customers be damned" comes to mind.

And that was back in 1976. Don't get me wrong - Apple also had a crappy dozen years, when its machines were named Macs with a number. Apple was despised, even by its strongest supporters.

But Apple later learned that you have to have great products that your customers love. Google knows this too. GM? Not so much. Microsoft? No, not any more. Maybe someday they'll come back.

GM has been in the dumps for decades - so can Microsoft. Apple and Google will continue as long as their management knows that you have to strive for excellent products.

Re:Speaking of Google

[Moryath]

Repeatedly.

Unfortunately, there are (and don't say there aren't) certain apps we use that Firefox and Opera just don't like to behave with.

Plus, if you take Google Crapbar and any other "helper" toolbars out of the equation, IE7 runs just fine. It's the crapbars causing the crash, every time - and half the time Google Crapbar turns out to have gotten into the system in some little "tag-along" arrangement, usually through an "automatic update" of Java or Acrobat Reader where you have to go into the "advanced" install mode to DENY the Google Crapbar permission to install.

Re:Not quite the same

[Gilmoure]

Apple did not steal any code for Lisa/Mac OS. Apple purchased the right (with a large amount of stock) to look over Xerox Parc's work, hire some of their developers and then reverse engineer the GUI they saw there. One thing they got wrong is that when they saw Xerox's GUI, they thought they saw windows tiled over each other. Apple then had it's engineers go and figure out how this was done when Xerox actually didn't have that happening. Apple also came up with the idea of icons representing verbs or actions as opposed to just representing objects or data files. So yeah, they did build on what went before but they paid for the privilege. And the way Apple stock went up back in the 80's, Xerox did pretty well.

As for MS innovation, MS required Apple to give them their source code for Mac OS so that they could code up the first version of Excel. It wasn't until Windows 1 came out and Apple engineers poked around in it that they found Apple code used in Windows. That was finally settled with the $150M stock transfer back in the late 90's.

Re:Speaking of Google

[toleraen]

Google is definitely in Java updates by default (just unchecked the install box yesterday...) and I believe it's in Flash as well.

Re:Speaking of Google

[SanityInAnarchy]

Completely offtopic, but when on Windows, I use the IETab Firefox extension. I'd rather use Firefox for absolutely everything that I can, and just have a few open tabs with the IE engine, rather than a completely separate browser. Configured right, and users won't really notice.

Also, complain loudly to whoever's responsible for those apps. It seems likely they won't care, but it seems equally likely that they're just waiting for enough people to complain, so they can make the case to their bosses.

Re:No, we hated Apple from time to time

[Richard Steiner]

I have a whole LAN full of 10+ year old PCs running Warp 4, BeOS 5 Pro, various Linux flavors including modern DSL and Puppy distros, and Win2k (which works just fine on a SCSI PPRo/200 albeit a bit slowly as long as you feed it enough RAM). Three of those boxes have CD burners.

Sounds like the issue is yours, not the age of your machines...

Re:No, we hated Apple from time to time

[Richard Steiner]

My two 1998 IBM IntelliStations (model 6899, baby!) came with Intel EEPro/100B NICs configured for Wake-on-LAN, which are *very* nice cards, and the Compaq Deskpro 6200's I have came with 3Com NICs. 3C905B-TX cards, I think. I'd have to look. ;-)

Networking was commonplace in the PC world in 1998. Heck, my OS/2 box was built in 1996 and has an EEPro/100B in it compliments of Micron.

Re:New definition of genius...

[tbannist]

Not exactly. Microsoft became a monopoly through a series of illegal activities. Sure, they didn't hold a gun to anyone head to force them to use Windows, but they did slander and sabotage the competition. They did use their early monopoly power (when they were the only OS for IBM PCs) to sign exclusionary deals with computer vendors to ensure that no other OS could compete. They have practiced discriminatory pricing against any retailer who dared to carry non-MS OSes with the clear intent of driving them out of business for defying Microsoft. They conquered the office suite marketplace by burning it to the ground, and using their OS monopoly rents to outlast their competition. They have a various times deliberately modified their operating system to prevent competitors products from functioning properly in Windows.

In every market that Microsoft has won, they won by being the only choice left.

Re:New definition of genius...

[M-RES]

Yes, except for those who plagiarised the work of others. I count Bill Gates amongst these with his rip-off of MacOS. Some people still contest that Apple just took their ideas from Xerox - well, yes they did, but with the notable difference that they BOUGHT the rights to the software (GUI) that Xerox had shelved and in fact they also employed the Xerox staff who'd built that GUI/OS to work on the original Lisa/Mac System. Mr Gates just did a wholesale rip-off and got away with it. I know, I know, he'd already done well getting lucky by selling MSDOS to IBM prior to that (before he'd even written the OS) which some would see as a shrewd business move, but it could be argued was actually fraud (it's a common tactic of conmen to sell something to a mark that doesn't actually exist). Interesting way to start a monopolistic business venture - with a grand crime! ;)

Re:Speaking of Google

[CornMaster]

You could just change all of their shortcuts to launch IE like this:
iexplore.exe -extoff

That should take care of most of the crap addins.

Re:One day?

[wish bot]

The machines were much better for some tasks despite the processor speed difference. I can remember quite clearly photoshop and illustrator choking on large files on P3 Wintels where the G4 Powermacs would handle them just fine. Even the apparent interface response time of later G4s seemed better to our graphics guys than - on paper - much faster P4's. This made them 'faster' i.e. they could do more in a set time. There was a reason that Macs were used in DTP houses, and it wasn't the design of their cases.

Re:Which Apple supports to a great extent!!!

[mjwx]

Darwin (open source, base for )

Apple Killed it,

GCC (used for Apple development tools, significant updates added by Apple for Objective C support)
Apache (OS X ships with Apache built in)
PHP, Perl, Ruby

All Open licensed before Apple got their hands on it. Apple doesnt have a choice but to support them (if open in name only) if they want to continue using them.

All sorts of BSD tools

Name one?

The other three you mentioned, I've never used, two of them I've never heard of. I've only heard about Rendezvous because it had a cross platform vulnerability.

Apple has taken far more from FOSS than it puts back and it only puts back because if they didn't we would stop them from taking.