How Sun Bought Apple Computer (Almost) 307
Hugh Pickens writes "There was a time in the 1990s when Sun, at its wealthiest, was poised to buy Apple when it was at the lowest point in its storied history and now eWeek reports on how the deal for Sun to buy Apple fell through. 'Back in late 1995 early '96, when we were at our peak, we were literally hours away from buying Apple for about $5 to $6 a share,' says former Sun CEO Ed Zander. 'I don't know what we were going to do with it, but we were going to buy it.' Sun co-founder Scott McNealy adds that there was an investment banker on the Apple side who basically blocked it. 'He put so many terms into the deal that we couldn't afford to go do it.' Would there be iPhones, iPads and iPods on the market today if Sun Microsystems had been able to close a deal to buy out Apple in the mid-1990s? No, says McNealy. 'If we had bought Apple, there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads ... I'd have screwed that up.'"
He'd have screwed it up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well at least he's being honest about it.
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As Apple did not invent the idea of Pad computing, I'm quite certain there would have been others to market. The only questions are whether they would have been as successful or achieved the brand recognition that Apple has.
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I was trying to make another point, but whatever.
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot, the internet's center for pedantry.
Re:He'd have screwed it up. (Score:4, Funny)
It's more like the epicenter for pedantry.
Ahem... (Score:2, Informative)
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot, the internet's center for pedantry.
Internet is a proper noun [internetis...ernoun.net].
(See what I did there?)
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That was ready for use in 1989. Not "still in the development phase" the way the Newton was.
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That was in 1989, ready to use, years before the Newton was ready for use.
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I agree with the first half of your post, but "before the web, the computers were not that useful to many people"? For FSM's sake...
The web arrived in people's consciousness in about 1995. At that time computers have been around 30-40-odd years, desktop computers maybe 15. And you really saying corporations didn't use IBM XTs in the 80's as productivity-improving tools?
Fucking kids... Heck, I remember banks getting worried about the Michelangelo virus, and that was 1992!
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Perhaps not, but one can dream.
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> whether a world without iPads or iPods would be any different.
I never would have succeeded as a supplier of feminine hygiene products if it weren't for pad casting.
Re:He'd have screwed it up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by what actually happened, the answer would be "yes", but the outcome would have differed, and taken far longer to realize overall. After all, there have been tablets for 10 years now, and portable mp3 players out long before the iPod.
I think that, while many like to deride Apple for many reasons, there is one thing that, at least IMHO, commands respect: Apple has a knack for producing products that folks like to use, in forms that make it drop-easy to do so... and in turn they do revolutionize the industry in question, forcing competitors to adopt, adapt, or perish.
Take the iPad... Microsoft and OEMs have had tablets out since 2001-2002 or so. OTOH, those products, well... sucked. They were expensive for what they did, the functionality was crap, the battery drained almost as fast as the laptops did, and the UI was ill-fitted for the job. Then the iPad comes along - a bit limited in flexibility, but almost perfect for the form-factor and what folks expected of it. Battery life is insanely long. The UI is almost perfect for fingers (stylus? who needs that?) And everything about it just seems to 'click' with the non-techie public.
Almost immediately, and like *every other Apple product*, competitors (including Microsoft) begin aping the thing... and in a repeatable progression: First we see a ton of vaporware and 'concept' demos, then massive promises (most of which fall short), then out comes the blatant (and undeniably crap) imitators, and finally, a long time later, some competitors begin trickling in with a few halfway decent competitors... af first falling well short of the mark, in spite of being somewhat decent products in their own right. Eventually the competition becomes almost as capable, perhaps surpassing the Apple product - but by then Apple has the market pretty much sewn up - if not in marketshare, then in profit share. The iPod was like this. Even the iPhone is like this.
I think OTOH that Sun would have dickered around, then come out with a few enterprise-oriented versions, then let them each die, while more consumer-oriented competitors would have picked up the torch and limped along.
I do have to give props to Apple for one thing - without them, most consumer-oriented tech would have likely progressed a whole lot slower than it has. I also think that a lot of corollary bits (e.g. digital music licensing, apps, mobile smartphones, etc) would have been slowed down, if not stalled completely. I say this because Microsoft would have just sat around for the most part, and Linux would have had a much harder time getting anywhere (esp. w/o Google jump-starting things). I mean, sure, there are things that have moved along and disrupted tech nicely w/o Apple, but when you examine them (netbooks for instance), they're not much more than incremental iterations of existing products... not complete disruptors.
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The fatal flaw in Microsoft's "tablet" PC was that it was designed around the pen based computing concept. The GUI was optimized for stylus, and most input was done using handwriting recognition that didn't work that well. The result was a miserable user experience and carts at your local hospital that turned a tablet into a desktop, complete with keyboard and mouse.
The current iteration of touch screen designs are vastly easier to work with, but still have some fairly serious limitations... particularly a
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Make a 7"-12" tablet priced at about $250, able to last an 8 hr workday on a single charge, able to run proprietary in-house apps (i.e. not locked to an app store), capable of real I/O (e.g. printing, able to accommodate things like a barcode scanner), and I predict sales in the tens if not hundreds of millions.
iPad is all those things, except for $250, including already in the "tens of millions" in sales.
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I think the really important thing that Apple does differently, is put the user in the center.
A lot of companies either try to open up new markets for existing products, have some new cool hardware they try to sell, or mainly cater to the OEMs and large business needs.
Apple specifically seems to start with the question of what does the user want?
Sometimes this means they end up with something that is very expensive, as usually the user wants a lot.
But the key point is that they start with a desire, and then
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad [wikipedia.org]
Re:He'd have screwed it up. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Back in college I happened upon some NeXT hardware and it was nice. It was fairly old at that point, but the stuff that still ran was quite nice indeed. The monitors were high res albeit black and white, but the interface was quite responsive and the experience was quite a bit more positive than I would've expected out of such old equipment.
I think that they probably could have taken NeXT equipment mainstream had they wanted to, although one might say that that's what OSX was.
Eh, not really (Score:4, Interesting)
""NeXT wasn't a "popular" computing company, it built high-end workstations and an object-oriented OS for the scientific and government markets, actually a lot like Sun. NeXT actually did pretty well at this"
Did pretty well? Not exactly. People loved the OS. The hardware, with that expensive-yet-trouble-prone combo optical drive... eh, not so much. Even if the hardware was beloved, there simply wasn't enough of a market in terms of total sales to support what NeXT was spending. They burned through cash at a mind-boggling rate. Jobs spent much of his fortune from Apple on NeXT, and didn't have much to show for it near the end. Eventually the company downsized radically, becoming essentially a small software tools shop, selling off their expensive-yet-stylish factory facilities. There have been entire chapters written about how Jobs was at his most obsessive over things like how the furniture looked at the factory during the period. NeXT, where Jobs was totally in charge of a company for the first time, was essentially a learning experience in how NOT to run a company for him. Considering what was invested and lost in it, NeXT was considered to mostly be a failure. This is why there was such a loud "WTF?" when the public found out just how much Apple paid for NeXT. Buying NeXT? Sure. Buying NeXT for $400 million? At the time it looked insane. People generally thought "Wow, Jobs sure conned them, didn't he?".You're right in that NeXT had an "exit strategy"; having Jobs talk (sucker?) a bigger company into buying them
I use OS X and love it, so you can argue that buying NeXT was great because it gave Apple a foundation for a post-Classic operating system, but let's be honest here. Apple wasn't buying NeXT or an operating system or software tools. In retrospect, Apple was buying Steve Jobs. And it was the best investment they ever made.
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Yeah you're right, but then again when you're comparing people to a crowd the likes of Sun, SGI, Sperry, Symbolic, and Wang... :)
I'm reminded of the old Keynes line: "In the long run everybody dies." If I were a C-level exec at NeXT in 1996 and a C-level exec at Sun in 2009 (or an SGI exec in 2006) came back in a time machine and asked to switch, I definitely wouldn't take that offer. Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show
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Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.
Doesn't add up to me. What did NeXT have, in the final analysis? What does it preside over?
Also, love it, hate it, or "meh", Java is still very big today.
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NeXT has evolved into one of the top two mobile OSes on the planet. It's also one of the few desktop UNIX OSes left on the market, and probably the largest in terms of current sales volume in recent quarters. Most companies would love to have failures like that.
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Oh, and the top two mobile OS's are Symbian and Android.
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You're talking about VMS? That wouldn't be quite the same. You see VMS' ideas were used in the Windows NT Kernel but I don't think that VMS was used directly in the development of Windows NT. That's like saying AT&T's Unix became one of the most popular open source operating systems. If Windows NT would've been based on VMS however and we wouldn't have Win16/32 now then you could say that.
However Mac OS X is NeXTStep. The same kernel, the same way the interface is drawn (PostScript), the same object ori
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So how do you explain the NeXT's failure to deliver a popular product?
iOS and Mac OS X. The reason they failed until Apple bought them is their computers cost *way* too much. They were truly desirable at the time, just too expensive for most people outside of workstation applications, like scientific research and finance. The WWW was created on NeXT hardware.
Jobs is lucky and Jonathan Ives is the real genius behind Apple, or some lucky combination of the two.
Jobs ia a genius, as are Woz and Ives. Each in their own way. Woz is a low level technological/hardware hacker genius. Ives is a design genius, and Jobs is a high level "technology for people" genius. Ives was at Apple be
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The WWW was created on NeXT hardware.
citation needed
Learn to google. This isn't some well-guarded secret.
keywords: tim berners-lee cern html next
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Re:McNeally would not have screwed up everything (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple expertise combined with Sun's might have resulted in a new, easier-to-use class of workstations.
...which would have done bupkis for the consumer side, and would have cost a mint.
I think that was the whole genius of how Apple did it - they have an almost slavish devotion to how the consumer uses their products, and pretty much gave up on the business/enterprise side of things, outside of a few feints and probes here and there (e.g. XServe). They found a whole side of computing and electronics that most OEMs only half-assed paid attention to, and leveraged it to rather enormous success.
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I think you have to look at the situation during the timeframe this merger was being discussed. At the time, Apple was almost entirely dependent on creative workstations and high-end desktop PCs. The few consumer devices they produced had bombed, and there was almost no indication that Apple could be successful as a consumer electronics brand other than their high name recognition.
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And that explains the pathological hatred of buttons? Simplifying is good, but there's a reason why Apple is the only company to use a 1 button mouse, and why the early mouses all had 3 buttons. Single button mouses suck.
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And that explains the pathological hatred of buttons? Simplifying is good, but there's a reason why Apple is the only company to use a 1 button mouse, and why the early mouses all had 3 buttons. Single button mouses suck.
There are good reasons for a single-button mouse. The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking, and adding buttons that can be clicked just confuses. I should click the icon? The normal button or the menu button? How many times? Why do I sometimes use one button and at other times the other? There's also a menu up top already with all the same things and more... when should I use which? The second reason is that Apple selling a single-button mous
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The first is that non-technical users simply don't understand the concept of right or left clicking, and adding buttons that can be clicked just confuses.
I'd phrase that as "less sophisticated users"; I suspect many of the more sophisticated users who are "non-technical" understand context menus.
There's also a menu up top already with all the same things and more... when should I use which?
Use the menu button if 1) the thing you want to do is, or might be, on the context menu and 2) you don't want to have to move the mouse to get a menu.
The second reason is that Apple selling a single-button mouse (not sure if they still do though)
That depends on what you call a "button"; the only mouse I see is the Magic Mouse [apple.com].
forces UI designers to make their products single-button navigable.
No, because Command+Click pops up a contextual menu, just as right-click does in several other GUIs. [apple.com] Yes, they say "Always ensure that
On the other hand ... (Score:3)
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PC hardware key to Apple's success (Score:2)
It could have resulted in Apple retaining unique hardware, rather than moving to Intel CPUs. Of course, whether that would be for the better or the worse is an open question.
Apple's move to PC hardware was key to its success. They basically doubled their market share after moving from PPC to x86. The consumer no longer had to choose Mac OS or Windows, they could have both(*). This made the decision to buy a Mac much easier for many.
(*) Yes there was emulation under PPC but it was far less practical, especially for games.
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The G5s were nice, but they weren't going to keep up with Intel for long. The G4s in the laptops were very power efficient, but dog slow at the end.
Apple HAD to move off PPC, it was unsustainable. x86 was the only option. Cheap, easily sourced, constantly speeding up.
If Apple went to something else, they'd still have to keep up with Intel. Only the x86 has enough volume that the processor makers can afford to keep doing that.
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In other news... (Score:3)
In other news, a few years ago, Microsoft was poised to buy Yahoo!'s search engine but didn't. Would there be Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Bing, and Yahoo! Mail if Microsoft had been able to close a deal to buy out Yahoo! in the mid-2000s? No, says Balmer. "If we had bought Yahoo!, there wouldn't have been Yahoo! Search or Yahoo! Bing ... I'd have screwed that up."
We'll have more on that story and other past attempted company takeover news at '11.
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I call this a hoax. Ballmer would never admit he's a screwup. He'd rather throw a chair at you.
"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads" (Score:2)
Because of course without Jobs and Apple the world would be utterly bereft of "innovation".
Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads" (Score:5, Interesting)
It would have been there, but it would have been a whole lot slower. Way slower, IMHO.
Imagine something like the iPod coming out just this year, instead of 10 years ago. Imagine the RIAA going even more apeshit (yeah, I know) and keeping the music biz locked down to where digital music was either illegal, or locked down under so much DRM that it would have been nearly impossible to use. Imagine smartphones still being over-priced and slow piles of crap, with the useful models being hella expensive, and apps being distributed (if at all) under carrier lockdown. Imagine still having to use tablets with a stylus, crap specs, crappier battery life, and all of them still running Windows.
I know full well that others would have filled the void, certainly. Problem is, they would have been very slow about it, and innovation would come in fits and starts, with Microsoft running the show (that, or doing its best to ruin the show if it couldn't get a piece of the action - see also netbooks when those all first came out running Linux - notice how all the sudden Microsoft got all wonky with the licensing all the sudden, sometimes threatening vendors outright?).
Re:"there wouldn't have been iPods or iPads" (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.google.com/patents?vid=4667088 [google.com]
Or maybe you meant something more like this:
http://www.techpin.com/the-first-mp3-player/ [techpin.com]
Oh yeah, we really needed Apple to get portable music.
Let's get real here. Apple's strength is not in creating new technologies, but in making new technologies look pretty and in marketing those technologies. If Apple had not stepped in with the iPod, we would probably have seen a market with a lot of competing companies, making uglier products.
Innovation is a continuous process, with or without Apple. Where is Apple's research division? How does it compare with universities, or MSR, or IBM research? I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).
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He didn't say "portable music player," he said "the iPod." iPods are, granted, a kind of portable music player, but they are also different from all other portable music players in that it's an actual mass consumer product instead of some hobbyist thing. Without iPod's we'd still have portable music players, but they'd all play ATRACS off of Memory Sticks...
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I don't think the argument about who invented the portable(personal) digital media player is relevant to the question of why Apple (who was several years late) dominates the market. The next tech company that correctly answers that question will dominate the rest of the market and challenge Apple.
In an analogy: Ford did not invent the automobile, nor did he invent assembly line production, and his first product was limited in capability and appearance but the price was such that almost anyone could buy it.
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I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).
Just like how Chess AI is relevant to consumers now.
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If by "look pretty" you mean "functionally usable", then yes. Before iTunes would take multiple apps to rip, organize, and play your mp3s. Even then you'd still probably be moving them all about manually file by file. Before the iPhone, phones could view webpages and probably better in bullet points, but were practically useless. You could get more information out of 5 minutes on the iPhone's safari and an hour on most phone browsers. Even what you probably mean
and nothing of value... (Score:3, Insightful)
And nothing of value would have been lost. Perhaps, even, actual useful computing devices would have been developed, instead of shiny geegaws. Perhaps the Apple of Woz would have won out over the Apple of Jobs.
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Hankering for the days when computers came in kit form and a portable music player mean using granddad's wheelchair to ferry around the phonograph? Yup, that's certainly a demographic upon which one could build a business.
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Re:and nothing of value... (Score:5, Funny)
How about the days when people did not have to worry about breaking the law just to the software they wanted to run on the computers they legally purchased?
I think you a word.
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Are you writing from the future? If so, in what year did this become the norm for computers? Are Twinkies still available, or did the health mafia finally outlaw them?
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How about the days when people did not have to worry about breaking the law just to the software they wanted to run on the computers they legally purchased?
I don't have to break the law to run the software I want to run on the computer I legally purchased - and I purchased it from Apple and and running an OS from Apple. I just happened to buy the right computer for that purpose - one of the computers running Mac OS X, rather than one of the computers running iOS.
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I had one of these bad boys years before the iPod first appeared. Rio PMP300 [wikipedia.org] And my PMP500 was really a great player. Even at the time that Apple first released their players, Creative amongst others had already created their Nomad line.
It might be that we wouldn't have players like the iPod without Apple, but let's be honest, the iPods were never the best players out, the sound quality wasn't ever as good as the competition and the feature list somewhat anemic compared to other lines of players.
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Don't bash Steve for something Bill started. The "clueless, tech-illiterate" user is a result of Windows more than any Apple product. The only difference is that Windows taught people that they can be illiterates and still use a tool, while Apple finally actually delivered to that promise. What Apple did was simply to go all the way and not only give people an easy approach to whatever they want to do but also disable them from fucking things up.
This is mainly the reason why I have not and will not ever own
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Isn't it wonderful? that we, in today's age, have people actually proud of their own ignorance. Simply magnificent.
But I guess you're one of those that views driver's licenses as an useless invasion of privacy because if I paid for it I'm obviously able to use it, right?
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technological masturbation (Score:2)
Isn't it wonderful? that we, in today's age, have people actually proud of their own ignorance. Simply magnificent.
There's a vast difference between "being proud of one's own ignorance" and "understanding what one's needs are".
I have a MacBook Pro. I love it. I just want to get down to business, not masturbate with shell scripts and config files to boost my sense of self worth. That's not saying that I don't understand how a computer functions, far from it, but rather that I don't feel the need to incorporate needlessly complex things into my daily life.
But anyway, when the time comes to fuck around, I can open-up the t
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I seem to remember the "computer as an appliance" concept being something Steve Jobs wanted to push all the way back in the 1980s. What do you think "computer as an appliance" means, if not "computer for hopelessly clueless users who should remain clueless?"
"Computer for somebody who has better things to do with his or her time than tweak stuff to make it work"?
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Windows 3.0 came out in 1990 and Mac OS came out in 1984. I'm not sure how exactly that makes MS first to dumb down the interface for the benefit of people lacking technical proficiency. And don't count those earlier revisions of Windows, they were complete unusable crap also they were after Mac OS was released anyways.
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Apple does a lot better respecting the intelligence and freedoms of their customers than the average Apple-trolling slashdotter.
That was the first time, there were more (Score:3)
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Total Perspective Vortex (Score:5, Insightful)
I love the trolls' complete and total lack of objectivity. Hundreds of millions of iDevices sold, arguably the first economically successful tablet, a company that could turn on a dime and recreate their hardware jumping from PPC to Intel, and OS 9 to OS X in a seamless fashion, and gain enough financial success to ecplipse Microsoft...and yet 'nothing of value is lost'.
Here's a hint for the younguns: There's room for more than one successful company in the world, and one being successful doesn't mean no others will be. If you don't like 'em, don't buy 'em...but to ignore their success is foolhardy. It's what makes people like Nokia lose their position in the economy.
Sun would have pre-empted iphone (Score:2)
I doubt there would be iphones if this had happened. Sun seems to suffer from the lack of marketing skill and understanding of how average users operates and developing an environment that is suitable for them.
One of the reasons Sun has been doing so poorly as well, and why their business model is wrong and failing, is that the market for supercomputers and mainframes is shrinking. Businesses realise now that you can completely replace millions of dollars computer complexes of 30 years ago with a few $500 c
Almost bought Vmware.... (Score:2)
Have the same thoughts as Zander.
Back in 1998 (I think) the company I work for was recommended/poised to buy this little company that was making 6 meg virtual environments called Vmware.
Coolest shit I had ever seen up to that point, blew away Qview. Had we bought it, I have no doubt we would have screwed it up and set the whole world back by 5 years.
Not to say anything negative about the company I work for, just that I doubt they would have had the dedicated vision and creativity to develop them into the c
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Would have happened anyway. (Score:2)
MP3 players predated the iPod, and someone else, probably Sony, would have owned that market. The iPod wasn't the innovation. The iTunes store was the innovation. Jobs' contribution was making micropayments work.
Tablet computers had been tried many times before Apple. The hardware, and the wireless networking, weren't ready. Nor was the entertainment market. Early tablets were intended as general-purpose computers. Modern tablets are output-mostly devices, for which a touch screen is good enough.
Eh, no Sony failed (Score:2)
ANYONE could have produced the iPod but NOBODY did. MS failed, Sony failed, Philips failed, Samsung failed, Sharp failed. EVERYONE failed. Apple with the iPod took an extremely fragmented industry and took the vast majority of the market share because they simply saw a market and ordered a million units so they got discounts nobody else could get and had high capacity for a reasonable price.
Sony was far to busy worrying about its music sales to pick up the billions in sales for a quality MP3 player they cer
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iPod + iTunes integration was the innovation, plus the pretty slick and easy to use UI. I've seen people puzzled by iRiver and Archos devices have no problems with iPods.
Wow! An honest investment banker!?! (Score:2)
I always thought SGI should have bought them (Score:2)
At the time in the mid 90s, SGI was still something of a leader in high end visualization, graphics, animation, 3D. Apple was a leader in easy-to-use GUI and pretty much the only game in town for 2D graphics and publishing.
I always saw it as a good fit, with SGI providing the datacenter/high end technology Apple lacked while Apple could provide SGI with the end-user interface they lacked and the desktop-type end users.
The OS merger would have been OS X before OS X -- IRIX back end with the Mac OS GUI.
The combined company (Score:4, Funny)
Consider what else was happening in this timeframe (Score:2)
McNealy's a friggin' moron. (Score:2)
"If we had just grabbed the Intel Pentium chip and done a one-way and two-way pizza box with Solaris on it, Linux never would have happened. And we would have hit that whole next wave that was post-2000 and we would have had all the little startups.
McNealy forgets that Linux was a labor of love. If Solaris had shipped on commodity x86 hardware from Sun, that wouldn't have changed the game. The initial userbase behind Linux were the hackers who had been doing work on it in university and in their spare time. When it came for dot-coms to hit the web, everyone already knew Linux. Even if Sun hardware was cheap, no one knew Solaris.
"Screwed it up"? (Score:2)
Who's to say that Sun wouldn't have come out with something functionally similar but less-Apple? That's not a bad thing: Sun technology has always been awesome and useful.
I feel assured by Sun's awesomeness at the time that, if they'd bought Apple, they'd have taken the Newton concept and turned it into something incredible and usable. Sun was/is great at hardware design, hardware utilization, and simplified user interfaces. The Palm hegemony of the time wasn't really so awesome that Sun couldn't have taken
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If Sun was so awesome, and run so well, why do they no longer exist?
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Bad marketing and poor vision. Had they put focus behind certain projects (OpenSolaris, VirtualBox) they could easily be competing with both the bigger SAN providers and Citrix/VMware on the virtualization fronts.
Apple prices would've fit well into their portfolio, though.
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I'm not sure I follow your logic, but
ooh look, something shiny
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Apple stuff isn't just "shiny". Apple wins customers by "shiny", but retains them by "just works". And, bluntly, as much as I hate it as much as the next geek, that's what the consumers want: Just working stuff.
Say what you want about Apple, but one thing they managed to do: Make stuff work. They streamlined everything, tucked everything remotely 'technical' away from the user, gives him only what he 'needs' and most people don't bother to ask for more.
I wouldn't want one, since I want to own my hardware an
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It just works at being shiny, i.e. at providing minimal features for a lazy consumer to entertain himself with. Neither the iPhone nor the iPad provide anything new which makes them realistic tools for productive work. Put another way, I've not found any work application where the iPhone or iPad is in some way the best choice.
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Actually, geeks with actual jobs as engineers and programmers love OS X. But carry on.
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A good example is the Supercomputing conference. I go every year, and while obviously the clusters on the floor have 0 Apple representation there are tons of Mac Pros and Minis driving visualization displays (or even iMacs acting as vis boxes) and, most importantly, the laptops people are using are roughly 30% Thinkpads, 30% Dell, 35% Apple, and 5% everything else (and I'm probably overstating Dell at the cost of Thinkpads and Apple machi
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Apple is what was wrong about the last decade. They produced mass-marketed shiny for consumers.
Putting aside the decades-old "Apple makes products for morons" talking point, god forbid a company produce something consumers want.
Your type would probably be happy living on an isolated planet where everything is Linux-based and only runs on a command line, every function requires ten steps to perform, and all your MP3 players have tiny one-line LCDs and songs are navigated by repeatedly clicking on a d-pad.
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Nope. Microsoft provides a reasonable balance for the average user. A good 90% of the computing world agree.
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True re Sun by the late '90s - concision led to imprecision, sorry.
As to Apple's stock price, I couldn't give two hoots. That's determined by the demand of shares on the secondary market, in turn determined by nothing much since they don't pay dividends. In particular, it's not determined by whether they're producing high quality products to help people produce. They are not.
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Being Java, I would expect even dying to take longer ... seriously, Java in the browser in the mid '90s was painful. Even today, you don't see it much.
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Well, at least her on the 'dot we have communities of WebOS, Windows, Android, Emacs, Java, and Linux consumers to offset this with their stern rationality and scrupulous abstention from any appearance of advocacy...
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Most Apple true believers are simply people who hate MS and Intel
Any Apple true believer who currently hates Intel is only going to be buying iPhones, iPods (touch or non-touch), iPads, or the current flavor of Apple TV. Anything else from Apple (other than keyboards and mice and AirPort base stations and other accessories) has Intel Inside(TM) (and, for all I know, the keyboard has Intel Inside(TM) in the form of an 8052 or whatever the controller chip is).
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It think you got your dates wrong. The acquisition attempt was in late 1995 or early 1996.
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This incident happened in 1995.