5 ms·

Is Steve Jobs Repeating His Past Mistakes?

39 points by ssclafani 16y ago

dkuchar 16y ago
yes
- dkuchar 16y ago
  wow i expected up-votes for this. jobs is one of the greatest innovators of our time. but he got completely destroyed by microsoft last time, and he's going to get similarly beaten by android and google.
whatwhatwhat 16y ago
My gut reaction was yes just because I had already had this thought before.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
etherael 16y ago
but the fact that AAPL now has a larger market cap than MSFT, twelve years after Jobs' return to Apple, has to give one pause. This just reads to me that Microsoft has been failing hard since the great succession and Apple is capitalising on the void more than Apple's excellent strategy would've won the game against Microsoft back in the day. My take is that Apple will lose, and yes, history is repeating himself. They'll lose in the mobile/tablet space to Android handset/tablets, and they'll maybe lose in the "real computer" space (eventually) to Ubuntu/Chrome OS or a revitalized Microsoft. I'm more confident of the former than the latter though, have heard "year of the linux desktop" just too many damned times.
- theli0nheart 16y ago
  What makes you think they'll lose in the mobile space? Isn't there something to be said for the difficulty of developing on a fragmented platform? From yesterday: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/23/2313245/Fragmentation-vs-Obsolescence-In-the-Android-Ecosphere http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/23/2313245/Fragmentatio...
  - etherael 16y ago
    The same reason that they lost in the computing space originally, which was the point of the article. I also don't buy that android is fragmented, I've read that story as well as the stories where people were whispering about fragmentation before the first devices were even released. Saying that android is vulnerable to fragmentation because of varying hardware features and screen resolutions of devices which use it is quite similar to positions stating the same about windows imho. Also, Apple are being so relentlessly bad strategically on OS X Touch I think it would take a lot less than a technically superior implementation on technically superior hardware to beat them. But hey, I could be wrong, personally I am a very happy Linux user, this would be good prima facie evidence that I am "out of touch with the market" ;)
    - ams6110 16y ago
      No Microsoft achieved dominance in the PC space because it was the "safe" choice. IBM PCs were not cheap back in the day, but neither were Selectrics and in the business world, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Once Windows came along, businesses had the choice of keeping compatibility with their existing PC software and hardware or starting over with Macintosh. Most made the easy choice. And consumers who used PCs at work typically bought the same platform for home so they could install pirate copies of Wordperfect or Lotus 123 or Microsoft Word/Excel from the office. Unlike then, in the mobile space, and now the tablet space, Apple has won the huge market share position. Microsoft, Palm, and others have been working for years on the platforms but never quite got it right for the mass consumer market. Apple did. Will Android beat them? Remains to be seen but I don't see this as history repeating itself at all.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    Android is less fragmented than Windows PC's ever have been and look how that worked out.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      The Windows features that succeeded most (loosely coupled applications with root access) don't overlap at all with what Android is trying to do. Android is trying to do tightly-coupled sandboxed applications that invoke and include one another. The Windows features in this area (like COM) all failed pretty miserably.
- philwelch 16y ago
  On marketshare, Apple is still losing the PC space to Windows. And on marketshare, they may yet lose the mobile space to Android. But in terms of profitability, it remains to be seen. And Apple just might go and attack another product category yet.
  - etherael 16y ago
    True, you can survive a long time on a small slice of the pie if you're charging like a wounded bull.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      How many analogies was that?
      - etherael 16y ago
        three?
      - abalashov 16y ago
        Metaphors, not analogies.
  - maurycy 16y ago
    APPL focuses on the high ROI clients. By definition, there's a limited supply of such clients, so they have to go into new markets.
  - jister 16y ago
    Android is still immature but if Google continues to improve it then maybe it will be on par with Apple (or much better)...someday...who knows maybe just like the Yahoo vs Google search way back.
    - stcredzero 16y ago
      The Droid Incredible seems to be comparable to the iPhone. The ecosystem needs to catch up. I'd wager that the phone service is better.
- seb 16y ago
  Does Apple want to win? They are not trying to go to cover the complete market and filling everybody's wants. In other markets doesn't one company covers the complete market. For example Ferrari is not going for the same market like Toyota, but are they failing because of that?
- bonaldi 16y ago
  By the same token, Microsoft capitalised on the void left by Sculley-era Apple. While Apple was charging thousands of dollars for underpowered Macs with 9" screens, Windows PCs could leap into the bottom end. They weren't really good: users actually wanted Macs, but couldn't afford them at home, and businesses wouldn't pay the premium at work, except where absolutely necessary (publishing and design, mostly). Software and "closedness" had nothing to do with it. The Mac had much better software -- Word and Excel were born on the Mac, as was Photoshop, Quark, Postscript, Hypercard. The question isn't "is Jobs making the same mistake?" it is "is Jobs making Sculley's mistakes?". And the answer is "no". The iPhone and iPad are aggressively priced, ensuring they go just low enough to put them in reach of people who want them, and success doesn't depend on penny-pinching CYA CIOs. Windows succeeded because it was good enough, just as Android is. Apple is trying hard to sure you don't have to settle for "good enough", you can actually have good, this time.
  - etherael 16y ago
    I don't buy it, Apple products still attract a significant premium just for the brand. You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally, which would actually be a good measure of if the hardware was worth the cost. They're just trying to tie the software to the hardware and push the benefits of the software to the average user in a way that it can't be separated from the hardware (via their DRM etc in the chips). Nothing Apple has ever made has been compelling to me in any way, shape or form. So from my perspective, they generally make worse products than the alternatives, this includes OS9, OSX, and definitely OSX touch.
    - bonaldi 16y ago
      The Mac still attracts a premium, because that's its market now, for better or worse. When it was conceived, the target price was $999, which it didn't actually hit until the underpowered Mac Classic arrived. The other products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad -- have definitely been priced to sell, even if they don't appeal to you. As for compelling, we're talking 1980s here. If the choice was DOS vs System 6, or later Win 3.1 vs System 7, the only thing in Microsoft's favour was price.
philwelch 16y ago
"'m not so sure that Jobs thinks his Macintosh strategy failed." True, but not quite in the way that the author thinks. The Macintosh lived on if you wanted one, and Windows itself only existed and innovated to catch up with Mac. The Mac made its dent on the world even if you never bought one, because it forced Microsoft to make their operating system more Mac-like. Learning to accept partial victories is part of life, and Steve's partial victories are a little more complete than some people's. (Alan Kay, anyone?)
- blasdel 16y ago
  Alan Kay is a particularly odd case — he's had to start over with Smalltalk half a dozen times because it was too successful. Because people from elementary schoolkids to Disney to IBM were invested in it, he couldn't keep iterating. He had to leave it to them for it to rot in stasis, and go off to start over again with a new community until it happened again.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  Many of the things Alan espoused are now mainstream, and more is coming down the pike. I'd say they won. It's actually not that their way won so much, but that they are privy to certain thing that are true -- were privy before most of the rest of us. Exercise for the reader: what are the things I refer to?
jolan 16y ago
Actually, allowing 3rd party vendors to make MacOS-compatible hardware is basically what almost killed Apple to begin with. So no, he's not repeating past mistakes.
- xenophanes 16y ago
  Why was that so bad for Apple? Why didn't it work? (I have no strong opinion on the matter.)
  - etherael 16y ago
    Because they basically acted as enablers for the competition on their core profit center. I'm prone to agree that it was a bad move keeping in mind what Apple's strengths are, but then I just don't think that highly of Apple's strengths so ymmv.
  - jfb 16y ago
    Apple was and is a hardware company. The amount that made on each OS license was insignificant compared to the margins they made on their computers. This was true in the clone era and much more so today. Full disclosure: I used to work at Apple.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    Apple couldn't build better hardware or cheaper hardware than the clone makers -- they were losing on the top end and the bottom end. Today, Apple makes good top end hardware and would likely continue to compete there but allowing clones to capture the low end would dilute their premium brand.
- tullius 16y ago
  That's only because they waited to do so as a last-ditch effort after their market share cratered. At that point the cheaper alternatives were only purchased by the existing Mac faithful.
- tzs 16y ago
  I'd say the problem there wasn't allowing MacOS compatible hardware--it was requiring that hardware to be too close to Apple hardware. The clone makers were required to use Apple-approved designs for their motherboards, expansion busses, and so on. All they really had some freedom with was the case design, and they got to pick how to build the thing. This forced the clone makers into essentially the same market Apple was in, so there was almost no chance the clone makers could grow the Mac market. That isn't what the clone makers wanted. They wanted to make MacOS compatible machines aimed at markets Macs were not in, rather than just end up competing with Apple in the existing market. One of the clone makers demoed some laptops, for instance, that covered nicely parts of the laptop market Apple wasn't in, and publicly begged Apple to let them sell them. Apple wouldn't allow it. In some ways, this was a continuation of an Apple problem that started earlier, even before the PPC switch. That's the problem of too many models in a given space. I remember when I bought my Centris 650. It was a brand new model when I bought it. 14 months later it was discontinued. Apple had dozens of models like that--each a minor variation on something they already had, but with a different name. Buy a Mac, and 18 months later go to buy RAM, and it was was a pain in the ass, because the vendors no longer listed your Mac model. Want to buy a hard disk? Again a pain in the ass--because each model had a slightly different way of mounting an internal drive, and the vendors were no longer advertising the kits with a mount for your Mac (this was before the internet was big, so you couldn't just pop online and check their catalog...if it wasn't in their ad in the magazines, you had to call or send away for their catalog). Want some really cool expansion hardware that used the fast "direct to processor" bus instead of the much slower NuBus? Oh look, each model Mac had a slightly different pin-out for that bus. I think Jobs knows exactly what he's doing. He knows that what is best is to have a small number of devices that are clearly distinguished from each other, and have a large amount of non-overlap in the markets they are best for (although one might argue that MacBook and MacBook Pro have a lot of market overlap).
sx 16y ago
Even if Apple allowed 3rd party vendors to make IPhone OS compatible phones, Android would still be free and Google would still push it as hard as possible, so the competition would still be there (which by the way is really good). Also, it's not easy to beat "free" from the vendors' perspective. I think the iPhone will continue having a significant market share and I think Apple will continue innovating. In the meantime, the Android market share will grow, possibly beyond the iPhone share, but I don't see why it's necessary to only have one winner that takes it all. I think both companies, along with RIM, will do fine
forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
Steve Jobs? mistakes? It seems to me really strange to find people like Steve Jobs that belong to the group of "most successful people in the world", economical, personal and socially, being criticized by someone random on Internet, giving him lessons on what he should be doing. Of course Steve Jobs is human, and makes "mistakes",he is not a deity, but as a human, he had more successes than anyone else I know in the IT field in a sustained way over the time. In fact what this blogger considers "mistakes" is what I like about people like Steve "everything that Jobs has ever done in his career has suggested that he loves great products more than market share." Thank God!! some people care about products and not getting more and more rich like the Banks, whose financial successes come from stealing other people work, or getting monopolies from destroying competition and benefiting from that, or getting(paying) the politicians to agree with them. Not everything in life is money, marketshare ... and I respect the guys of google or Apple because they cared first about the product, and the got money and marketshare as a consequence later because people love good products. Their primary goal was to benefit their customers and they benefited from that. Those that try to first benefit themselves with crappy products, tricking their customers to buy it using only false advertising, corrupting others to give them market privileges(today you have to pay corrupt officers to have the right to sell to some countries), well, those are the mistaken companies.
- ryandvm 16y ago
  Need a refill on that Kool-Aid?
pkaler 16y ago
Different situation. Developers make more money on the iPhone/iPad/iPod than Android at the moment. Developers will continue to target the platform where they make the most money. Apple treats Apps as a switching cost. The more Apps and content that a user purchases, the less likely there are to move to a competing platform. Microsoft won because Office, Outlook, games, etc increased the switching cost. Once you were over in the Microsoft camp, you were there forever. There was zero user churn. The whole point of the Get A Mac campaign was about how the switching cost was now low. Google treats Apps and content as a commodity. Ship your App and make crumbs from AdSense and AdMob. Google's switching cost is in the data in Gmail, Google Apps, etc. Google needs to ship Google Checkout worldwide and then store your purchased Apps like mail and docs to build up the same competitive advantage and attract developers.
tmsh 16y ago
I think the PC succeeded because of the massive demand in business for a reliable, cheaper alternative. The thing about the markets these days is that a tablet and a phone are very different from an office computer. They're much more personal. They're also cheaper to start with, so people might just be willing to pay for quality in ways that small/medium/large-sized businesses wouldn't for PCs. But all of this is sort of thinking relativistically in terms of the desktop/tablet/phone space. However, there are too many paths out there these days for things to proceed slowly, linearly and predictably. That's the one huge advantage that Linux has over all of this. It attracts people who are in left field who are going to change the entire paradigm. Maybe the future is 3D CSS transforms. Maybe it's Apple. But maybe it's a completely different dialogue. All it takes is one or two misguided people on HN, e.g.
pvdm 16y ago
Bill Gates wrote to John Scully to license the MAC OS to third-party manufacturers. Scully refused. Steve Jobs wasn't around when the first mistake was made. 29:00 into this video. http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2457 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2457
pg 16y ago
"I'm sure somewhere in Jobs' head he thinks that if he had been running Apple instead of John Sculley, the Mac could have out-innovated and out-marketed Microsoft through the late eighties and early nineties, and kept Windows from dominating the planet." Actually I believe this myself. It's hard to say exactly how well he would have done at fending off Microsoft, but it would have been a closer race than it was. Apple seemed totally lost during that period.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  I'm sure he thinks he could have done better than Sculley, and it's almost certain he would have. But to cite his oft-cited speech: I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. ----- An addendum: I wonder how many decisions Jobs made after returning to Apple would have happened if he'd never been fired. Would he have still embraced Microsoft? Would the radically colorful design of the iMacs have happened any earlier, or at all? Would they have switched to Intel? What about the iPod, which was probably the most significant way Apple could introduce non-Mac users to Apple design, making the value proposition of a Mac credible? I wonder if his time away from Apple hadn't made him more sensitive to the importance of media besides software.
  - dieterrams 16y ago
    Sorry, wanted to add another point but the editing window expired. Basically, I get the sense that the Jobs that got fired was a lot more willing to shake things up when he came back. Whereas it's hard for me to see what Jobs would have done if he'd managed to oust Sculley, aside from killing 3rd party Macs earlier and shrinking the product lineup.
zweben 16y ago
It seems that some people will never learn that going for market share first isn't always the path to maximizing profit. I could understand these arguments when Apple wasn't doing so well, but now it's just silly; Apple has, for ages, been extremely consistent in prioritizing margins over market share. By all measures, it's working brilliantly for them. Success through high margins is less visible and less obvious than success through high market share, and I'm guessing that contributes to the strange idea that Apple is somehow making a mistake with a high-margin lower volume strategy, but come on, they make more money selling cell phones than almost any other company in the world. Apple could certainly license their OS to other vendors. But in doing so, they would be throwing out an extremely successful business model for one that eliminates their biggest differentiation from their competitors: the polish and quality they can provide by having complete control over all aspects of their products.
houseabsolute 16y ago
> who suggested a theory that seemed outlandish at first but is making more and more sense to me: Steve Jobs just isn’t bent on world domination. Hard to understand how that idea could be outlandish considering how many times Steve himself has repeated it.
jey 16y ago
No, because computers have already been commoditized. The new innovation is in high-end items -- which are also partly fashion and style. Sure, you can use an ASUS tablet running Win7 or Linux if you're willing to put up with it, but everyone else will shell out the extra $200 for an iPad. (cf. Swiss watches -> Cheap quartz watches -> Fancy mechanical movement watches, e.g. Rolex) I don't think Jobs is naive enough to think he could have out-competed Microsoft with the "aesthetically pure products" strategy. I'm pretty sure he does think he could have maintained a much more significant chunk of market share for Apple through the 90's, but I bet he recognizes the strong pressures toward commoditization of the PC concept. And would we have iPods, iPhones, and iPads if Jobs hadn't been fired and grew complacent instead? Doubtful.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
Some similarities this time around: 1. iPhone leads out of the gate. 2. Apple charges a premium. 3. Apple does not license the OS for clones. 4. Google not only licenses the OS, it's completely free, as is their development kit and app store. 5. Apple lacks some infrastructure redundancy and is reliant on ATT and Foxcon, maybe others. Some differences this time around: 1. Meta standards. There's no longer the Microsoft file formats vs the Apple file formats that locked so much of the world into Windows/Office. These open meta standards eliminate the possibility of lockin. Hence even if Android pulls ahead in market share, it won't have the lockin that Windows had. 2. Apple has fully transitioned from a computer company to an industrial design company. They just happen to specialize in consumer technology (and are not too shabby with the business tech either, thanks to BSD). Most people, consciously or subconsciously, perceive Apple this way as well. Apple owns this niche. 3. Unlike Microsoft, Google actually has a sense of design and aesthetics. Not quite at Apple's artistic level, but, crucially, intuitive, easy to use for noobs, with power-user features under the hood. I do see Android eventually outselling iPhone simply because of its cost, openess (to handset makers, app devs, and end users), economy of scale, and Google brand. But I think there's room in this field for both, and no lockin to prevent that. Apple will do fine as the BMW of handsets, I don't see them coming so close to death in that role as they did the last time.
- dkuchar 16y ago
  Good analysis, and I agree with your conclusions.

39 points by ssclafani 16y ago

dkuchar 16y ago

yes

dkuchar 16y ago
wow i expected up-votes for this. jobs is one of the greatest innovators of our time. but he got completely destroyed by microsoft last time, and he's going to get similarly beaten by android and google.

whatwhatwhat 16y ago

My gut reaction was yes just because I had already had this thought before.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

etherael 16y ago

but the fact that AAPL now has a larger market cap than MSFT, twelve years after Jobs' return to Apple, has to give one pause. This just reads to me that Microsoft has been failing hard since the great succession and Apple is capitalising on the void more than Apple's excellent strategy would've won the game against Microsoft back in the day. My take is that Apple will lose, and yes, history is repeating himself. They'll lose in the mobile/tablet space to Android handset/tablets, and they'll maybe lose in the "real computer" space (eventually) to Ubuntu/Chrome OS or a revitalized Microsoft. I'm more confident of the former than the latter though, have heard "year of the linux desktop" just too many damned times.

theli0nheart 16y ago
What makes you think they'll lose in the mobile space? Isn't there something to be said for the difficulty of developing on a fragmented platform? From yesterday: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/23/2313245/Fragmentation-vs-Obsolescence-In-the-Android-Ecosphere http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/05/23/2313245/Fragmentatio...
- etherael 16y ago
  The same reason that they lost in the computing space originally, which was the point of the article. I also don't buy that android is fragmented, I've read that story as well as the stories where people were whispering about fragmentation before the first devices were even released. Saying that android is vulnerable to fragmentation because of varying hardware features and screen resolutions of devices which use it is quite similar to positions stating the same about windows imho. Also, Apple are being so relentlessly bad strategically on OS X Touch I think it would take a lot less than a technically superior implementation on technically superior hardware to beat them. But hey, I could be wrong, personally I am a very happy Linux user, this would be good prima facie evidence that I am "out of touch with the market" ;)
  - ams6110 16y ago
    No Microsoft achieved dominance in the PC space because it was the "safe" choice. IBM PCs were not cheap back in the day, but neither were Selectrics and in the business world, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." Once Windows came along, businesses had the choice of keeping compatibility with their existing PC software and hardware or starting over with Macintosh. Most made the easy choice. And consumers who used PCs at work typically bought the same platform for home so they could install pirate copies of Wordperfect or Lotus 123 or Microsoft Word/Excel from the office. Unlike then, in the mobile space, and now the tablet space, Apple has won the huge market share position. Microsoft, Palm, and others have been working for years on the platforms but never quite got it right for the mass consumer market. Apple did. Will Android beat them? Remains to be seen but I don't see this as history repeating itself at all.
- wvenable 16y ago
  Android is less fragmented than Windows PC's ever have been and look how that worked out.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    The Windows features that succeeded most (loosely coupled applications with root access) don't overlap at all with what Android is trying to do. Android is trying to do tightly-coupled sandboxed applications that invoke and include one another. The Windows features in this area (like COM) all failed pretty miserably.
philwelch 16y ago
On marketshare, Apple is still losing the PC space to Windows. And on marketshare, they may yet lose the mobile space to Android. But in terms of profitability, it remains to be seen. And Apple just might go and attack another product category yet.
- etherael 16y ago
  True, you can survive a long time on a small slice of the pie if you're charging like a wounded bull.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    How many analogies was that?
    - etherael 16y ago
      three?
    - abalashov 16y ago
      Metaphors, not analogies.
- maurycy 16y ago
  APPL focuses on the high ROI clients. By definition, there's a limited supply of such clients, so they have to go into new markets.
- jister 16y ago
  Android is still immature but if Google continues to improve it then maybe it will be on par with Apple (or much better)...someday...who knows maybe just like the Yahoo vs Google search way back.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    The Droid Incredible seems to be comparable to the iPhone. The ecosystem needs to catch up. I'd wager that the phone service is better.
seb 16y ago
Does Apple want to win? They are not trying to go to cover the complete market and filling everybody's wants. In other markets doesn't one company covers the complete market. For example Ferrari is not going for the same market like Toyota, but are they failing because of that?
bonaldi 16y ago
By the same token, Microsoft capitalised on the void left by Sculley-era Apple. While Apple was charging thousands of dollars for underpowered Macs with 9" screens, Windows PCs could leap into the bottom end. They weren't really good: users actually wanted Macs, but couldn't afford them at home, and businesses wouldn't pay the premium at work, except where absolutely necessary (publishing and design, mostly). Software and "closedness" had nothing to do with it. The Mac had much better software -- Word and Excel were born on the Mac, as was Photoshop, Quark, Postscript, Hypercard. The question isn't "is Jobs making the same mistake?" it is "is Jobs making Sculley's mistakes?". And the answer is "no". The iPhone and iPad are aggressively priced, ensuring they go just low enough to put them in reach of people who want them, and success doesn't depend on penny-pinching CYA CIOs. Windows succeeded because it was good enough, just as Android is. Apple is trying hard to sure you don't have to settle for "good enough", you can actually have good, this time.
- etherael 16y ago
  I don't buy it, Apple products still attract a significant premium just for the brand. You don't see linux users purchasing Apple hardware to install linux on generally, which would actually be a good measure of if the hardware was worth the cost. They're just trying to tie the software to the hardware and push the benefits of the software to the average user in a way that it can't be separated from the hardware (via their DRM etc in the chips). Nothing Apple has ever made has been compelling to me in any way, shape or form. So from my perspective, they generally make worse products than the alternatives, this includes OS9, OSX, and definitely OSX touch.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    The Mac still attracts a premium, because that's its market now, for better or worse. When it was conceived, the target price was $999, which it didn't actually hit until the underpowered Mac Classic arrived. The other products -- iPod, iPhone, iPad -- have definitely been priced to sell, even if they don't appeal to you. As for compelling, we're talking 1980s here. If the choice was DOS vs System 6, or later Win 3.1 vs System 7, the only thing in Microsoft's favour was price.

philwelch 16y ago

"'m not so sure that Jobs thinks his Macintosh strategy failed." True, but not quite in the way that the author thinks. The Macintosh lived on if you wanted one, and Windows itself only existed and innovated to catch up with Mac. The Mac made its dent on the world even if you never bought one, because it forced Microsoft to make their operating system more Mac-like. Learning to accept partial victories is part of life, and Steve's partial victories are a little more complete than some people's. (Alan Kay, anyone?)

blasdel 16y ago
Alan Kay is a particularly odd case — he's had to start over with Smalltalk half a dozen times because it was too successful. Because people from elementary schoolkids to Disney to IBM were invested in it, he couldn't keep iterating. He had to leave it to them for it to rot in stasis, and go off to start over again with a new community until it happened again.
stcredzero 16y ago
Many of the things Alan espoused are now mainstream, and more is coming down the pike. I'd say they won. It's actually not that their way won so much, but that they are privy to certain thing that are true -- were privy before most of the rest of us. Exercise for the reader: what are the things I refer to?

jolan 16y ago

Actually, allowing 3rd party vendors to make MacOS-compatible hardware is basically what almost killed Apple to begin with. So no, he's not repeating past mistakes.

xenophanes 16y ago
Why was that so bad for Apple? Why didn't it work? (I have no strong opinion on the matter.)
- etherael 16y ago
  Because they basically acted as enablers for the competition on their core profit center. I'm prone to agree that it was a bad move keeping in mind what Apple's strengths are, but then I just don't think that highly of Apple's strengths so ymmv.
- jfb 16y ago
  Apple was and is a hardware company. The amount that made on each OS license was insignificant compared to the margins they made on their computers. This was true in the clone era and much more so today. Full disclosure: I used to work at Apple.
- wvenable 16y ago
  Apple couldn't build better hardware or cheaper hardware than the clone makers -- they were losing on the top end and the bottom end. Today, Apple makes good top end hardware and would likely continue to compete there but allowing clones to capture the low end would dilute their premium brand.
tullius 16y ago
That's only because they waited to do so as a last-ditch effort after their market share cratered. At that point the cheaper alternatives were only purchased by the existing Mac faithful.
tzs 16y ago
I'd say the problem there wasn't allowing MacOS compatible hardware--it was requiring that hardware to be too close to Apple hardware. The clone makers were required to use Apple-approved designs for their motherboards, expansion busses, and so on. All they really had some freedom with was the case design, and they got to pick how to build the thing. This forced the clone makers into essentially the same market Apple was in, so there was almost no chance the clone makers could grow the Mac market. That isn't what the clone makers wanted. They wanted to make MacOS compatible machines aimed at markets Macs were not in, rather than just end up competing with Apple in the existing market. One of the clone makers demoed some laptops, for instance, that covered nicely parts of the laptop market Apple wasn't in, and publicly begged Apple to let them sell them. Apple wouldn't allow it. In some ways, this was a continuation of an Apple problem that started earlier, even before the PPC switch. That's the problem of too many models in a given space. I remember when I bought my Centris 650. It was a brand new model when I bought it. 14 months later it was discontinued. Apple had dozens of models like that--each a minor variation on something they already had, but with a different name. Buy a Mac, and 18 months later go to buy RAM, and it was was a pain in the ass, because the vendors no longer listed your Mac model. Want to buy a hard disk? Again a pain in the ass--because each model had a slightly different way of mounting an internal drive, and the vendors were no longer advertising the kits with a mount for your Mac (this was before the internet was big, so you couldn't just pop online and check their catalog...if it wasn't in their ad in the magazines, you had to call or send away for their catalog). Want some really cool expansion hardware that used the fast "direct to processor" bus instead of the much slower NuBus? Oh look, each model Mac had a slightly different pin-out for that bus. I think Jobs knows exactly what he's doing. He knows that what is best is to have a small number of devices that are clearly distinguished from each other, and have a large amount of non-overlap in the markets they are best for (although one might argue that MacBook and MacBook Pro have a lot of market overlap).

sx 16y ago

Even if Apple allowed 3rd party vendors to make IPhone OS compatible phones, Android would still be free and Google would still push it as hard as possible, so the competition would still be there (which by the way is really good). Also, it's not easy to beat "free" from the vendors' perspective. I think the iPhone will continue having a significant market share and I think Apple will continue innovating. In the meantime, the Android market share will grow, possibly beyond the iPhone share, but I don't see why it's necessary to only have one winner that takes it all. I think both companies, along with RIM, will do fine

forgottenpaswrd 16y ago

Steve Jobs? mistakes? It seems to me really strange to find people like Steve Jobs that belong to the group of "most successful people in the world", economical, personal and socially, being criticized by someone random on Internet, giving him lessons on what he should be doing. Of course Steve Jobs is human, and makes "mistakes",he is not a deity, but as a human, he had more successes than anyone else I know in the IT field in a sustained way over the time. In fact what this blogger considers "mistakes" is what I like about people like Steve "everything that Jobs has ever done in his career has suggested that he loves great products more than market share." Thank God!! some people care about products and not getting more and more rich like the Banks, whose financial successes come from stealing other people work, or getting monopolies from destroying competition and benefiting from that, or getting(paying) the politicians to agree with them. Not everything in life is money, marketshare ... and I respect the guys of google or Apple because they cared first about the product, and the got money and marketshare as a consequence later because people love good products. Their primary goal was to benefit their customers and they benefited from that. Those that try to first benefit themselves with crappy products, tricking their customers to buy it using only false advertising, corrupting others to give them market privileges(today you have to pay corrupt officers to have the right to sell to some countries), well, those are the mistaken companies.

ryandvm 16y ago
Need a refill on that Kool-Aid?

pkaler 16y ago

Different situation. Developers make more money on the iPhone/iPad/iPod than Android at the moment. Developers will continue to target the platform where they make the most money. Apple treats Apps as a switching cost. The more Apps and content that a user purchases, the less likely there are to move to a competing platform. Microsoft won because Office, Outlook, games, etc increased the switching cost. Once you were over in the Microsoft camp, you were there forever. There was zero user churn. The whole point of the Get A Mac campaign was about how the switching cost was now low. Google treats Apps and content as a commodity. Ship your App and make crumbs from AdSense and AdMob. Google's switching cost is in the data in Gmail, Google Apps, etc. Google needs to ship Google Checkout worldwide and then store your purchased Apps like mail and docs to build up the same competitive advantage and attract developers.

tmsh 16y ago

I think the PC succeeded because of the massive demand in business for a reliable, cheaper alternative. The thing about the markets these days is that a tablet and a phone are very different from an office computer. They're much more personal. They're also cheaper to start with, so people might just be willing to pay for quality in ways that small/medium/large-sized businesses wouldn't for PCs. But all of this is sort of thinking relativistically in terms of the desktop/tablet/phone space. However, there are too many paths out there these days for things to proceed slowly, linearly and predictably. That's the one huge advantage that Linux has over all of this. It attracts people who are in left field who are going to change the entire paradigm. Maybe the future is 3D CSS transforms. Maybe it's Apple. But maybe it's a completely different dialogue. All it takes is one or two misguided people on HN, e.g.

pvdm 16y ago

Bill Gates wrote to John Scully to license the MAC OS to third-party manufacturers. Scully refused. Steve Jobs wasn't around when the first mistake was made. 29:00 into this video. http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2457 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2457

pg 16y ago

"I'm sure somewhere in Jobs' head he thinks that if he had been running Apple instead of John Sculley, the Mac could have out-innovated and out-marketed Microsoft through the late eighties and early nineties, and kept Windows from dominating the planet." Actually I believe this myself. It's hard to say exactly how well he would have done at fending off Microsoft, but it would have been a closer race than it was. Apple seemed totally lost during that period.

dieterrams 16y ago
I'm sure he thinks he could have done better than Sculley, and it's almost certain he would have. But to cite his oft-cited speech: I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. ----- An addendum: I wonder how many decisions Jobs made after returning to Apple would have happened if he'd never been fired. Would he have still embraced Microsoft? Would the radically colorful design of the iMacs have happened any earlier, or at all? Would they have switched to Intel? What about the iPod, which was probably the most significant way Apple could introduce non-Mac users to Apple design, making the value proposition of a Mac credible? I wonder if his time away from Apple hadn't made him more sensitive to the importance of media besides software.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  Sorry, wanted to add another point but the editing window expired. Basically, I get the sense that the Jobs that got fired was a lot more willing to shake things up when he came back. Whereas it's hard for me to see what Jobs would have done if he'd managed to oust Sculley, aside from killing 3rd party Macs earlier and shrinking the product lineup.

zweben 16y ago

It seems that some people will never learn that going for market share first isn't always the path to maximizing profit. I could understand these arguments when Apple wasn't doing so well, but now it's just silly; Apple has, for ages, been extremely consistent in prioritizing margins over market share. By all measures, it's working brilliantly for them. Success through high margins is less visible and less obvious than success through high market share, and I'm guessing that contributes to the strange idea that Apple is somehow making a mistake with a high-margin lower volume strategy, but come on, they make more money selling cell phones than almost any other company in the world. Apple could certainly license their OS to other vendors. But in doing so, they would be throwing out an extremely successful business model for one that eliminates their biggest differentiation from their competitors: the polish and quality they can provide by having complete control over all aspects of their products.

houseabsolute 16y ago

> who suggested a theory that seemed outlandish at first but is making more and more sense to me: Steve Jobs just isn’t bent on world domination. Hard to understand how that idea could be outlandish considering how many times Steve himself has repeated it.

jey 16y ago

No, because computers have already been commoditized. The new innovation is in high-end items -- which are also partly fashion and style. Sure, you can use an ASUS tablet running Win7 or Linux if you're willing to put up with it, but everyone else will shell out the extra $200 for an iPad. (cf. Swiss watches -> Cheap quartz watches -> Fancy mechanical movement watches, e.g. Rolex) I don't think Jobs is naive enough to think he could have out-competed Microsoft with the "aesthetically pure products" strategy. I'm pretty sure he does think he could have maintained a much more significant chunk of market share for Apple through the 90's, but I bet he recognizes the strong pressures toward commoditization of the PC concept. And would we have iPods, iPhones, and iPads if Jobs hadn't been fired and grew complacent instead? Doubtful.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

Some similarities this time around: 1. iPhone leads out of the gate. 2. Apple charges a premium. 3. Apple does not license the OS for clones. 4. Google not only licenses the OS, it's completely free, as is their development kit and app store. 5. Apple lacks some infrastructure redundancy and is reliant on ATT and Foxcon, maybe others. Some differences this time around: 1. Meta standards. There's no longer the Microsoft file formats vs the Apple file formats that locked so much of the world into Windows/Office. These open meta standards eliminate the possibility of lockin. Hence even if Android pulls ahead in market share, it won't have the lockin that Windows had. 2. Apple has fully transitioned from a computer company to an industrial design company. They just happen to specialize in consumer technology (and are not too shabby with the business tech either, thanks to BSD). Most people, consciously or subconsciously, perceive Apple this way as well. Apple owns this niche. 3. Unlike Microsoft, Google actually has a sense of design and aesthetics. Not quite at Apple's artistic level, but, crucially, intuitive, easy to use for noobs, with power-user features under the hood. I do see Android eventually outselling iPhone simply because of its cost, openess (to handset makers, app devs, and end users), economy of scale, and Google brand. But I think there's room in this field for both, and no lockin to prevent that. Apple will do fine as the BMW of handsets, I don't see them coming so close to death in that role as they did the last time.

dkuchar 16y ago
Good analysis, and I agree with your conclusions.