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I thought this was going to be an incredibly cliché manifesto against Apple's closed-ecosystem, and while in some ways it was, it was surprisingly good, and thi

by kick 7y ago

I thought this was going to be an incredibly cliché manifesto against Apple's closed-ecosystem, and while in some ways it was, it was surprisingly good, and this is an exciting move. However, there was an error (or omission, to be generous) that I found somewhat strange: The development of the Macintosh computer, released in 1984, is a revealing origin story for Apple. Jobs had assembled a crew of “pirates” to build a computer as he wanted it, which meant attractive design, a symbiosis between hardware and software, and, most of all, control – of the consumer, by him. In a hundred small ways, he made the Mac immutable and inescapable. Its elegant contours were actually hard borders, held together by special screws so that bedroom hobbyists couldn’t get inside with their regular screwdrivers. Requests to license out the operating system (so that it could be used on other computers) were refused or ignored. The Mac would be an ecosystem unto itself. People would have to buy into it entirely, or not at all. Jobs was forced out of Apple for his hubris; then reinstalled in 1997, when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. With Jony Ive at his side, and until his death from pancreatic cancer in 2011, he introduced a series of products that were like the original Mac in spirit yet incomparably more successful: the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. This doesn't note that right after he was brought back from NeXT, he was pushing the idea of licensing the operating systems to everyone (there were a few being developed at the same time, but I believe the one he was focused on was Rhapsody, which later became Mac OS X) very hard. So hard, in fact, that he dedicated like fifteen minutes replying to an audience question on it at WWDC.

pmarreck 7y ago
That was a really fun time to be a Mac fan attending MacWorld Expos. Also really frustrating. So a company called PowerComputing was killing it making Mac clones (with the full backing of Apple) and which had a very provocative ad campaign (http://www.streamstudio.com/powercomputing/campaigns.shtml http://www.streamstudio.com/powercomputing/campaigns.shtml), and here's what happened: The total Mac market was growing, but at the expense of Apple itself, and all the news reported on was Apple itself and its stumbling financials. I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the time. Had they reported on the total Mac market instead, things would have looked stellar, but instead they reported on Apple alone, and this hurt both Apple AND the perception of the Mac market. And that's when Steve Jobs took all the licenses back.
- MontagFTB 7y ago
  I had one of those PowerComputing clones back in the day and loved it. I still have some of those marketing posters, and recall that season of Mac history with fondness. It’s a shame the Mac clone market got killed off.
braythwayt 7y ago
Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. Having found himself without a power base within Apple, he looked around for a project and found Jef Raskin working away on creating an information appliance designed for “people first.” Raskin’s vision was that it be low-cost and emphasize the user experience. But he and Jobs had very different ideas about how to accomplish this. Raskin did not want to create a computer people couldn’t afford, and his ideas for a new user experience were based on things like incremental search, not shipping an expensive (for the time) peripheral like a mouse. Likewise, a bitmapped display and the cimputing power to make it work added too much cost for the computer to be an appliance in Jef’s mind, so he eschewed the kind of things Apple was doing with LISA, based on Xerox’s Star. However, Jobs may have lost his power in the boardroom, but he outranked Raskin, and he pushed Raskin out. The Macintosh became another LISA, but without the overhead created by a design team trying to recreate much of the richness of the Star. The Macintosh that shipped was less expensive than LISA, but certainly not inexpensive enough to be an appliance. They were way more expensive than The PCs of the day, and might well have fizzled had Aldus not shipped PageMaker and created a “killer app” for Macintosh the way VisiCalc created a killer app for early PCs. The story Apple likes to tell about Jobs creating Macintosh is entertaining, but the backstory is much more educational for those of us working in mid-sized or larger companies, with all of the conflicting requirements, tradeoffs, and yes, politics. Plenty more of that kind if thing at http://folklore.org/ http://folklore.org/ There’s a collection of stories about Jef Raskin. He was an iconoclast with an insanely focused vision: https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Jef%20Raskin https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&ch...
- kick 7y ago
  I was aware of this! It's always been a very interesting part of consumer technology's history for me.
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Yeah. The story of LISA and before that, Apple III are also fascinating. A hit product like Apple II buys a company a lot of lottery tickets for coming up with another hit.
cmurf 7y ago
Mac OS 8 and 9 were licensed to 3rd parties under Gil Amelio. That all ended, and the clones as well, when Jobs came back. NeXTStep (or perhaps more correctly OpenStep) > Rhapsody > OS X. None of that was licensed to 3rd parties.
- kick 7y ago
  > That all ended, and the clones as well, when Jobs came back. That's not true. I don't have the time to grab a timestamp right now, but he very explicitly states that he is pushing clones hard in this (and reps Amelio). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM
  - cmurf 7y ago
    It's completely true. He came back, personally went to the licensees asking for what he thought was a reasonable deal. They said no five times over three weeks. And so he cut them loose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=maIgu_7oLm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=maIgu_7oLm0
scarface74 7y ago
If this is true. It didn’t last long. He cancelled all of the MacOS licenses by changing the next version of macOS to 8 instead of 7.7. He also spent $100 million to buy out Power Computing’s Mac license shortly after the deal with MS.

by kick 7y ago

pmarreck 7y ago

That was a really fun time to be a Mac fan attending MacWorld Expos. Also really frustrating. So a company called PowerComputing was killing it making Mac clones (with the full backing of Apple) and which had a very provocative ad campaign (http://www.streamstudio.com/powercomputing/campaigns.shtml http://www.streamstudio.com/powercomputing/campaigns.shtml), and here's what happened: The total Mac market was growing, but at the expense of Apple itself, and all the news reported on was Apple itself and its stumbling financials. I couldn't believe what I was seeing at the time. Had they reported on the total Mac market instead, things would have looked stellar, but instead they reported on Apple alone, and this hurt both Apple AND the perception of the Mac market. And that's when Steve Jobs took all the licenses back.

MontagFTB 7y ago
I had one of those PowerComputing clones back in the day and loved it. I still have some of those marketing posters, and recall that season of Mac history with fondness. It’s a shame the Mac clone market got killed off.

braythwayt 7y ago

Note that Jobs didn’t create Macintosh. Having found himself without a power base within Apple, he looked around for a project and found Jef Raskin working away on creating an information appliance designed for “people first.” Raskin’s vision was that it be low-cost and emphasize the user experience. But he and Jobs had very different ideas about how to accomplish this. Raskin did not want to create a computer people couldn’t afford, and his ideas for a new user experience were based on things like incremental search, not shipping an expensive (for the time) peripheral like a mouse. Likewise, a bitmapped display and the cimputing power to make it work added too much cost for the computer to be an appliance in Jef’s mind, so he eschewed the kind of things Apple was doing with LISA, based on Xerox’s Star. However, Jobs may have lost his power in the boardroom, but he outranked Raskin, and he pushed Raskin out. The Macintosh became another LISA, but without the overhead created by a design team trying to recreate much of the richness of the Star. The Macintosh that shipped was less expensive than LISA, but certainly not inexpensive enough to be an appliance. They were way more expensive than The PCs of the day, and might well have fizzled had Aldus not shipped PageMaker and created a “killer app” for Macintosh the way VisiCalc created a killer app for early PCs. The story Apple likes to tell about Jobs creating Macintosh is entertaining, but the backstory is much more educational for those of us working in mid-sized or larger companies, with all of the conflicting requirements, tradeoffs, and yes, politics. Plenty more of that kind if thing at http://folklore.org/ http://folklore.org/ There’s a collection of stories about Jef Raskin. He was an iconoclast with an insanely focused vision: https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&characters=Jef%20Raskin https://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&ch...

kick 7y ago
I was aware of this! It's always been a very interesting part of consumer technology's history for me.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  Yeah. The story of LISA and before that, Apple III are also fascinating. A hit product like Apple II buys a company a lot of lottery tickets for coming up with another hit.

cmurf 7y ago

Mac OS 8 and 9 were licensed to 3rd parties under Gil Amelio. That all ended, and the clones as well, when Jobs came back. NeXTStep (or perhaps more correctly OpenStep) > Rhapsody > OS X. None of that was licensed to 3rd parties.

kick 7y ago
> That all ended, and the clones as well, when Jobs came back. That's not true. I don't have the time to grab a timestamp right now, but he very explicitly states that he is pushing clones hard in this (and reps Amelio). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iACK-LNnzM
- cmurf 7y ago
  It's completely true. He came back, personally went to the licensees asking for what he thought was a reasonable deal. They said no five times over three weeks. And so he cut them loose. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=maIgu_7oLm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=maIgu_7oLm0

scarface74 7y ago

If this is true. It didn’t last long. He cancelled all of the MacOS licenses by changing the next version of macOS to 8 instead of 7.7. He also spent $100 million to buy out Power Computing’s Mac license shortly after the deal with MS.