Alright, I'm awake now. I looked over what I wrote. I think was doing too much for dramatic effect. The history in this thread is excellent. I don't have much

Alright, I'm awake now. I looked over what I wrote. I think was doing too much for dramatic effect. The history in this thread is excellent. I don't have much to add but out of either narcissism or obligation I will (I wonder if they are related) and with it open a new can of worms, so let's go if someone was to run Lloyd's algorithm on tech companies they'd probably, with the right feature selection find nice Gaussian blobs around a number of once great companies who faltered. For example, RIM, Palm, DEC, Burroughs, Commodore, SGI and Sun. I think a pithy ~100 word description could describe them all: "Excellent teams blindsiding the world with visionary products that crash through material reality with the human spirit of creativity who are not able to stabilize the fragile chemical interplay between market, money, magic and mind. Delays and disappointments lead to disasters and desertion as the dreams turn into nightmares. The talent atrophies and the culture grows bitter. Plans for the future are replaced with the nostalgia of the past as the once great company grasps in futility at trying to reconstruct the fleeting world that once was but can increasingly never be again." This was also Apple's trajectory in the late 90s. The confluence of factors that led to its demise and rise were many and extraordinary. The MSFT influx is in my mind the most memorable. Apple was definitely in survival/death mode and could have just coasted and rode to the end until they got snatched up by someone like say, counterfactually now, Adobe in say 2003. They'd be another company on that pile of once great machines of the mighty who faltered. I should probably disclose I've never liked their products. I've got an obscure collection too; a magic link, newton, nextstation - I had a 1983 pre-production mac, early snow-white design language hardware - I've never worked there but I think I have pretty deep exposure to them and I've always found their stuff to be overpriced shoddy ostentatious appliances. And that's enough gasoline on this fire from me.