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Apple’s first online store played a crucial role in the company’s resurgence
- ldng 3y agoAnd how rewriting of history saved Steve multiple times ?
- soperj 3y agoNever seen a guy save a company so many times. Begs the question why it needed saving so often...
- Waterluvian 3y agoSomething something John Sculley?
- kmeisthax 3y agoTo be fair, Jobs-interregnum Apple was such a hilariously mismanaged mess that it did actually need saving multiple times over. Michael Dell's quip about "shutting Apple down and giving the money back to the shareholders" was not entirely as misguided as it sounds today.
- babypuncher 3y agoI'm not sure I follow. It's pretty widely recognized that Apple was circling the drain in the '90s, and things didn't turn around until they bought NeXT and put Steve in the CEO chair. Since that point, they haven't needed "saving". All these different stories you see are about the changes Steve made to the company that probably contributed to the turnaround.
- MBCook 3y agoI believe the common thought is that Apple got down to as little as 90 days before having to declare bankruptcy. If Steve hadn’t made drastic (successful!) changes fast, there would be no Apple. They really were right on the edge.
- lupire 3y agoBecause business is hard without leveraging IBM's monopoly power. Most companies fail.
- GeekyBear 3y agoOne of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time, and their online store was built on NextStep's WebObjects, just as Apple's store would be. Also interesting that Jobs had Apple pay to use Amazon's one click ordering patent at a time when other online retailers didn't see the point of removing sales friction. > Why Amazon’s ‘1-Click’ Ordering Was a Game Changer https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/amazons-1-click-goes-off-patent/ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
- deanCommie 3y agoI remember being really furious that "1 click ordering" was "patentable" when I first learned about it as a young geek. The longer I stay in this industry, and the more I learn about compliance, customer surprise, and the difficulty in balancing usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability, the more I realize it absolutely was.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoCan you elaborate on the difficulty?
- deanCommie 3y agoOK, I think the difficulty isn't the first level of implementation, but all the edge cases. I think that's true about a lot of innovation. So yes, the elevator pitch is just "remember the shipping and billing details, and use it by default". But the question is the edge cases: First, you have to remember that this came at a time when people were still nervous about even giving your credit card to a website. Cross-web identity wasn't a thing, password managers weren't a thing. Second, you need intelligence for what are the default options to select? It's easy for iTunes when the delivery is digital, or for a Prime member when 99% of the time the shipping is free. But what about for everyone else - should 1 click choose the fastest shipping or the cheapest? Is there a 3rd option? OK, you might say the customer should be able to customize that in the profile. But A) what if they don't, and B) what are the extreme edge cases? If someone wants it the fastest, is it worth it if it costs 100$? Or is it a % of the cost of the good? Is faster shipping by 1 day worth it if the shipping costs twice as much? And so on.
- pigsmedallion 3y agoI never really thought about this and took the website for granted. It's really brilliant how we can go back in time with the wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19991008055013/http://www.apple.com/education/hed/students/jello/ https://web.archive.org/web/19991008055013/http://www.apple.... This is pretty precious.
- scohesc 3y agoThe first paragraph implies that Apple takes down the website to promote new product launches - is that... correct? Seems silly to take their website down for new products.
- mikestew 3y agoYup, try http://store.apple.com http://store.apple.com during the next WWDC keynote: "we'll be right back!". And it doesn't come back until the keynote is over. I assume that in ye olde days they were actually switching the website over with new products, or had some other reasonable technical explanation. These days I have to believe it's just for nostalgia or something.
- GeekyBear 3y agoBack when they used a third party CDN, I have to assume they were paranoid about uploading the details of new products to servers controlled by a third party until the keynote was already in progress.
- etchalon 3y agoThey still use a third party CDN.
- GeekyBear 3y agoThey rolled their own CDN a decade ago. > Apple’s multi-terabit, $100M CDN is live https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/apples-multi-terabit-100m-cdn-is-live-with-paid-connection-to-comcast/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/apple...
- etchalon 3y agoWe're talking about the website in this thread, and the website still uses Akamai. An nslookup on their domain will show you as much.
- westurner 3y agoSomewhere between Macintosh & iPod + iTunes and MacOS (was: OSX (Unix, Bash,)) I think Apple was saved. And the white cabling with the silhouettes
- jbverschoor 3y agoThis is exactly how I remember and have experienced it, in that order. MacOS became big because of the included Unix. Developers flocked. And al ballman once said... developers, developers, developers!
- paradox460 3y agoIt also looked absolutely amazing. We came from blocky ugly 256 color icons, bland shades of grey, and lumpy fonts to aqua. Each icon looked "real", either as a real thing you could hold (hard drive, CD, printer, trash) or a glossy photo realistic artists rendition (the network icon and favorites heart in particular were gorgeous). The faint pinstripes and transparency matched apple's hardware at the time, and it just looked absolutely incredible. It's contemporary oses, windows xp mainly, improved the resolution of their interfaces, but still had garish cartoonish icons, and Linux DEs didn't really shake their lumpy pixelart icons till Nuvola and Crystal came about
- westurner 3y agoThe Developer story is key, I think, in addition to content CDNs and SAST/DAST for apps. iPod Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux Rockbox Firmware for an Archos and then an Nano w/ color and no WiFi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox podman run --rm -it docker.io/busybox xcode-select -p # installing homebrew installs the xcode CLI tools: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" brew install podman brew install --cask podman-desktop https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html https://brew.sh/ https://brew.sh/ How to add a Software repository to an OS. Software repository; SLSA, Sigstore, DevSecOps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository W/ Ansible: osx_defaults_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/osx_defaults_module.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... honebrew_tap_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_tap_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-tap-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... honebrew_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... homebrew_cask_module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/general/homebrew_cask_module.html#ansible-collections-community-general-homebrew-cask-module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/communit... From my upgrade_mac.sh: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/upgrade_mac.sh https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles/blob/develop/scripts/u... : upgrade_macos() { softwareupdate --list softwareupdate --download softwareupdate --install --all --restart }
- re 3y ago> Michael Dell's comment came after Apple had started to develop its online store, but it definitely smarted — as you can see in video of Steve Jobs launching the Apple online store. You can see it, but you can't really hear it. Video survives of the presentation, but it is close to inaudible. Even though this article was published today, the video link is dead due to the posting account ("SteveJobsArchive") being terminated. I found a mirror here, though, and the audio seems fine: https://vimeo.com/30998833 https://vimeo.com/30998833
- SllX 3y agoThat is the presentation I was looking for. I didn’t realize SteveJobsArchive was dead though. Dammit all.
- chiph 3y agoAfter Steve makes a $16,000 purchase from the store, and he says "You can go the website ... so you don't take up the time of the salespeople at CompUSA" I bet Hal Compton (the CompUSA CEO who had just left the stage) was in the wings hopping mad at Steve.
- seltzered_ 3y agoSaid around the 41 minute mark of the above linked video.
- phonon 3y agoAudio cuts out around 25:42?
- re 3y agoLooks like there's an issue where the audio is actually just mono, but is split into stereo channels, but after that point in the video, one of the channels is inverted. So if you're listening to them through a single speaker or otherwise mixed down to mono, the channels will cancel out. Try using headphones or stereo speakers, or download the video and play it back in a program like VLC that lets you select just one of the audio channels to play.
- etchalon 3y agoWebObjects was so vastly ahead of everything else in the space at the time, it's ridiculous and hard to overstate. It did the MVC-ORM-Persistance-Templates so early, and so well.
- jaegrqualm 3y ago> The new online Apple Store brought in $12 million of revenue in its first 30 days, for an average of $730,000 per day. That's three-quarters of where Dell's daily revenue had reached after its first six months. Uhh... 12,000,000 / 30 = 400,000 If I wanted to be charitable, I could guess that they might have gotten their numbers mixed up talking about net and gross revenue, but... This feels like a pretty big oversight.
- kwk1 3y agoHmm, so 730k * 30 = 21.9M... with $21M and $12M figures in play, there may have been a digit transposition mistake somewhere, plus maybe truncation instead of rounding... Not that those are lesser mistakes, of course.
- daniel_iversen 3y agoThere's a neat interview with Marc Benioff where about 15 mins in he mentions talking to Steve Jobs about an App Store, and I think later in the interview he also tells how he gave Steve the domain AppStore.com and it all is just a very sweet story really :)