4 ms·

If I had Gassee's track record I would refrain from criticizing. 1981-90 - Exited when Apple was on a downward spiral. 1991-02 - BeOS, didn't get anywhere. 2

by jeswin 14y ago

If I had Gassee's track record I would refrain from criticizing. 1981-90 - Exited when Apple was on a downward spiral. 1991-02 - BeOS, didn't get anywhere. 2004- - Palm, didn't get anywhere either. Come on.

drx 14y ago
You don't necessarily have to be good at running a company to be good at criticizing how others do it. Same way you don't have to be a professional football player to commentate football.
- mcav 14y ago
  In fairness, a more accurate analogy would be a poor football player criticizing better ones.
  - raganwald 14y ago
    If you take “Moneyball” as an example, sometimes a poor but experienced football player might be more insightful about success and failure than a player who is successful based on “natural talent” and/or following conventional wisdom. (That’s what I tell myself every time I write a blog post about programming...)
Tloewald 14y ago
Apple was not on a downward spiral in 1990. (Stock price in 1990 was almost double 1985.) The other points are fine but isn't that just ad hominem? His points seem valid.
- jeswin 14y ago
  The industry exploded over that period, so the stock price isn't an accurate indicator of how Apple performed relatively. By 1990, Apple was clearly not competitive. Microsoft was winning, and what they had was DOS! What ticked me off were his words: "...the board also needs to be renewed with people who have an understanding and working knowledge of the mobile industry." It is perfectly fine for me (since I am a nobody in the industry), or _maybe_ even you to say the same thing. Gassee's carries more weight though, and gets published, read and discussed. I feel Nokia's management is doing what they can. No other handset vendor-developed OSes have succeeded. Blackberry, Bada, Meego,... The roadmap would have been shared way back when they signed up for this. Windows Phone 8 is the real deal; WP7 was too little, too late.
melling 14y ago
BeOS was a great product. Apple almost bought it. Part of their problem was that Microsoft was charging people for DOS on every PC that shipped, regardless of whether it actually shipped with DOS. Once Microsoft did that, it pretty much killed a other PC operating systems. The Microsoft of the 90's was lethal. Nothing compares to them today.
- taligent 14y ago
  BeOS was a great technical experiment and a terrible product. It had no drivers, no printing support, no decent SDK and was generally immature across the board. It would have been a disaster for Apple to use it who actually had real customers to support. I really wonder whether BeOS was ever a serious consideration over NeXT.
  - tsunamifury 14y ago
    The talent who made it ended up managing the creation and development of the iPod though.
  - cpeterso 14y ago
    Upvoted. If anyone knows about great technical experiments that were terrible products, it's someone named Taligent. <:)
specialist 14y ago
"If you're not failing now and then, you're not trying hard enough" -- Bill Joy (from memory) Gassee cracks me up. The way John Dvorak used to. I read Monday Note because Gassee seems to one of two people who understand what's happening to traditional publishing and news. (The other being Clay Shirky.) Gassee has been pretty candid about how Jobs schooled him when Apple was choosing between BeOS and Next. That Gassee has learned from both his successes and failures impresses me. As for his time at PalmSource, I can't say much. I tried some Palm dev work, didn't light my fire, so I ignored Palm(Source). However, there was a pretty good post mortem of HP, Palm, WebOS a week or two back. WebOS had a shot, but blew it Untouchable's style (brought a knife to a gun fight).
gnaffle 14y ago
I think he can criticize because he knows exactly what the problem is. But besides that, Apple wasn't in a downward spiral in 1990. BeOS got bought and basically took over Palm, Palm got bought by HP. (And if not for Apotheker killing it, WebOS could very well have been lauded as HPs savior now that Microsoft has stabbed its OEMs in the back).

by jeswin 14y ago

drx 14y ago

You don't necessarily have to be good at running a company to be good at criticizing how others do it. Same way you don't have to be a professional football player to commentate football.

mcav 14y ago
In fairness, a more accurate analogy would be a poor football player criticizing better ones.
- raganwald 14y ago
  If you take “Moneyball” as an example, sometimes a poor but experienced football player might be more insightful about success and failure than a player who is successful based on “natural talent” and/or following conventional wisdom. (That’s what I tell myself every time I write a blog post about programming...)

Tloewald 14y ago

Apple was not on a downward spiral in 1990. (Stock price in 1990 was almost double 1985.) The other points are fine but isn't that just ad hominem? His points seem valid.

jeswin 14y ago
The industry exploded over that period, so the stock price isn't an accurate indicator of how Apple performed relatively. By 1990, Apple was clearly not competitive. Microsoft was winning, and what they had was DOS! What ticked me off were his words: "...the board also needs to be renewed with people who have an understanding and working knowledge of the mobile industry." It is perfectly fine for me (since I am a nobody in the industry), or _maybe_ even you to say the same thing. Gassee's carries more weight though, and gets published, read and discussed. I feel Nokia's management is doing what they can. No other handset vendor-developed OSes have succeeded. Blackberry, Bada, Meego,... The roadmap would have been shared way back when they signed up for this. Windows Phone 8 is the real deal; WP7 was too little, too late.

melling 14y ago

BeOS was a great product. Apple almost bought it. Part of their problem was that Microsoft was charging people for DOS on every PC that shipped, regardless of whether it actually shipped with DOS. Once Microsoft did that, it pretty much killed a other PC operating systems. The Microsoft of the 90's was lethal. Nothing compares to them today.

taligent 14y ago
BeOS was a great technical experiment and a terrible product. It had no drivers, no printing support, no decent SDK and was generally immature across the board. It would have been a disaster for Apple to use it who actually had real customers to support. I really wonder whether BeOS was ever a serious consideration over NeXT.
- tsunamifury 14y ago
  The talent who made it ended up managing the creation and development of the iPod though.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  Upvoted. If anyone knows about great technical experiments that were terrible products, it's someone named Taligent. <:)

specialist 14y ago

"If you're not failing now and then, you're not trying hard enough" -- Bill Joy (from memory) Gassee cracks me up. The way John Dvorak used to. I read Monday Note because Gassee seems to one of two people who understand what's happening to traditional publishing and news. (The other being Clay Shirky.) Gassee has been pretty candid about how Jobs schooled him when Apple was choosing between BeOS and Next. That Gassee has learned from both his successes and failures impresses me. As for his time at PalmSource, I can't say much. I tried some Palm dev work, didn't light my fire, so I ignored Palm(Source). However, there was a pretty good post mortem of HP, Palm, WebOS a week or two back. WebOS had a shot, but blew it Untouchable's style (brought a knife to a gun fight).

gnaffle 14y ago

I think he can criticize because he knows exactly what the problem is. But besides that, Apple wasn't in a downward spiral in 1990. BeOS got bought and basically took over Palm, Palm got bought by HP. (And if not for Apotheker killing it, WebOS could very well have been lauded as HPs savior now that Microsoft has stabbed its OEMs in the back).