Tuesday: Jobs vs. Sculley

[Mr. Anderson]

Oh, that's pathetic. A wireless eBay bidding system? I could see, sort of, why they would have thought it would be earth shattering. Now all the eBay geeks can bid on their cell phones, whoo hoo! It might be benificial for a few, but I hardly call it a major new tech. Its not evolutionary nor revolutionary, its just taking a system and expanding its service.

I would have been happy to see a 'MaryAnn'....

 

[Wry Cooter]

Originally posted by dukestreet
Now all the eBay geeks can bid on their cell phones, whoo hoo!

Now you no longer need to be at home tied to the Desktop as the bid ends, so you can pay too much for worthless junk while driving down the road eating frenchfries! Impress your dates... "Hah, just got a Boba Fett for only 9 dollars!" They will be so awed they may not handle seeing you again.

I think it seems a big whoop to the suits because it is one of the first real 'buy it on your phone web thingies", and also they view it a bit like opening the stock market to home clients 24/7... which creates its own sort of false bubble.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

Its still a small market niche. And with very limited press it seems it won't take off anytime soon. Hell, there's no mention of it on eBay's home page, figure they'd want to tell everyone, weird.

 

[LordJohnWhorfin]

Live Picture

Live Picture has been Dead Picture for a long time now.
John Sculley was instrumental in running it into the ground. He was the same guy who almost destroyed Apple by pursuing unreasonable margins at the expense of market share (Mac market share in 1989 was 25%!) and signing the secret agreement with Bill Gates which granted them the right to copy core Apple UI behavior, causing them to lose their long early-90s lawsuit against microsoft.
A visionary? Yeah, in a sense: keep track of what he's involved in and stay as far away as possible!

 

[topicolo]

Yeah, Sculley's stupidity makes me cry...

I can't help but wonder what apple would be like if they let people clone macs early on. Would they be like what MS is now? or would they still get beaten down by MS, just like palm? If apple succeeded and became huge like MS, would they be hated as the "evil empire?"

I guess we'll never know

 

[Foocha]

I've often wondered about the old "what if" scenario.

If Apple had managed to pull it off, and set up the right OEM agreements, the Mac could have become the defacto standard (this would have taken some help from Microsoft, who had volunteered to broker the deals with IBM clone manufacturers at the time).

If Mac had become the standard, they would have invested more in Copeland and probably pulled it off. Rather than using OS X now, we'd be using System 8 with a micro kernel, multi tasking & memory protection. NeXT would probably have gone bust by now, and Microsoft would be competing with Lotus to be leader in office productivity software. Apple would probably have stopped manufacturing hardware, and Dell would be the leading Mac developer!

By now, Netscape would have taken Apple to court for illegally commingling their Web browers Cyberdog (they would probably have paid big buck to a brand consultant to come up with a better name by now) with their operating system.

In this scenario, Apple's monopoly of desktop operating systems would be more complete than Microsoft's today, since Apple & Microsoft would be collaborating, Microsoft would not have developed Windows.

Since it's in my nature to support the underdog, I'd be a Linux user and anti-Apple! Shudder.

 

[Wry Cooter]

Originally posted by topicolo

I can't help but wonder what apple would be like if they let people clone macs early on. Would they be like what MS is now? or would they still get beaten down by MS, just like palm? If apple succeeded and became huge like MS, would they be hated as the "evil empire?"

I don't think it would have mattered too much... what really lost Macs their share happened before they were ever released, it was IBM coming out with 16 bit while apples installed base was 8 bit Apple IIe. Sixteen bit is the first case that businesses really thought the machines were useful for spreadsheets. When macs first became available, the intel users were already entrenched into their decisions.

If cloning happened earlier in Macs history, it would have had to have happened BEFORE windows, or GEM desktop to have made any difference in Market Share.

 

[Foocha]

I guess that would have been the time to release Mac for Intel - with Microsoft's backing, and a substantially superior user experience, I would have been the logical next step from DOS.

 

[topicolo]

Originally posted by Foocha
I guess that would have been the time to release Mac for Intel - with Microsoft's backing, and a substantially superior user experience, I would have been the logical next step from DOS.

The thing was, the early macs were FAR superior to PCs hardware-wise, just like how the early Powermacs were superior to first-gen pentiums. The 68000 was much faster than the 8086 and the mac 128k had a much more advanced display. Why would any of apple's brass at the time think of switching? They'd just spent millions in R&D and they weren't willing to throw that all away. I doubt apple would have survived the transition if they switched to intel.

What really screwed apple was their reluctance to consider the mac as a gaming system. They didn't want the mac to be considered a "cute toy" and discouraged game makers. Big Mistake! Games drove the PC industry and apple was unfortunately left in the dust. Still, I blame it all on Sculley. He's a dumb moron and it appears from his latest "announcement" that he still has his head stuck up his ass.

 

[Wry Cooter]

Blame Sculley if you want, but wasn't the 'no games on mac' actually a Steverino edict?

 

[Foocha]

We could have a long debate on 68k v x86, in the eighties but it would just be very self indulgent of us and not get us anywhere 😉

I'm sure you're right about games in consumer space, I guess I was thinking more of business - the widespread adoption of Microsoft/Intel in corporates is what nearly killed Apple - the problem is that people want the same kind of machine at home as they're used to at work, so when the buy a home PC they buy a Windows one.

That's why I go back to the idea that a Mac in the late eighties running on Intel with Microsoft's backing could have cleaned up in the business sector and have gone on to dominate consumer-space as well.

The only thing that save the Mac was the Internet, which levelled the playing field, and now Apple's focus on iApps - creating tangible reasons to choose Mac over PC.

We can't assume that the Mac would have survived through locked-in vertical sectors like design & publishing alone. Retrenched in this way, as Apple found itself in the mid-90's its revenue was so limited they could no longer afford to develop the OS so that it was competative with Windows.

I'm glad that Apple's back on the right track again now, and look forward to seeing the Mac reclaim some market share from Windows, and perhaps even move into new markets, for the first time in years. Go OS X, Go!