I also disagree that Microsoft took all the good ideas and made them easy to access from a programming point of view this is simply incorrect. The Windows APIs have always been much nastier than those for the Mac
“Inside Macintosh” – a set of books most people had on their shelves and never managed to do anything useful with. It wasn’t widely available until a year after the Mac was released! And Pascal was always somewhat of a toy for general purpose programming on microprocessors. I think a lot of people forget just what a paradigm shift it was to write event driven windowing programs compared to text based ones – Apple did document all the calls and the hardware, but it didn’t help much due to the complexity. I’d disagree Windows was nastier to program for, the Mac still had issues about which way around on the call stack arguments for the system subroutines should appear, or whether the mac you were programming for was properly “32 bit clean” which made the hungarian notation stuff look like childs play. Microsoft hid all that stuff for you.

I also disagree that Microsoft “took all the good ideas and made them easy to access from a programming point of view” — this is simply incorrect. The Windows APIs have always been much nastier than those for the Mac, from their bizzare and discredited use of Hungarian notation in their code to the well known “DLL Hell” issues of 3.x and 95 (somewhat persisting today). In fact Apple was a bit unique at it’s introduction both for using a compiled high-level language (Pascal) when most serious applications at the time were written in assembly language, and for releasing very accessible programmer documentation (“Inside Macintosh”) which I’ve always considered to be the epitome of documentation for any product, ever.

While Apple (and Jobs I) can certainly be held to account for past errors, it is hard to argue that Jobs II is making the same mistakes. He has conceded that he and Apple made errors in in the early days, and under his recent direction, the Mac has gained substantial market share – some reports suggest that Apple now has a remarkable 10% penetration of US homes, and the rest of the world generally follows the US lead in this regard.

So I think the jury should still be out on whether or not the Mac is a success or a failure, and there are no indications that OSX is any less important to Apple than it has ever been; the focus of the recent WWDC on Mac and OSX to the exclusion of iPod and iPhone being a case in point. And so extrapolating the “failure” of the Mac and it’s philosophy to the success or failure of the iPhone – created by a person who has learned his lessons the hard way – seems quite a stretch.

The complete lack of an SDK for the iPod has not hampered it’s adoption.

No. Look at the profits:
Apple – 8 billion/year
Microsoft – 11 billion/year

Apple make nearly as much on much smaller sales.

Again. (Comparing hardware companies this time)
Apple – 8 billion/year
Dell – ? (nothing the last couple of years)

Again. Compare what Apple made when they *did* open their software and try to
grab the general market from MS:
1997 – 1 billion loss
Now – see above

The money speaks. The trope about “if only they’d released MacOS on commodity
hardware” is flat out wrong.

To explain why an indirect quote from Steve Jobs (I have this from one of his
senior managers who was a drinking buddy of mine when I worked overseas a couple
of years ago, so this is a paraphrase)

“Could BMW make a $15k car for the price range market? Of course, but they
don’t. Could we make low price PC’s and compete with Dell? Of course,
but we don’t. We don’t want to.”

Apple did not need such high prices. About half of it was pure markup. They were gouging the dumb “I’m special” part of the market. In their new incarnation, their margins are more closely aligned with the market.

Regarding the workstation market, there wasn’t much the traditional vendors could do because Intel machines were so much cheaper. The markets for those machines collapsed, although they didn’t disappear completely.

Regarding Apple’s plans for the iPhone, I don’t think they will release an SDK. Involving the great unwashed is too messy for Apple, especially with the complications of dealing with phone companies. Apple will work with a few selected big developers to produce games and applications.

You’ve essentially said that consumers only care about “features”. Consumers tend to like Apple because they make things mere mortals can drive with nice design, fit and finish. Sure you can buy a Rio or Sandisk, but they look like arse and have interfaces designed by retarded chimps. And don’t even get me started on mobile phone interfaces.

That being said, the iPhone’s features are not revolutionary. There are a number of other phones out there which does exactly the same, and in some cases, more than what the iPhone is capable of.

iPods are in the same boat as the iPhone in that what you pay for compared with other products is not justified and the features of an iPod are replicated in other MP3 players.

Why is the iPhone thus far a success? I argue that is is because Apple is cool now. Its a fashion statement to own an iPod or an iPhone. Apple is in a great position now in that they can almost put out total crap and have it sell. Apple TV may be proof of that.

I hope I’m right too. I’d really like to see apps like the upcoming OmniFocus available on an iPhone. That’d be a killer combo.

Tony;

I don’t think I did confuse cause and effect. The problem for a high end vendor moving downmarket is that the margins there can’t support the highend R&D efforts which dominated DEC, SGI etc etc. It turns out there is still a market for that kind of product and those companies who stuck with it – IBM and Sun mainly – have done OK from it; though IBM does have the advantage of lock-on on the zSeries (nee OS/3×0) front.

The consensus among people who care is that Apple will release an SDK for the iPhone as it would grow the pool of Mac OS X developers. But that might be wishful thinking. I hope not!

They also lacked the diverse range of software on Windows, as a direct result of Apple’s arrogant approach to third party developers (ISVs). Apple was not alone in this. IBM also failed to understand quickly enough the importance of third party developers, leaving OS/2 marooned.

Jacques’ point about workstation vendors failing when they tried to go downmarket confuses cause and effect. The expensive workstation makers like SGI and Sun had no choice when Intel machines started to provide the same power at a tenth of the price. So it wasn’t that reducing their prices crippled the workstation vendors; it was that their business models were built on high margins.

Regarding the iPhone, the failure to provide an SDK strikes me as more of the Apple arrogance, although Apple might intend to strike private deals with selected software developers, particularly for games. It will then provide SDKs to those developers. At the moment, Apple says developers can use ajax, but that’s useless for serious applications, especially valuable ones.

On the subject of working with phone companies, existing mobile devices, such as Pocket PCs, have had the capability to run third party applications for five or six years. The great problem has always been the phone companies, who insist on rigid and expensive certification procedures. I don’t see that changing just because Apple has a new phone. Other phone makers have much better market share, but must still conform with phone company requirements. Even Microsoft has to conform.

Apple’s marketing spiel has always really been about signalling. You dont want to get sucked into it too much.

As for the iMac – yes they sold a lot, no they made no dent in the overall market share of the Windows operating system. Still a failure, albeit a pretty one that gave Apple enough marketing capital to launch the iPod.

Where iTunes was hostage to music companies insistance on digital rights management, they are amateurs compared to phone companies.

I suspect a big part of withholding the development access on the iPhone will be telephone companies horrified at the prospect of an open development platform running on their fragile and expensive networks.

I disagree. The iTunes store example shows that Apple is prepared to stare down anyone when they get the upper hand. Apple continues to set the prices for the music downloads despite intense lobbying by music companies. The iPhone has sold half a million units in 2 days and will probably keep on selling big to people with disposable income – ie just the sort of people you want to boost your profit margins. In 18 months Apple will be dictating terms to the phone companies, who like the music giants will find out that they don’t have that much say after all.

I think that the turn around point for Apple was the original iMac, which was actually the biggest-selling PC of all time up to that point.

I’d also disagree that iPhone will fail due to being ‘closed’. In actual fact it runs a variant of OS X with a different interface layer. Apple will probably release development tools for it once they sort out the tools and interface doctrine. You have to remember that the iPhones interface is quite new compared to the well-established Apple Human Interface Guidelines which Mac apps follow.

I suspect a big part of withholding the development access on the iPhone will be telephone companies horrified at the prospect of an open development platform running on their fragile and expensive networks. Who knows what kind of funky applications you could dream up with open access to a phone network and programmable handsets (low cost mobile phone conferencing? positioning devices based on cell locations? massive multi-user mixed real world and virtual world games?). Their pricing models can’t accommodate new, resource heavy services they would have trouble charging for. The paucity of phones available with mp3 ringtones gives us some idea of just how reluctant these companies are to accommodate users.

Jobs loves to play in this kind of space (closed, restricted spaces where the user experience can be micro-managed) but genuinely new platforms tend to fail without some third party introducing a product we never new we needed. Like the spreadsheet. I don’t think the iPhone by itself qualifies, and Apple (the only organisation who have full development access) have a patchy history of providing ground breaking applications.

I use a creative MP3 player which records from streaming audio. Very handy for time shifting audio that isn’t directly downloadable as an MP3.

David, Thanks for your comments. It will be interesting to watch how things turn out.

Apple II: Succeeded then Failed. Was once the best supported and most open PC (despite Jobs abhorring the things that made it successful like the internal expansion ports and an easy to understand programming interface). Did not die as a bad product, died because Apple lost focus to concentrate on the..

Lisa: Failed. utterly. Apple lost focus to concentrate on the…

Macintosh: Failed. Was once the great breakthrough of affordable GUI computers and had most of the Lisa features without most of the pricetag, but (surprise!) wasn’t expandable enough or particularly easy to program for as a third party. Arrogance that they would win left the market wide open for Microsoft, who took all the good ideas and made them easy to access from a programming point of view , at the same time expanding the market for PC’s by making them a commodity, which the Apple II should have become 5 years earlier.

Then: 15 wilderness years and dozens of worthless eye candy products like the Newton. Jobs builds another failure in the meantime (NeXT).

Then: ipod. Finally a success. Finally a platform where being closed and lacking expandability was a virtue (nobody wants to program a music player, just play music).

Jobs always wins the battles and loses the wars. iPhone will fail as a platform for the same reason the Mac 512k and Plus were relative failures, nobody knows how to program for it and Apple won’t release the specs or a decent development library. The most successful macintoshes will ironically be the ones that are capable of running Windows.

We’ve had this argument before I think. Apple did try opening up Mac OS to clones in the 90s, it nearly killed them. As for Microsoft, they make massive revenues but their total profits are not that higher because their costs are much higher. They spend a lot of money on deep sinks like Xbox, Zune and others while the production of Windows costs an absolute motza.

Since my current, and for the forseeable future, phone is a four year old pre-paid that rarely has credit on it and I use almost exclusively as an alarm clock I won’t be camping out for the iPhone. But it does look cool. Go Stevie!

But at least in the case of the Mac this strategy of charging a hefty premium for good design was a mistake – a mistake that Jobs may well not have persevered with had he remained at Apple (but who knows).

I don’t think you’re right, for two reasons. The first is that the premium on a Mac these days isn’t that hefty. And secondly because it boosts Apple’s profit margins over their making-tiny-profits-on-vast-volumes competitors like HP and Dell.

In fact every company that decided to ditch proprietary platforms for Wintel has suffered for it, especially at the fat-margin highend. HP gave up PA-RISC and HPUX, Compaq killed Tru64 and the Alpha when they bought DEC, SGI has been struggling for years after stopping forward movement on MIPS and Irix. The 90s push towards Wintel architectures is mostly to blame, though Intel achieved a first by killing 3 high performance processor families with no more than a press release.

The only companies who still do complete systems design are IBM (AIX, zSeries, POWER, AS/400) and Sun (SunFire, SPARC, Solaris) . Who coincidentally make a good thing on their stuff. Apple is in a similar boat with OS X, though over the years they’ve steadily dropped proprietary hardware.

Since Steve Jobs came back to Apple, the stock has risen from $7 in early 2001 to $120 today. That’s including a stock split. I don’t know about you, but I think Apple know how to turn a buck better than either of us.