Comment by jjguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjguy | Hacker News Reader

> After being informed of IBM's hundreds of millions in yearly patent revenue, CEO Steve Jobs authorized a change in FireWire's licensing policy. Apple would now charge a fee of $1 per port. (So if a device has two ports, that's $2 per unit.)...Intel sent its CTO to talk to Jobs about the change, but the meeting went badly. Intel decided to withdraw its support for FireWire—to pull the plug on efforts to build FireWire into its chipsets—and instead throw its weight behind USB 2.0, which would have a maximum speed of 480 megabits a second (more like 280, or 30 to 40 MB/s, in practice)...A month later, Apple lowered the fee to 25 cents per (end-user) system, with that money distributed between all patent holders. But it was too late. Intel wasn't coming back to the table. This was the death blow for FireWire in most of the PC market.

For all of you who embrace the "fail fast" mindset, keep this story close as a reminder that some mistakes are irrevocable. This was one decision, reversed after 30 days.

It's also a good reminder that Jobs, for all the posthumous praise he gets, made some rather stupid business blunders during his tenures at Apple.

Apple can be aggressive about its tech today (such as Lightning and Thunderbolt; anyone know what they charge for those?), but back then they were much more of a niche player.

Thunderbolt is Intel AFAIK. (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.)

My guess is Intel probably would have backed USB over Firewire regardless since it had a stake in USB.

The irony is, USB would probably have failed without Apple.

The fact is that Intel has repeatedly chosen its own technology to promote, and until recently it had the market power to force everyone else to follow suit.

> (Correction: apparently Intel made some claims but Apple owns it.)

This doesn't seem to be correct. While I can't find anything with a simple search, the thunderbolt technology website is copyrighted by Intel, and Wikipedia directly attributes the development to Intel.

Iirc apple was mostly a first adapter to thunderbolt.

At the time of the first technology demos, the story was that Apple and Intel jointly developed it.

https://www.engadget.com/2009/09/26/exclusive-apple-dictated...

> It's also a good reminder that Jobs, for all the posthumous praise he gets, made some rather stupid business blunders during his tenures at Apple.

Did anyone say that Jobs never made any blunders? Does anyone think that there it any person alive that didn't make blunders?

No one would say 'no' to that, but at the same time people would praise jobs anyways. "See, he made firewire, which made intel make USB 2.0. He knew exactly what he was doing." etc, etc.

I can't help but laugh at how much of a euphemism " ... but the meeting went badly." must be.

With legal teams on hand and millions of dollars at stake, I'd imagine it as dry and unemotional for the most part.

A read-through on some paperwork, a couple of curt refusals, double check to confirm and get clarification, maybe a phone call or two, and call it a day.

I've heard it argued that burning Intel was intentional strategy as Jobs wanted Firewire to be associated with the Mac. People bought Macs simply because they couldn't get their DV cameras working with a third-party Windows-based setup.

What is your interpretation of the "fail fast" mindset? This sounds like the perfect example of a big project failing catastrophically that "fail fast" intends to avoid.

He's talking about "fail fast" failing to rescue Firewire, not Apple.

On the contrary, OP is saying that Apple made the decision to bump the license fee up to a dollar, very quickly saw that it was too high and lowered it to 25 cents, but it didn't matter. That one simple failed decision that Apple quickly reversed still ended up killing FireWire.

If Apple charged 25c in the beginning and increased the price over time until they found the equilibrium then it might have been a different story.

Would that actually have been possible, though? I'd expect that these royalties were defined by massive multi-year contracts. If that's the case, they couldn't realistically do something like gradually increase the price until they found the equilibrium, at least unless "over time" here is on the scale of a decade. I may be off base here, though; I'd be interested to hear from anyone who knows more.

I'm not sure I agree - at least they didn't fight each other for a few years and eventually both get passed up, like the 56k modem chip fiasco. Apple moved forward and still did OK. They might have "lost", but they also avoided a protracted and potentially self-defeating fight.

Apple might have done OK, but they killed a technical specification that was already present in thousands (millions) of users' devices, and that hundreds of other companies had invested in as the best way forward (technically it remains superior to USB).

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