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edw519

Great list! A few more:

We're so successful because we're smarter than everyone else.

We learned everything we needed to know in college.

Our technology was so good, it was only a matter of time before everyone found us.

Most of our unit tests were successful on the first run.

We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m.

Customer service issues went pretty much as we expected.

We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that.

We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and friends.

We outsourced all of the technical work.

I'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News.

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  > We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and 
  > friends.

If you cannot say that, I's say you failed.

  > We always knew better than our customers. Eventually,
  > they realized that.

Should I repeat Ford's saying about faster horse? And not doing focus groups hurts Apple so much…

> We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and > friends. > If you cannot say that, I's say you failed.

Doesn't "not having plenty of time to spend with our family and friends" follows directly from not winding up at 5?

Regardless of what you consider a failure, the hard fact is most of the businesses demand time - a lot of time. And there are only so many hours in a day. For the starting days, putting up south of 12 hours is common, and that takes a toll on the time you would have spent with your near and dear ones.

Actually, Ford never said that.[1][2]

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747106

[2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819549

> We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that.

Pretty sure I've read quotes from Steve Jobs that follow that line of thinking actually.

Sadly, I know a few entrepreneurs that also think this way. They're not having much success, but cling to the notion that the world will 'wake up' and see things their way, eventually, some day, if they could just talk to enough people (and they usually cite Apple as their inspiration for this approach).

The Steve Jobs / Apple approach is more the exception that proves the rule, and even then, they've had their Newton moments too. What that proves is that with a successful enough company you can have a few failures. When you've only got the one product, you can't afford the luxury of your own Newton.

The first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was kill off the Newton. There's been the occasional slip, but nothing too ghastly (except the flower power iMacs).

why did he return to apple? everyone forget this, because he couldn't have the same luck at his second company.

also apple would have forwarded the osx success a couple years if the acquired beos instead of next. so that was steves luck acting again

How do you explain the success of Pixar, the company that Steve bought and eventually made him a billionaire?

This is like saying carl icahn is genius for making motorola mobile a success and making him a billionaire.

apple was a success because of woz. Jobs was good at milking it, that i will give him.

jobs wasted all his apple-money on next.

Pixar was more proof that even he never thought apple would be the hit it is today. i don't think they had a single mac there until 5yrs ago.

> Pixar was more proof that even he never thought apple would be the hit it is today.

The facts don't align with that theory. Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. Toy Story was released in 1995. There wasn't any plausible path for Steve to return to Apple until 1996.

I'm no huge fan of the NeXT underpinnings of OS X, but the idea that using BeOS as an underlying operating system "would have forwarded the osx success a couple years" is silly.

Aside from the still-continuing claims of Be adherents and their Haiku descendants, BeOS was so very much Nothing Special and I find it highly unlikely the Magic BeOS Fairy Powder would have materially improved OS X.

But it demo'd so well!

it had an amazing multimedia framework. it had even patents for hardware stuff that put the later firewire to shame. and it had the best os api I've ever had to deal with.

it had everything that os8 lacked, and that later was added on osx only. except objectivec... but there were even compilers for that later on.

but thats not even my point. to downvote me above, first answer: how many clients next had?

BeOS was interesting on the surface and had a couple of neat ideas, but wasn't a substantial system underneath. Heck, it didn't even have the concept of user accounts and file ownership!

Anyone who laments the outcome of the Be/NeXT decision clearly knows little about just how much rock solid foundation came along with NeXT -- most notably the development tools and developer ecosystem.

The Mac ecosystem has experienced a consumer renaissance through iDevices/iOS, but also a geek renaissance through Mac OS X's UNIX underpinnings.

Classic Mac OS was derided as a toy (and in many technical respects it was), and BeOS would have done nothing long term to shed the Mac's toy image. Today, few people call OS X a toy.

Correct. NeXT and BeOS were respectively an over-engineered and under-engineered OS with a really good looking UI on top.

I find file permissions just an annoyance on my debian desktop that I share only with my wife. And I deal with unix security since the early 90's. OSX has file permissions and about 30% of them are setuid. Great improvement!

Also, BeOS had an Xwindow port months after it's death. OSX had it when?

IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are mentioning this. But the beos hybrid kernel would be good for that as well. heck it was even bought by palm for that purpose. sadly politics never moved it. even Next took a lot of time to be absorbed in apple ...and they had the ceo at their side.

About the tech that matter... there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk? anyways, GNU implemented all that 3 years after NEXT, and they were not even being paid. Meanwhile Next were licensing PS from adobe for the interface just like SGI was doing for what? 10 years?

No matter how many buttons had your rock solid development tools. it was just like programming in VB. and if you wanted to do anything just a little different, you had to deal with awful apis and post script. heck, there's one layer of hell with the same name.

now, on the other hand, I invite you to read the BeOS book that is now opensourced... from oreilley if i'm not mistaken. Even the OS being dead now, it's the best read if you ever want to learn anything about elegant APIs design.

...i know all that is pointless... http://xkcd.com/386/#Duty_Calls ...but i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit for being cool

> I find file permissions just an annoyance

Maybe for you. However Mac OS X does manage them well for you, which means that you can set up limited access and guest accounts on your computer without worrying about someone fucking it up or looking at your shit.

> IOS is a completely different beast. I don't even imagine why you are mentioning this.

I mentioned it because the products sparked a revival of the Apple brand in consumer's minds. But yeah, now you mention it, the technology did do a great job of scaling down to the phone. BeOS might have been fine too, but hey, Palm chose a Linux kernel instead.

We're discussing could-have-beens, which is pointless.

> there was nothing super new about objective C. ever heard of smalltalk?

With that line of argument, there's been nothing new in computer languages for thirty years.

I'm sure you love your BeBox and spend your life porting stuff like Firefox to Haiku, but as cool as BeOS was on the surface, the world has past it by. Stop lamenting what could have been, there's no interesting arguments to be had there.

> i just can't stand to see apple taking any underserved merit

Whereas giving too much credit to experimental failed projects like BeOS isn't?

But: BeOS couldn't print. End of story.

(I don't recall the details, but there was little to no printer support; certainly nothing comparable to classic MacOS. For Apple's core market at the time, that was the kiss of death.)

that's true. BeOS never got to the point of being a product.

After they noticed they had no money for the bebox they just pampered the OS for a sale. that's the main reason it looks so much like os7... or 8. it was being tweaked for an apple purchase.

printing was just a matter of paying the rights for the 'standards', again, they were steps before that point.

Also, linux didn't have decent print for the same reason. nobody paid pantone et al for color stuff licenses. heck, gimp didn't have CMKY until... does it have already? honestly, i gave up following it up.

"Why did he return to Apple?"

Because it was falling apart without him and that's the company he really wanted to run?

Think what you will about Steve Jobs but the idea that he's some hack who's milked an incredible streak of good luck is not going to win many people over.

I think people take the ignoring customers as an on or off thing, but no company ignores what their customers want (including Apple).

What a good company does is never listen to only a single customer. What a good company does is listen to all customers and take that knowledge and solve the over arcing problem. Each individual customer is likely only seeing part of the problem and thus only asking for partial solutions. The problem is that they simply do not have the visibility to know the entire problem, and that's where a good 3rd party business comes into play.

I think the quote I've heard is that they don't bother with outside market research. That's different from simply ignoring customers.

Any sane company will tell you feedback is important, what can differ is where the feedback comes from, how it's interpreted, and whether customers have as much knowledge of what is or isn't possible/economical as the people at the company.

It's also important to note that companies like Apple are always trying new things, building strange prototypes, etc.. If a customer screams for Widget X, a company might try building a Widget X prototype, and discover it doesn't work so well in practice.

> If a customer screams for Widget X, a company might try building a Widget X prototype, and discover it doesn't work so well in practice.

_This._

It's a lesson I learned early on in my developer career: when customers ask for Widget X, it's often a symptom of an underlying problem that customers are trying to solve. Your role as a product developer is to understand the customer's underlying problem.

Discover what the problem is, and you might discover that they don't need a Widget X; maybe they need a Feature X or a Gadget X. Maybe it reveals holes in your training processes. Maybe they just revealed a seemingly trivial bug with existing stuff. Or maybe you realise you never understood why clients ever used your product until now.

Another one to add: "I am as good as Steve Jobs." ;)

I've heard successful people say half of those. Be carful not to paint yourself into the corner of conventional wisdom.

This made me lol while taking a swig of my lemonade...point for you ;p "I'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News."

...ok, not a constructive reply other than: laughter generates beneficial chemicals in the brain and it's good to be good to others...thanks! carry on. :)

"We'll share profits with employees that actually worked on the product we sold"

I'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News.

Hence, CTRL + W.

Hmmm, I had to CTRL + SHIFT + T that.

What does it do (nothing on OS X, apparently)?

Close the window. Same as Command+W.

Actually it closes the tab, not the window (unless there is only one tab.)

"We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m"

Actually I am pretty sure I heard/read that a couple of times (or equivalent, not completely busting their asses).

"We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that."

Apple?

"We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m."

That's what 37Signals always preaches.

>Our technology was so good, it was only a matter of time before everyone found us.

Google...

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