Their early pricing was very high, even when you don’t factor in inflation.
It worked out ok for them long term I suppose.
It worked out ok for them long term I suppose.
The stars aligned for Apple a few times: I think it's Apple ][, iTunes, iPhone in that order.
These days we reflect on the Macintosh as a success, but texts from the mid-to-late 80s did not and frankly, I trust those texts more. A fairly good specimen can be found in this 1987 text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey:_Pepsi_to_Apple (available at https://archive.org/details/odyssey00john)
Here's an example from my personal library from a 1984 text, "The coming computer industry shakeout" which sadly hasn't been digitized: http://9ol.es/computer-shakedown-219.jpg
1984-86 were pretty dark times for Apple if you're to go off of what people were saying between 1984-1986.
This is another HN myth like “cable was once ad free”.
Before Amelio was kicked out, he had secured $4 billion in financing. If you look at the series of events, it is completely illogical thst $150 million could have “saved” Apple. The deal happened in 1997. Apple wasn’t profitable and just barely until 2000-2001. $150 million couldn’t have saved it. Besides that, a month later, Apple spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license.
The second myth is that part of the deal was that Microsoft agreed to port Office to the Mac. Office was already available for the Mac and actually started on the Mac.
Part of the deal was that Microsoft would continue supporting the Mac with Office and port IE.
Also Apple and Microsoft were involved in two major legal disputes - the “look and feel” lawsuit where Apple accused MS of copying the Macs interface and that MS illegally used QuickTime code. They agreed to drop the lawsuit and cross license patents.
Sorry for not being more engaging, it's late and I'm getting kinda dizzy so I should go to bed.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-acquires-power-comput...
My timeline for Apple profitability was off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.
But Apple lost over $1 billion that year. A net $50 million was a drop in the bucket.
I also misstated that Amelio had obtained working capital. It was actually Fred Anderson from the same article.
> On July 9, 1997, Gil Amelio was ousted as CEO of Apple by the board of directors. Fred D. Anderson was the head of the directors in short term and obtained short-term working capital from the banks in July 1997.
I looked over what I wrote. I think was doing too much for dramatic effect.
The history in this thread is excellent. I don't have much to add but out of either narcissism or obligation I will (I wonder if they are related) and with it open a new can of worms, so let's go
if someone was to run Lloyd's algorithm on tech companies they'd probably, with the right feature selection find nice Gaussian blobs around a number of once great companies who faltered. For example, RIM, Palm, DEC, Burroughs, Commodore, SGI and Sun. I think a pithy ~100 word description could describe them all: "Excellent teams blindsiding the world with visionary products that crash through material reality with the human spirit of creativity who are not able to stabilize the fragile chemical interplay between market, money, magic and mind. Delays and disappointments lead to disasters and desertion as the dreams turn into nightmares. The talent atrophies and the culture grows bitter. Plans for the future are replaced with the nostalgia of the past as the once great company grasps in futility at trying to reconstruct the fleeting world that once was but can increasingly never be again."
This was also Apple's trajectory in the late 90s. The confluence of factors that led to its demise and rise were many and extraordinary. The MSFT influx is in my mind the most memorable. Apple was definitely in survival/death mode and could have just coasted and rode to the end until they got snatched up by someone like say, counterfactually now, Adobe in say 2003. They'd be another company on that pile of once great machines of the mighty who faltered.
I should probably disclose I've never liked their products. I've got an obscure collection too; a magic link, newton, nextstation - I had a 1983 pre-production mac, early snow-white design language hardware - I've never worked there but I think I have pretty deep exposure to them and I've always found their stuff to be overpriced shoddy ostentatious appliances.
And that's enough gasoline on this fire from me.
That’s clearly not the case, there is no way that a net $50 million made the difference between life and death when Apple already had a little bit over $1 billion in the bank.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120729114743/http://news.cnet.... “Apple, which ended its third quarter with $1.2 billion in cash, will use the additional $150 million to invest in its core markets of education and creative content, Anderson said.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20160821150114/http://www.roughl...
http://time.com/3781557/in-a-private-light-diana-walkers-pho... (Picture #10 in slide show)
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/05/apple...
“Less than 12 hours before his big announcement, nobody here knows yet about the bombshell to come. In fact, Jobs is still negotiating it here at the Castle--on a cell phone. "Hi, Bill," you hear him say in the echo chamber of the old hall. Then his voice drops, and for nearly an hour he paces the stage, running through last-minute details with Gates. All the while, he leans over his computer, paces, lies down on the stage, paces, lurks in dark corners, paces and talks, paces and talks.
This is the fateful call for the boy titans of the personal-computer revolution, meant to settle the war. At one point, talking about Apple, Jobs says, "There are a lot of good things, happily--and a lot of screwed-up things." Then, to his crew, he yells, "Have we got satellite contact with the other side?" Assured this has been taken care of, he answers a question from Gates about what to wear on the morrow ("I'm just going to wear a white shirt," he assures him), and he finally ends the conversation with a heartfelt "Thank you for your support of this company. I think the world's a better place for it." And so that's how Apple and Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, finally seal it--on a cell-phone call.
The deal is vintage Jobs. Amelio began the process of repairing relations between the two longtime rivals. But once he was out the door at Apple, Jobs contacted Gates to try to get talks started again. Gates dispatched his CFO, Gregory Maffei, who met Jobs at his home. Jobs suggested they go for a walk. Grabbing a couple of bottles of mineral water from the fridge, the two took off for a stroll around Palo Alto. Jobs was barefoot. "It was an interesting scene," Maffei recalls. "It was a pretty radical change for the relations between the two companies." The two walked for nearly an hour, through Palo Alto's green university area, as they pounded out the details of a potential deal. Jobs, Maffei says, was "expansive and charming. He said, 'These are things that we care about and that matter.' And that let us cut down the list. We had spent a lot of time with Amelio, and they had a lot of ideas that were nonstarters. Jobs had a lot more ability. He didn't ask for 23,000 terms. He looked at the whole picture, figured about what he needed. And we figured he had the credibility to bring the Apple people around and sell the deal."”
(From: Steve’s Job: Restart Apple by Cathy Booth in Time Magazine Aug 18, 1997)
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/13/3239977/apple-and-microsof...
The 1997 cross-license agreement between Microsoft and Apple: http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1292505/584.pdf
Another minor company founded by Jobs while he was away is Pixar...
Steve Jobs didn't exactly came back at Apple by sneaking in shamefully after a lucky coincidence, his come back was actually a big deal for those who remember.
Catmull brought in John Lasseter to make animated shorts. Lucas had no interest in producing "cartoons," so once he had usable hardware, he spun out the ILM digital graphics group and as Pixar with investment capital from Steve Jobs. Lucas then hired more digital graphics artists who were more interested in supporting special effects using the rendering tools that had already been developed.
Steve had an interesting relationship with Pixar. He was somewhat hands on as chairman of the board, but still had a lot of the aggro tendencies that everyone knew from his first stint at Apple. Sometimes he would go "street bully," including a heated argument over the use of a whiteboard with Alvy Ray Smith, an actual founder of Pixar, that resulted in Smith's departure.
That said, Steve provided the financing and executive deal-making that resulted in Toy Story and the subsequent string of the best animated feature films ever made.
I think your summary of his relationship with them sounds a lot like many of his working relationships.
After C64 you got the Amiga (graphics) and Atari ST (music) who took a lot of the marketshare for easy to use GUI os’es. Also games were big on both. PC was still predominantly business until games like Doom and the first audioboards/videocards and the CD-ROM.
That means that I have been through a lot of changes, and watched Apple expand and contract; numerous times.
I used to regularly get sneers from "PC people," about how I was holding onto a "dead baby," and should just let go, and learn Windows.
It got fairly infuriating. Geeks can be pretty insulting (just spend some time, wandering around the comments of this very venue, and we're quite well-behaved, hereabouts).
Kinda glad I stuck it through, though.
That was the outcome of a process that started years earlier, when Jobs wasn’t at Apple. I wouldn’t describ3 it as “got”, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company:
The lawsuit "Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co.", filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows.
On March 3, 1995, a Federal judge issued a temporary restraining order that prohibited Microsoft from distributing its current version of Video for Windows
[…]
In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser. In return, Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office, Internet Explorer, and various developer tools and software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock