Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997)

scripting.com

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I had a Macintosh on my desk in 1997, and it was the biggest piece of crap around. "An OS ... 10 years ahead"?! What a joke. It crashed hard far more often even than Windows 95. It was also slow and expensive. Eventually MkLinux came along and I was able to replace it with something solid.

I believe he meant that the OS was ten years ahead when it debuted in 1984. By the time it was on your desk some 13 years later the rest of the market had caught up and in many ways surpassed it.

Perhaps in 1984 it was a year or two ahead of the competition (Windows 1 was released in 1985). Or another way to look at it is that it was a decade behind (the Alto was released in 1973). In any case that's no excuse to sit around and do nothing for 13 years.

Come on, Windows 1 was a pathetic joke, not remotely comparable to the Macintosh OS of the time. Mac OS was quite good up until System 7 in the early 90s when Microsoft finally caught up with windows 3.1.

Was just about to say. Win 3.1 on a "multimedia PC" was finally good enough at around ~92, but few PC users left the comforts of DOS before that.

System 7.x was a work of art imo. The system was still small enough to 'understand'. Loved the old system folder layout (with folder for Preferences, Control Panels, Fonts, Extensions, etc...). Whenever the Mac had issues, the fix was generally to start-up without Extensions (by pressing the Shift key on start up) and clean-up the folder. Then add a few extensions at a time and keep restarting until the issue was found.

Extensions were often things like drivers and other code that 'enhanced' the system. Like this loveable addition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7EWDKVM1Y

Windows 1 does not remotely qualify as "catching up" with the Mac.

And no one, not Jobs or anyone else, is defending those 13 years, so no excuse is necessary. Jobs came back to a shell of a nearly bankrupt company and turned it into the most successful company in the world. It was a remarkable feat.

The Amiga was released a year later and made the Mac look like an overpriced toy.

"6.The influence of developers, even influential developers like you, will be minimal."

This seems an characterization of Apple, even today.

Apple puts Apple first above all else, after which are customers and then developers.

Like most companies it's a question of who you perceive your customers to be:

Apple — end users

Google — advertisers

Microsoft — OEMs, IT departments (although they seem to be changing their mind about OEMs)

Amazon — investors (which bizarrely works to customer benefit, or at least low prices, right now)

That's cute, but also pretty clear that every category you've assigned here is inaccurate in any realistic sense.

Developers did have one huge effect on Apple: the creation of the iPhone OS SDK.

When the iPhone launched, Apple really did believe that they were going to limit developers to web apps on that platform. It was only after huge outcries from developers that they agreed to create an SDK.

"Eventually, though, the flywheels lost mass and the engine wore out."

Will we be reading this again in 10 years?

I doubt it. Tim Cook may not have Jobs' charisma or vision, but he's eminently competent and Apple is nowhere near as dysfunctional a company as it was in the 90s. They'll probably peter off a bit, but I can't see Apple returning to the verge of bankruptcy with its current leadership group.

When Steve Jobs left, was it incompetence that killed Apple or a lack of vision, direction and innovation? The answer to that question is important because, while Tim Cook has demonstrated the ability to crank out thinner, lighter devices with sharper screens and better battery life, but there's no indication that he shares Steve Job's ability to drive Apple to launch revolutionary new products every few years (iPod. iTunes. iPhone. App Store. iPad.)

but there's no indication that he shares Steve Job's ability to drive Apple to launch revolutionary new products every few years

Can we at least wait a "few years" before declaring that Cook's Apple isn't able "to launch revolutionary new projects every few years"?

I'm interested in knowing this now, not in a few years...

I don't think in the current Apple that Tim Cook is the one that is expected to have the vision for the company going forward. I think this responsibility is partly in the hands of Jon Ive and probably some other higher-ups as well. It's also interesting that Apple will allow employees some time to work on their own projects, perhaps Apple is expecting the employees to develop great new ideas that can be turned into products.

See: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-tries-20-time-2012-11

I think Apple’s innovation (i.e. new products) made them grow so massively, but I do also believe that Apple’s other core values under Steve Jobs – values Tim Cook will, I’m confident, be able to uphold – will at least keep them big and successful (if not growing).

Tireless iteration and polishing and a lean product line is also what Steve Jobs’ Apple was about, and that is something Tim Cook can preserve.

revolutionary

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Lack of vision, direction, and innovation doesn't bring you to the brink of bankruptcy. There are plenty of boring, staid, profitable companies out there. To fail so badly at that size requires mismanagement.

Can someone else with Jobs' understanding of what-depends-on-what be found to make the exquisite choices that Jobs made? Enterprisey groupthink seldom tolerates the new, difficult, and unpopular choices required to produce "inventions intended to mother necessity." I fear we're more likely to see Apple eventually disintegrate back into "a church wracked by petty politics."

Lately I've begun to suspect that the tech industry works a lot like politics. The pendulum swings back and forth. Except, instead of Republicans and Democrats you have an array of tech companies that hand off market dominance. What will be interesting to see five years from now if Jobs's departure from the company was the point at which that pendulum starting swinging in a different direction (Microsoft?).

Especially with some of Steve's people, like Scott Forstall, getting forced out.

Brings back memories of reading Scripting News back in the day. I worked for a certain silicon valley university and we actually had one of the Power Computing boxes. They certainly weren't great in terms of quality but they ran the OS. I also remember Ric Ford getting upset when Steve pulled theplug on the clones. Seems a zillion years ago.

Beautifully written. Almost brought tears to my eyes. The combination of art and technology is what gave Apple, and America the competitive edge for so long.

can you explain the "and America" part? The PC was invented in the US, and the majority of the culture still comes from there. Microsoft, IBM, Google, Sun, HP, Dell, Facebook...

You can argue that Samsung, Sony, etc. have made inroads, but I think America runs tech-culture while other nationalities are sometimes responsible for hardware. But software runs the world, not hardware.

The only company I think that isn't American is RIM (I'm Canadain), but their impact is definitely in decline.

What do others think? Is ARM, Samsung or Sony, as influential in technology as these American software companies? Or is there a non-American software company I'm missing? I would have put Linux in there, but they aren't a company, and are truly international.

It really exploded with the iPod; it took several years but Steve was ultimately able to check off Searls' list.

I think he did it pretty fast actually. Think about it. In 1996 Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy and around 15 years later, it is the most valuable tech company ever? How many CEOs can guide their companies so?

Please. Killing the clones was the only choice Steve had.

The cloners e.g. Power Computing in particular weren't interested in the Mac platform at all. They were simply interested in making money. And the easiest way to do this was to target existing Mac prosumers which were the most profitable segment.

Which meant the overall Mac market didn't increase at all which was the whole point of the clones.

At the time that Apple started allowing clones, the common wisdom was that this was the Right Thing. We all knew that the PC platform had only succeeded because IBM opened it up to clones, and the result basically forced them to innovate. When Steve shut down the Mac clones, everyone "knew" he'd made a mistake, because it meant Apple would continue to have 100% of a very small pie instead of 10% or 20% of a pie a thousand times bigger. Of course, we all underestimated the effect on quality of all these semi-compatibles. Just read Raymond Chen's blog to see the pain Microsoft has to endure to support ten zillion slightly different pieces of hardware. Steve avoided all that, with the result that his pie is now a whole lot bigger, and his company still owns all of it.

Hindsight: he had it in advance. The rest of us didn't. That's why he died rich, I guess.

>the PC platform had only succeeded because IBM opened it up to clones

That's a little misleading. More accurate to say IBM didn't consider the personal computer strategically important and consequently did not bother to erect barriers to competition, particularly, did not buy MSDOS outright or take other measures to prevent MS's licensing it to competitors.

I'm not sure that's accurate, given their history with openness and the System/360.

Elaboration would be welcome. I always thought they wanted to get rid of the plug-compatible manufacturers but couldn't because of anti-trust litigation and because software copyright was much less vigorously enforced by the courts than it came to be in the early 1980s.

Note that after they realized the importance of the PC, IBM did try to exclude competitors by pushing their own OS and making sure Microchannel and other parts of PS/2 were heavily patented.

The System 360 was basically the first computer to implement a concept of software and hardware compatibility. It was completely spec-driven, which allowed hardware and software to be created and sold by third-parties.

You're right that IBM was bitten by not taking the PC revolution seriously, but even so they never had pure MCA product line at any point, so their attempt to (re-) corner a segment was somewhat half-hearted. They did license MCA to third-parties, though, which is something you didn't see in the pre-System360 era. You could get a Hayes modem in either ISA or MCA (and later PCI) versions. They cost a bit more, but depending on who you talk to it was indeed a better performer, the Betamax to PCI's VHS.

As I've read about it, the 360's goal was a scalable product line. I haven't ever read before of a goal to create a third-party ecosystem.

>the PC platform had only succeeded because IBM opened it up to clones

It didn't, the team behind Project Chess used off-the-shelf parts to cut down on costs and dev times so the end product was also easier to reverse engineer.

A company did just that and made a BIOS that didn't infringe on IBM patents. Couple that with an Intel processor and a DOS copy you could buy fair and square from Microsoft and you got a Clone just as good as an official IBM PC.

On Mac clones, it wasn't a bad idea, just too little too late: by the time Apple decided to go ahead with OEMs the Mac's marketshare was a shadow of its former self and Apple was already in trouble. Windows had become the standard, nuff said.

Yep, I'm more or less speaking from the viewpoint of the time. The received wisdom was that it was IBM's deliberate decision to allow clones that made the difference; nowadays we can see that this was only part of the story, but that original belief coloured how people saw things.

On the other hand, though, perhaps the decision to use off-the-shelf parts was also part of the wider clone-friendly decision process. So it's not an either/or, even in hindsight.

IBM didn't want clones, it created the PS/2 to make a PC that couldn't be reverse engineered and cloned by the competition, but even then it was too late.

If IBM could they would have banned all clones, but as I said before OEMs weren't infringing any patents so they couldn't be sued nor stopped.

That was a considerable number of years after the PC rewrote the personal computer market. I don't think the PS/2 was on their radar when they did what they did with the first PC.

I suspect you're right. But regardless of the reasons, the Power Computing clones were FANTASTIC compared to the crap Apple was peddling at the time. I bought three PowerComputing machines in the space of two years and each one was a leap forward in terms of speed, upgradability, and ... ahem ... power. All for a quarter of the price Apple was overcharging for the nearest equivalent PowerMac.

That's not correct. The clones targeted existing users rather than expanding the market because Apple would not let them expand the market. The cloner license agreement required them to use Apple-approved designs for major components such as the motherboard. The net result was that all the cloners were actually allowed to do was build machines that functionally fit exactly the same niches Apple machines fit, but with more variation in case design. All that left for them to compete on was offering more options, such as more RAM, faster processors, and the like at a lower price.

Power Computing wanted to expand the market. They built prototypes that went beyond just putting Apple designs in a new case, and showed them at trade shows, and publicly begged Apple to let them sell them.

Yea, in 1997 Apple was going to add CHRP support to Mac OS to allow cloners more flexiblity, but they killed the clones before that work was released.

While true, this was exactly how Apple designed the cloning program. They refused to license to large PC companies like Gateway, and instead chose a couple small no-names. As a result, you had Apple with their huge advertising budget and retail presence, while mailorder companies like Power could really only afford to market in Mac magazines/tradeshows.

(IMO, this indicates Apple was never serious about clones; and wanted to keep it on a small scale. It was only done to appease the conventional wisdom on wall street.)

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