How to Save Apple from 1997 | Hacker News Reader

How to Save Apple from 1997

wired.com

28 pointscjoh28 comments

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I read the headline as: 1997 is somehow threatening Apple.

Turns out headline writing on Saturday morning is kind of hilarious.

I read it is being: How to save Apple from making the same mistakes that lead to it being in such a bad state in 1997.

The current iPhone vs Android battle could turn out to be a repeat of 1995. Only time will tell.

Chrysler nearly went under in the late 1970s and came back to lead its industry

Uhhh...

"97. Have Pixar make 3001, A Space Odyssey, with HAL replaced by a Mac."

Looks like some of that found its way into WALL-E.

60. Abandon the Mach operating system you just acquired and run Windows NT kernel instead.

Bwa ha ha. Funny how that bit worked out...

Umm, if anyone is troubled its Dell. I have tried ordering servers, monitors and UPSs from them multiple times this month and their website failed. I was able to place an order with them today via the phone, but it took over and hour and had to repeat all of the data they already had on my online account.

I would have to agree with that. I buy a lot of Macs, but Dell was always my goto PC / Windows server company. They seem to have lost there way and actually make it hard to buy stuff from them.

eerie premonition:

  We'd all feel better about shelling out the bucks
  for a Power Mac 9600 if we could get a tower with leopard spots.

That Blue Dalmatian iMac (http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/imac/stats/imac_500_fp...) must've been the ugliest computer Apple ever sold...with the possible exception of the Flower Power iMac (http://www.applegazette.com/imac/flower-power-imac-named-one...)

You might think it's funny, but a lot of the advice that people are giving to Apple right now will look like this in 10 years.

A lot of it looks like this even today.

It's funny that people, even today, are giving Apple advice on how they should change their business strategies, considering that Apple is hugely successful and extraordinarily profitable.

93. Develop a way to program that requires no scripting or coding.

I was going to come here and comment on how stupid and impossible this idea is. I then remembered that prototypes of many of my first mac applications where simply Interface Builder and bindings.

I think since Interface Builder had been around for many years by the time the article was written, we can write this one off as author ignorance rather than give him the benefit of the doubt.

Very good point. I had forgotten my timeline, IB was clearly a part of NeXt which had been recently acquired.

Haha, why stop there! Develop a way to cook without food or utensils. Invent a way to paint without paint or canvas. Write without vowels or consonants.

"Invent a way to paint without paint or canvas."

iPhone Brushes?

If you remove all the jokes in the list, you basically get the Apple corporate roadmap for the past ten years.

Really? It seems to me that half of those items are the exact opposite of what worked well for Apple, and many of the things from the list that Apple tried didn't work out so well (eg. 63, about embracing Java).

I think Apple's formula for success over the past decade boils down to three key elements:

1. Throwing out all the old hardware and software designs

2. Taking NeXTSTEP mainstream

3. Jonathan Ive

Number 1 in my list was only weakly expressed by the Wired list, number 2 was said in some ways, but there were also some conflicting suggestions, and number 3 was completely unanticipated, despite being by far the most important factor.

4. Don't listen to outsiders and know-it-alls that make lists.

People worry about replacing Steve Jobs. Who's going to replace Ive?

What do you actually know about what Jonathan Ive has done at Apple? I've never read any books or insider accounts of what kind of contribution he makes, so I don't know much about him. I find it mystifying that he's built up such a reputation that some consider him the most important factor in Apple's resurgence.

Even if he is the best industrial designer in the world, does that really account for Apple's success? What about the people designing the software and the hardware internals? Aren't those roles at least as important?

I was being a bit facetious in listing just Ive, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that his industrial design department has been that important to Apple's success. Most notably, the iPod is almost certainly the product that gave Apple the financial stability to develop OS X into what it is today, and to undertake the Intel transition that enabled them to take over the high-end computer market. If the iPod had been only slightly better than the other mp3 players of the time, Apple probably wouldn't have been able to make much profit off it or the iTunes Media Store.

The iPod was the big driver, but it was the software/hardware ecosystem, the content, the ads, as well as the design that made it a success. There were full/touchscreen phones before the iPhone. I don't think it was the clunky ID that kept them from being successful. It was poor feature design, implementation, and crappy software.

That said Ive is awesome, the products are lustworthy, but too much credit for the "design" is given to the ID team.

I think you're confusing the circumstances of the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone. I certainly agree with you that the iPhone's success is only minimally related to industrial design, and mostly due to a well-designed operating system and ecosystem.

The iPod, on the other hand, was on the market for a year and a half before the iTunes store opened. Its competitors were the likes of the Creative NOMAD players, which were very much clunky, some even in comparison to portable CD players. The iPod software certainly wasn't revolutionary. It was the physical interface, centered around the clickwheel and far simpler than the competition that was so groundbreaking. As slashdot so famously and bluntly put it, the iPod was downright lame in most other respects.

Do you really think Ive is that important? I'm a designer and love Apple's ID, but I think it is over rated as a success factor. The iPod gets credit for design, but it is really product management, more than ID, that accounts for the success IMO.

You could make a case that the revolutionary aesthetics of the first iMac helped put Apple back on the winning track with free media and general excitement, but is it more important than "Think Differnet?"

Good industrial design drives the rest of the product. It provides a laser focused attention to detail that drag the software and hardware along with it.

They seem to have taken this advice to the extreme:

Buy a song. Last year, it would have been "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. This year, maybe it's "Ain't too Proud to Beg."

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