Ways to save Apple (1997) | Hacker News Reader

Ways to save Apple (1997)

archive.wired.com

103 points666_howitzer77 comments

Funny how some of these are way off, while others are pretty spot on:

7. Don't disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple salespeople, and display everything like you're a living, breathing company and not a remote, dusty concept.

The one that made me laugh was the suggestion of replacing Mach (though really even then NeXT was more than *just Mach, but w/e) with the NT kernel.

Can you imagine what MacOS and iOS would look like if they were built on NT? Not so much because they are technically incompatible, but more for the political implications of MacOS being married to the heart of Windows.

1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game. Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely, to compete more directly with Microsoft without the liability of manufacturing boxes.

Very first one, lol. I agree that many are spot on, but coupling Mac software to its hardware is part of how they make such good products, not to mention the plethora of innovative hardware devices that have made them the richest company in the world.

All of Apple's hardware products are now made by outsourced contract manufacturers. They're still all designed by Apple obviously but I thought this point was spot on.

Are the entire products outsourced, or just the componenets?

Either way, I think this suggestion is implying that Apple stop selling hardware and instead just sell software that runs on other peoples' hardware (it's the "compete more directly with Microsoft" bit that leads me to believe this is what they meant).

Virtually all products are outsourced. Apple owns no factories and employs no assembly line workers.

Instead it's formed deep partnerships with certain contract manufacturers (Foxconn). When it wants to pioneer a certain manufacturing technique, it will simply make a large capital expenditure to make the tooling available to the contract manufacturer. Never however will it actually be responsible for the actual manufacturing and assembly of its devices.

This is Tim Cook's doing and it's the model for just about every OEM you see today, from Apple to Xiaomi. Samsung and LG are notable exceptions because they are component manufacturers who became OEMs afterwards.

Edit: There might be some iMac assembly done in the United States, but this is likely using a US-based contract manufacturer as well.

Yes, hardware building is largely outsourced, but it's not Dell-style outsourced, where the contract manufacturer does a considerable part of the design. Today's Apple products probably have less generic design in them than 1997 Apple products, and more control by Apple.

Where they are really spot on is in suggesting repeatedly to pile in on newton. Fundamentally an iphone is a better newton and this is the only fundamental change that really saved the company.

I think you've got your history a little wrong. The iPod marked the turnaround of the company some 5+ years earlier than the release of the iPhone. The date of the release of the iPod is very near the low point of their stock. The glow surrounding the iPod also renewed interest in MacOS, which had recently been revamped with the release of OSX. While the iPod became its own enormous profit center, I credit it with the turnaround of their computer hardware & OS business, too.

I particularly love the ones that are both right and wrong:

72. Try the industry-standard serial port plug. RS-422 should be a last resort.

(They replaced RS-422 not with RS-232, but USB)

14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate yourselves from the pack. [...] We'd all feel better about shelling out the bucks for a Power Mac 9600 if we could get a tower with leopard spots.

(Obviously Wired shouldn't be handing out design advice.)

28. Don't lose your sense of humor. Build a very large life preserver and display it in front of your Cupertino, California, headquarters.

(Their new headquarters is the life preserver.)

44. Continue your research in voice recognition. It's the only way you're going to compete in videoconferencing and remote access.

(That's totally not what Siri is for.)

76. Make damn sure that Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip. Write a Windows NT emulator for Rhapsody's Intel version.

(They switched to Intel purely for the sake of Intel, and never made that Windows emulator.)

Was it the Intel switch that enabled bootcamp though? That's clearly a better solution than maintaining a windows emulator, but does it meet the same point?

Not only did it enable Boot Camp, it also enabled third party Windows VMs like Parallels and Virtual box, and third party Windows API reimplementations (namely Wine)

We already had 3rd party emulators running VMs on PowerPC (and they were slow as molasses), what Intel allowed was 3rd party VMs to run FAST!

We had emulators, not VMs.

Was there never any native virtualization on the PPC chips, or were there just no software written for it? I guess there was never much demand among Mac users to virtualize on PPC.

It did, but that was a really low priority for Apple: they shipped two generations of Intel Macs before releasing Bootcamp and the firmware updates that added BIOS emulation. They would have switched to Intel regardless of whether it gained them any form of Windows compatibility, because they needed more efficient processors.

> 76. Make damn sure that Rhapsody runs on an Intel chip. Write a Windows NT emulator for Rhapsody's Intel version.

Rapsody did run in Intel. It was basically openstep (that was already running on the 486) with some Mac OS bits bolted onto it.

>50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development.

If you'd bought $10,000 of AAPL stock when this article was published (June 1997), it would be worth about $523,000 today, excluding dividends.

I spent $4,500 on a G3 + 17" monitor in '98... it was an amazing machine :)

I spent $3,899 on a Macintosh SE in 1987. ($8,000 in today's dollars).

It was a lot slower.

$3,400 on IIsi in 1991... one of the first 'affordable' color Macs. That was an amazing machine and I still remember the magic.

$2500 on an Apple //e in 1983. Monochrome screen, 1 floppy drive. No printer, no modem, no 80 column card.

$2699 on a 1GHz G4 Powerbook in 2003. Didn't even have a DVD recordable, had to shell out another $300 for a firewire one and another $300 for 256MB more memory.

If I told you to buy $10,000 of Blackberry stock today, would you do it?

Buying AAPL in 1997 is as crazy as buying Blackberry today. The difference is Steve Jobs, but some people thought he was nuts too back in 1997.

Also interestingly, how much money you need to have to be able to invest 10K into a single risky investment. Realistically you would either have to be irresponsible or be quite comfortable already.

500K today is a very nice sum, but it is only life changing if you are in the category that would not have had the 10K to invest in the first place.

Didn't Steve jobs sell 1.5 million shares in 1997? It caused a 12 year low in the company's stock price..

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Steve-Jobs-Confirms-A...

Jobs made several poor decisions around Apple's stock, including after he came back. A few choices cost him billions of dollars (which would now be tens of billions for his wife). Fortunately for him, money wasn't something that he obsessed over.

You're talking about a guy who got in trouble for having his subordinates make up a fictitious board meeting to get a better strike price for his options.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/06/steve-job...

Oddly, if you had bought $10,000 of Blackberry stock when the article came out and dumped it a year after the iPhone, you would have done quite well.

Hindsight is 20/20. At that point in time buying Apple stok was akin to throwing your money away in the forseeable future.

I just really wish I bought 10 bitcoins when they were 40 a pop ..

Damn you, captain Hindsight!

Hah, "only" $40 a pop. Remember the first ever Bitcoin purchase? 10,000 BTC for a $25 pizza?

Didn't it multiply by more like 210x since then? So your 10k should be worth $2,100,000.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AAPL

> 98. Testimonials. Create commercials featuring real-life people in situations where buying a Mac (or switching to a Mac) saved the day.

This is an example of one thing that Apple gets really right. For some reason, other companies have found it really difficult to achieve the success that Apple has with their commercials and branding. Some (in my opinion) great work by Apple:

1. 2013 Christmas Commercial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v76f6KPSJ2w)

2. Shot on iPhone6 (https://www.apple.com/au/iphone/world-gallery/)

> 24. Pay cartoonist Scott Adams $10 million to have Dilbert fall in love with a Performa repairwoman.

I can bet this was submitted by Scott Adams himself. It's sounds completely like him.

And that gives you the idea of the worth of these "101 ways" even at the moment they were published.

tl;dr "101. Don't worry. You'll survive. It's Netscape we should really worry about."

Kinda weird how much of this is the opposite of what worked.

I felt reading this is what life for a CEO must be like. To be continually bombarded with 101 ways to do the job. 80%+ are wrong, from people who absolutely believe at the time they are correct.

All people running a business or who are in a managerial position are in this situation.

I think it's worse than that. You don't know the right answer, nobody else knows the right answer, and the only way get by is to guess and hope you get lucky. Apple got lucky. They built the iPod, which in hindsight, was a trans-formative product, but at the time it wasn't so obvious.

At the time it was a heavy music player with an annoying interface that only worked for mac users and was useless forever if you dropped it and the hard drive broke.

They fixed all those problems later versions, but the initial device was underwhelming to a lot of people.

Apple tends to be pretty good at releasing 1.0's where the problems can be fixed as tech improves, rather than being fundamental design flaws (though they manage those as well.. coverflow)

I had an early one, and loved it. It's been slowly forgotten about over time, but the scroll wheel interface was an amazing innovation. Even years later I'd see people with MP3 players with up and down buttons struggle to scroll through a large list, whereas the scroll wheel made it comfortable, fast, and easy to control.

The on thing of note is that Mac users seems to include a massive number of people involved with media production. This including artists of various stripes.

From personal anecdote i think i first heard about iPod when people started chatting about what those white earbuds some artist had been spotted using.

And i sure as hell don't think Apple was in the position to pay them to use the iPod publically.

And, of course, your lucky roll of the die will get you hailed as a "visionary CEO" for the rest of your life.

This is pretty uncharitable to Jobs. If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8).

You can draw a straight line through iPod -> iTunes Store -> iPhone -> App Store -> iPad -> Apple Watch. Even though the vision was a little blurry with regards to how powerful mobile devices would get and thus how the smart phone would overtake the PC for revenue, it still holds up in the way these products are executed and integrated. Frankly, the only company that is really competing effectively with this 15-year-old strategy is Google, because they have cloud services chops that Apple has struggled with, but despite being dominant in that area, it's still just good enough to put them on par because their UX, integrated industrial design, supply chain management, and marketing still pale in comparison to Apple.

Just because it wasn't immediately obvious to the world that the iPod would succeed doesn't mean that the vision wasn't there or that it was just dumb luck. Obviously there is a huge amount of luck in terms of circumstances that fuel every large company, but I find it really annoying when people are so dismissive of good execution with this type of hand-wavy rhetoric.

> If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8).

That's not really the case though. As Jobs outlined it in that video, the Digital Hub strategy was to sell Macintoshes by positioning them as something you could dock your consumer-electronics gadgets, mostly from third parties, into. It was a plan to sell hubs, not spokes. This strategy had limited viability for Apple, because a typical consumer wasn't likely to think "I've just bought this $500 camcorder, so now I need to spend twice that or more on a Mac in order to offload and edit the video". If they were going to use any computer as the digital hub for their camcorder, it was probably going to be their Windows PC. That's probably why iTunes for Windows was such a difficult and long-drawn-out decision for Jobs: because it was a decision to mostly abandon the Digital Hub approach in favour of selling more of the spokes. Then Apple's slow and initially reluctant embrace of the "post-PC era" with over-the-air iDevice updates and cloud storage to partly displace iTunes means that it's increasingly taking nearly the opposite of Jobs' 2001 stance: "We're clearly migrating away from the PC as the centrepiece" and "We don't think of it in terms of the PC business anymore" are things that Tim Cook could say today without really startling anyone.

It sounds like you think they rolled a die for every design decision that went into creating the iPod and it happened to turn out well. I would agree that there are many factors outside your control and subject to luck for a company in a situation like that, but how you choose to design and market your products aren't among them. Apple back then wasn't Samsung, they didn't just make one of everything, in as many different models as they could, and see what happened in the market. They had very limited resources and had to be extremely judicious and thoughtful about how they used them. They're not in that position now, but the disipline they learned through those years has stayed with them.

I think they were just betting the whole company. If you're betting the whole company on a single revolutionary product, you better make that product as awesome as you can possibly manage.

I imagine with each design decision they asked just two questions "will it make the product more awesome" and "can we afford it".

I wonder if stock holders knew Apple was risking that much on a project that wasn't even a computer.

Plenty of items on the list are involved with what happened. Like 'keep a retail presence', 'distinguish your looks' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac#/media/File:Nafija55.jpg came out the next year), 'focus on customer support', 'break new ground, don't CYA', 'improve your marketing', 'simplify product names', even 'buy a song' (hello U2).

Notable exceptions are 'apologise', 'build software the business community cares about', and, of course, #1 'abandon hardware'.

These are all items on the first page, because I haven't clicked the second one yet.

#1 was pretty accurate actually...

>1. Admit it. You're out of the hardware game. Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely

They didnt scrap it entirely, but they did ended up outsourcing production to Foxconn.

Not in any meaningful sense. Hardly any big tech companies manufacture hardware in the US any more. Hardware is Apple's single distinguishing feature as a business, and theres way more to it than which company happens to assemble the components together.

But its hardware production, not design... So, it was accurate.

I think what Apple does is a bit different to outsourcing hardware production. They actually finance the initial investment in the manufacturing facilities in order to secure exclusive and long term contracts.

It seems to be a cost effective in that they get the benefits of owning the hardware production while the technology is still new.

I read this in 1997. A lot of these seemed like terrible ideas even at the time.

Seems like this was far more right than wrong. Clear yes from the top 30:

1 (outsourced to Foxconn and others), 3 (App store), 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30

No: 2, 4, 22, 24, 27

5: Far from universal, but they do name some products after features iPhone3 g. 9: Fixed problem. 17: arguable

PS: Granted, some of this was over the next 20 years.

I love reading posts from the past like this, ironic how things actually played out for Apple. Interestingly a few of the points actually happened, specifically; point #7, point #12, point #14 and more interestingly "39. Build a laptop that weighs 2 pounds." - kind of fitting that this played out for Apple focusing on thinner and lighter products than competitor offerings.

This takes me back to the days leading up the new release of the first iPhone. Everyone was predicting that an Apple phone would fail, that Apple should stick to what they know and in a short amount of time they proved everyone wrong and became the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world.

These were interesting to me:

16. Take better care of your customers -- Apple support is pretty good, especially if you can get to a store

26. If you sell it, make it -- Their supply chain integration and control is impressive today

38. Make it easier for ISVs to make applications -- The app store and the development ecosystem is important for apple

50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development -- This paid off hugely

53. Recharge your strategy for Europe -- Apple is a very global company and is pushing into lots of markets

59. Invest heavily in Newton technology -- Apple parked that particular project, but the iPhone and iPad followed

Some clearly joke entries, and some misses and terrible ideas, but definitely some interesting insights as well.

> 31. Build a PDA for less than $250 that actually does something: a) cellular email b) 56-channel TV c) Internet phone.

Here, here! If it's a measly 55-channel toy, I'm sending it back.

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

Kinda like Wall-E's charge-cycle-complete boot sound and EVE's iPod-inspired design.

I remember reading this in 1997, about a year after I switched from the awful Mac Performa that I had used in college and dragged out west with me to the first in a series of increasingly uninspiring beige WinTel boxes. It would be nine years before I switched back.

It's really easy to engage in hindsight-powered analysis. This article seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

There are some very interesting things here... Some jewels that proved to be very accurate, and some that were way off... But i think that the positive ones are winning...

#1 - Foxconn.

#2 - OSX for computers, iOS -> iPhone, iPad, AppleTv

#3 - Debatable, but one could argue that Apple Store did this at first

#4 - Steve Jobs listed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

#5 - iPhone #, iPad #, but not related with speeds, besides of "greater number, greater speed"

#7 - Apple Stores

#8 - 1998. I still remember the ad with Shes A Rainbow

#10 - Well, they did build an enormous image.

#9, #11, #12 - Or... do just the opposite xD

#13 - Hello, I'm a PC.

#14 - Again, 1998. G3, and everything that came next...

#15 - Say Hello to China!

#16 - YMMV :)

#17, #18 - This will contradict the next one. A corporate won't buy based on fanaticism (at least in theory... I hope...)

#19 - They did what they could, with what was available back then.

#21 - With this item and #31... I really don't know what to think...

#22 - #24 - No, no, no.

#25 - Portables and mobile! That was the future back then. And they did... eventually. # 26 - Here comes China again!

#27 - Or... make it expensive... I mean... exclusive

#30 - Secure the hearts and wallets of college students, OK. But with marketing.

#31 - What kind of advice is this?? That will NEVER, EVER work, cellular email? Internet Phone ??? ... Oh.. wait.

#32 - Always start with: We have sold X number of Y!

#34 - Done.

#36 - Hello iBook

#37 - Ok. Hello OSX

#39 - Easier said than done. Tech was not there yet. But eventually...

#40-43 - It didn't matter.

#44 - Or just buy someone who does... Hello Siri

#47 - New upgrade path: just buy the new device.

#50 - Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants -> OK!

#51 - Speak with both, but mostly to the consumer, yes. (through ads, and paid journalists...) #53 - And sell everything from Ireland!

#54 - Ok

#59 - You can't have #15 (dump newton) and this (invest heavily in newton technology)... choose one. One could say Apple choose #59.

from here, a lot of the items seem like jokes...

#60 - Again, contradicting with previous items.

#63 - Ok. #70 - Ok! #76 - Ok, and bye bye PowerPC Eventually.

#94 - Maintain differentiation between Wintel and Apple... Even when using intel technologies, we are not a PC.

#95 - Hello, I'm a Mac.

#101 - Bingo!

#10 = Think Different

#5 - I'm young so I think it's interesting (and super informative) that people believed in a naming convention that immediately tells you what hardware you're getting. The rise of frilly landing pages and just-look-at-the-computer-case-not-the-numbers marketing makes it frustrating for hardware-oriented shoppers like me to find what I want efficiently (basically I think #14's "pretty box" solution gained a little too much traction in the marketing aspect)

> 8. Buy a song. Last year, it would have been "Respect" by Aretha Franklin. This year, maybe it's "Ain't too Proud to Beg."

Why buy one song when you can buy all of them?

this has made Hacker News many, many times

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7877980

31c was a pretty good idea

1. limewire

Single page: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple_pr.html

Thanks. Url changed from http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.06/apple.html.

Ye, Gods. Yet another Apple story.

They are a for profit (and quite a lot of it) corporation that makes shiny gadgets.

Why do we keep talking about them incessantly? If we are not talking about what Apple is doing now, then we are talking about what somebody said about Apple 20 years ago.

I'm of course making the problem worse or meta-worse, if you will, by talking about talking about Apple, but I just don't understand this whole deification of a profit making entity.

Apple is one of the most important and influential tech companies in the world right now. There's a lot of Apple articles for the same reason there's a lot of Google/Amazon/Facebook articles.

They also have a lot of pretty devoted fans, but don't confuse ponderings on the industry with fanboyism.

> Apple is one of the most important and influential tech companies in the world right now.

No. You are confusing admired with influential.

No, I really don't think I am. Apple essentially created the modern smartphone market. Android was Google saying "We've got to get in on that." You're going to accuse me of fanboying now, but I've never owned an iOS device; I think Android is better and I wouldn't use anything else. But without the iPhone, Android as we know it would not exist.

You don't like Apple or Apple products, and that's fine and fair, but you are confusing your personal opinion with the actual state of the market. Quality and influence aren't always related, much as we might wish it were otherwise.

This is not about Android or iPhone. Or Google or whoever. I'll happily acknowledge that Apple sells well thought out products.

I stand by what I said earlier. There's too much of a cult of personality associated with Apple. Why do we shrink our worldview to gossipy discussions of a corporation. Tell me something interesting, something edifying that came up in this discussion?

> This is not about Android or iPhone. Or Google or whoever. I'll happily acknowledge that Apple sells well thought out products.

You specifically said that I was wrong to call them influential. I think Android demonstrates that they are. That makes it relevant.

> I stand by what I said earlier. There's too much of a cult of personality associated with Apple. Why do we shrink our worldview to gossipy discussions of a corporation. Tell me something interesting, something edifying that came up in this discussion?

Past predictions about the future of the industry have always had currency on Hacker News, from pre-electronic sci-fi like Wells' World Brain to Engelbart's 1968 "mother of all demos" to mid-'90s attempt to get a handle on the internet, and so on and so forth. Apple wasn't terribly relevant in the mid-'90s, but they _had been_ relevant (the Apple II, bringing Xerox's GUI ideas to the home desktop), and as it turned out they would be relevant again. This particular article is not exactly a giant of the genre, but it's a window into the conditions of the time and what people cared about and anticipated.

You are right about Android and Xerox's GUI. (There were others who were thinking in a similar direction (Openmoko for one), and I would argue that both of these things would have happened anyway. But Apple definitely moved the state of the world forward.)

However, my larger point is that Apple produces things of only one color -- things that you can exchange over the counter against money. Black box objects that are essentially consumer electronics -- things that die in 2, 4, 7, whatever years.

Contrast that with most other tech companies. Even if I don't care a whit about what they sell (witness IBM, Microsoft, Facebook -- I don't use any of their products directly) -- I (and the world) profit from their research and that gives them greater longevity than Apple.

So to correct what I said -- admired but not long term influential.

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