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Originally Posted by
melgross 
The Mac was dying when Jobs left. That's history. The Mac II revived the line.
What is history is that many of the Mac II concepts were developed for the BigMac project under Jobs. The BigMac was the predecessor to both the NeXT and MacII being a Unix based workstation using the 68020.
That the BigMac was going to ultimately be more successful than the MacOS based Mac II can be seen in today's Macs. Had Gassee not cancelled the BigMac but pursued it we'd have had OSX a full ten years earlier.
The Mac II revivial lasted a scant two year (1987-1989) and the slump was caused by Jobs leaving in 1985.
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Jobs has been blamed for the problems with the original Macs and their direction.
What is also history is that the Lisa was a failure but the Mac a success. The Mac was released in 1984. Jobs was gone in 1985. There was zero problem with direction of the Mac in 1984 in comparison to the Lisa direction which Markkula had kicked Jobs off of.
Imagine Apple in 1984 without the Mac and only the Lisa 2. Major suckage.
I had the Mac 128K in 1985. I had the Lisa in 1984. The usability difference in the two machines was rather large dispite the price and performance disparity. My college buddies and I had a small side business where we converted Mac 128Ks into Fat Macs with more memory and an additional fan.
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That's been documented several times. There's no point in arguing it here.
Bullshit. You want to make the assertion that Jobs sucks and revise history you damn well better defend it.
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Scully made other mistakes. The worst one was after he rejected the licensing agreement with MS, and raised the price of the Mac which led to large profits, but led to a decline in marketshare from 12% to the 10% it had for several years afterwards.
Scully's mistake is that he never really got computers and never cared.
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The biggest screwup though, was Michael Spindler.
He is responsible for most all of the problems Apple suffered from the holiday 1995 season fiasco. I remember that well.
By 1991 the Mac had lost to Windows 3.0 despite the Mac II. Apple's failures definately occured on Scully's watch and not Spindler. Spindler was a disaster but did manage to transition to PPC and build the PowerMac...which did lead to constrained deliveries for the 95 season and a billion dollars in backorders.
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I'm not against Jobs, he's learned a lot since his old Apple and Next days. But, he still has some ideas that he won't move from.
Thank god. Certainly his NeXT years taught him a lot and allowed Pixar to happen and flourish but to blame the 90s Apple on him and not on Scully is revisionist crap. So is ignoring that he saved Apple after the disasterous 90s.
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The biggest move he made since coming back was in recognizing that the iPod, which he had described shortly after it first came out as a nice little product for Apple, was much bigger than he had thought it would be, and did exactly the right thing with it.
He had multiple biggest "moves". One was to make the Mac what it should have been in the mid-90s if he had never left or Apple had the vision to pursue the BigMac vs the conservative Mac II. Another was the Apple Store.
Apple was rebounding from 1997 onwards. Killing clones, adding the Apple Store and yes, introducing the iMac in 1998...the best selling computer for the fall of 1998. Then the iBook in 1999.
Apple stock was at 52 week highs and trading in the 70s. All pre-iPod.
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That really put Apple on the map, and in everyones palm.
Many CEO's would have missed that, and handled it badly, but he, and his team, did not.
From that, he's building an empire, no question. He just has to be careful that the entertainment companies aren't able to go around Apple as they are now trying to do.
If he can prevent that, his place on the pantheon of business leaders will be assured.
And, please, don't mistake criticism for whining.
No, in this cause its just plain wrong.
Vinea
