NeXT did set the world on fire. Where shall we start?
e.g. with the fact that all Mac and iOS devices are running NeXTstep and NeXT APIs and are programmed with NeXT tools (sure iterative improvements, sometimes good things nuked, etc.)
e.g. java being a direct result of the OO frenzy and panic all the other companies had after they saw what NeXT can do (while bad mouthing NeXT at the same time and still getting it wrong be betting on junk like C++)?
e.g. the Win95/windows classic UI visuals (but not the intuitive feel) directly lifted from NeXTstep?
e.g. the WWW being invented on a NeXT with TBL explicitly stating that w/o NeXTstep he would never have attempted that project because with regular tools it would have been too complex for his taste?
e.g. DSP capabilities standard on board? Today all mainstream CPUs have DSP/vector processing instruction set extensions.
etc. etc.
A device or software platform doesn't have to be a money maker to be disruptive.
NeXT failed due to the user-software chicken-egg problem, thus didn't have enough critical mass.
The same stuff, half castrated and less consistent with the same guy at the helm is a runaway success today simply because people were naive enough to fall for the Mac OS moniker when in fact what they are getting is NeXTstep with various levels of legacy Mac compatibility.
What people think of as Apple's modern software for the most part is 25 yo software somewhat updated and optimized for better hardware, and that NeXT stuff was based on concepts more than 10 years old before NeXT picked them up.
So really, what Apple does is deliver the ideas and concepts from about 35-40 years ago, made consumer friendly by modern hardware.
Difficult to make statements about a history one doesn't know...
We at NeXT were very pissed off at Isaacson's Biography of Steve. He dicked over NeXT and PIXAR as if they were brief interludes. Without NeXT Apple is history.
As has been mentioned before, Jobs created a wonderful team, and environment, and ethos at Apple. There's massive talent there, inside a company almost uniquely positioned to execute well. It's a question of morale and cohesion as much as anything else. If the talent stays and continues to work its guts out... great things will continue to come out of Apple. None of us knows whether it will happen. We very much hope that it will. Ellison is a smart guy with an opinion. I hope he's wrong. Don't hate on the man, though. Just register his opinion and hope it ends up being wrong.
And if he ends up bring right, I hope someone else comes along with a wonderful innovative spirit. What I see right now is one company that's innovated, a couple of others who copied slavishly and added nothing to the tech landscape, and a few others that noodled around without any clear vision except "My boss told me to do something different, so I did."
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
Steve made sure of it.
I was waiting for you to weigh in on the matter (post #37). Your opinion is much more valued, to me, than Larry Ellison's. Since Steve and he were such friends, I think his opinion is more biased than yours.
"So really, what Apple does is deliver the ideas and concepts from about 35-40 years ago, made consumer friendly by modern hardware."
Maybe you just made a poor choice of words but 'ideas and concepts' are great only to a point. They don't add real value to the world until they can be delivered in a practical manner. Execution matters more. Apple is really damn good at execution; they bring good ideas to life and they do it with great integrity and craftsmanship. Oracle is basically the opposite. Their craftsmanship is almost non-existent, except perhaps in their core DB product. They excel, however, at buying existing product and making it worse. Actually what they excel at is selling and extracting large maintenance fees.
"Tim cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran - he'd worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years - with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple's manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.
"This is really bad," Cook told the group. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, "Why are you still here?" "
Hmm so the last 18 months or so didn't happen. Or does Larry thinks that Steve mapped out a good five yrs of everything that would happen at Apple (including lawsuits?) before he retired so we are still in the age of 'with Steve'
How about recognize that he's not a tech designing guy and to leave that to those that are. Recognizing your limits is something to be applauded for
And the iPad mini might still be a tablet but if Tim has the cajones to disagree with Steve's apparent decision that a smaller iPad would be bunk! I'd said Tim still gets a few points
I think he has a point. But Apple's current exec team doesn't have Sculley. As long as they keep trusting their product Visionaries they should be fine
All these guys bitching about apple like sharks in the sea! Jobs is laughing I'm sure before he died he gave ideas. You know I remember the old then return and the dead. Back them no one gave a shiza. What we now need is mac pc! I mean iOS and mac in every ones home!
Just because Jobs is no longer with us, he did instill spirit and character. People who worked closely with him know he would operate. Not that Jobs wanted that but, the DNA has been embedded into the longevity of the company.
True, but the first thing that changed after Jobs dies, was Apple catering to Wall Street. Jobs was opposed to a dividend. Wall Street started crying, and Apple caved. Jobs could have care less about Wall Street.
Further, Jobs handled the media much better. Jobs would not have rushed out an apology after the maps release. With that said, Apple has done some things better since Jobs left.
I think Apple is in a much better position now than when Jobs left Apple back in the 80's. First, they have a rock solid line of products and mechanisms in place to improve their existing products, they aren't facing having to re-write the OS, they aren't facing a LOT of obstacles that they had back in the 80's. they also have more money than anyone else, so they can invest in things when they need to and not worry about money all of the time.
Also, not to be a Dick, but Steve Jobs didn't know the Enterprise Market. Apple has been doing better and still needs a ways to go, but they are getting their products more Enterprise friendly than they had in the past with Jobs.
I'm sure Ellison would love to be the CEO of Apple and he might actually make a decent one. But he'd have to change his attitude a little.
I've always thought combining Oracle/Sun/Apple would be a pretty interesting combination.
But for now, Ellison isn't running Apple, so we only have to listen to him every once in a while when he opens his mouth, which isn't that often.
Can you expound on this? First I heard Apple was already far along in the design process of the iMac before SJ.
Apple was not far ahead in the design process of the iMac when Jobs returned. What happened when Jobs came back is he called a meeting with department heads and asked them to present to him what they were working on and to justify the departments various projects. He wanted to clean house. Ive brought various projects along to the meeting, amongst them a rough concept which the iMac eventually sprung out of. Apple was not developing the original iMac before Jobs. Ive, however, had been playing with ideas that after Jobs return was more fully developed into the iMac. Jobs talent was being able to focus. He called that meeting because Apple was working on a million projects, many of which were going nowhere. He wanted to kill things that were not essential to Apple's survival.
Seriously, why do these people think they can see the future so clearly. Somebody could come along that has the skills that Steve Job had. I can't believe he was that unique as a human. I know its just one man's opinion, but Ellison really is being rather arrogant to pointedly say the company will fail without Steve Jobs. The future is just too uncertain to be saying things like that. Apple may not be the same type of company it was under Steve Jobs but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. Maybe not as great, but certainly not bad.
Apple was not far ahead in the design process of the iMac when Jobs returned. What happened when Jobs came back is he called a meeting with department heads and asked them to present to him what they were working on and to justify the departments various projects. He wanted to clean house. Ive brought various projects along to the meeting, amongst them a rough concept which the iMac eventually sprung out of. Apple was not developing the original iMac before Jobs. Ive, however, had been playing with ideas that after Jobs return was more fully developed into the iMac. Jobs talent was being able to focus. He called that meeting because Apple was working on a million projects, many of which were going nowhere. He wanted to kill things that were not essential to Apple's survival.
When the original Mac was announced, I actually thought of what the first Mac SHOULD have been and it's basically the iMac (just less RAM, HDD, no optical), but that was in the 80's. To me, it was obvious, that it should have had a 12 or 13 in color screen (obviously bigger if possible), it should have had built in ethernet instead of AppleTalk, it should have had a built in hard drive, more RAM and then they obviously should have had another desktop model with slots and storage which eventually became the MacII. That's what I thought they SHOULD have done in the beginning. I was looking at a design much like what Televideo had in some of their terminals rather than the first Mac. I also thought they should have used Unix in the beginning. When I was told Mac OS wasn't really Unix, but it was similar in a lot of ways, I immediately asked "why didn't they just use Unix?".
Kind of like the Televideo 990 terminal or something along those lines. That's what I thought Apple SHOULD have done in the beginning.
But, I never worked for Apple, so what I thought OBVIOUSLY didn't matter. :-)
Jesus, you guys are getting pissy because Ellison believes that Jobs was the Edison of our generation and irreplaceable. That dude has an ego the size of montana, built Oracle, is amusingly cutthroat competitive and he publically states this.
Jobs was not always successful, this is true. But he always drove his products (whether movies or computers) toward greatness in a way that is unmatched by any CEO of his generation (and the next couple as well probably).
The question you have to ask is whether the Apple under Cook and beyond intends to change the world or simply make awesome products.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by rcfa
NeXT did set the world on fire. Where shall we start?
e.g. with the fact that all Mac and iOS devices are running NeXTstep and NeXT APIs and are programmed with NeXT tools (sure iterative improvements, sometimes good things nuked, etc.)
e.g. java being a direct result of the OO frenzy and panic all the other companies had after they saw what NeXT can do (while bad mouthing NeXT at the same time and still getting it wrong be betting on junk like C++)?
e.g. the Win95/windows classic UI visuals (but not the intuitive feel) directly lifted from NeXTstep?
e.g. the WWW being invented on a NeXT with TBL explicitly stating that w/o NeXTstep he would never have attempted that project because with regular tools it would have been too complex for his taste?
e.g. DSP capabilities standard on board? Today all mainstream CPUs have DSP/vector processing instruction set extensions.
etc. etc.
A device or software platform doesn't have to be a money maker to be disruptive.
NeXT failed due to the user-software chicken-egg problem, thus didn't have enough critical mass.
The same stuff, half castrated and less consistent with the same guy at the helm is a runaway success today simply because people were naive enough to fall for the Mac OS moniker when in fact what they are getting is NeXTstep with various levels of legacy Mac compatibility.
What people think of as Apple's modern software for the most part is 25 yo software somewhat updated and optimized for better hardware, and that NeXT stuff was based on concepts more than 10 years old before NeXT picked them up.
So really, what Apple does is deliver the ideas and concepts from about 35-40 years ago, made consumer friendly by modern hardware.
Difficult to make statements about a history one doesn't know...
We at NeXT were very pissed off at Isaacson's Biography of Steve. He dicked over NeXT and PIXAR as if they were brief interludes. Without NeXT Apple is history.
And if he ends up bring right, I hope someone else comes along with a wonderful innovative spirit. What I see right now is one company that's innovated, a couple of others who copied slavishly and added nothing to the tech landscape, and a few others that noodled around without any clear vision except "My boss told me to do something different, so I did."
Quote:
Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer
We saw Apple toss out Steve Jobs and go down the crapper. We are now seeing Steve Jobs create an infrastructure of culture reflecting his ideals for Apple that took 13 years to build before he passed on.
The talent at Apple from vision to raw technical merit dwarfs anything Larry ever experienced at Oracle or prior to Oracle working for a company developing film for NASA. The culture permanent.
Steve made sure of it.
I was waiting for you to weigh in on the matter (post #37). Your opinion is much more valued, to me, than Larry Ellison's. Since Steve and he were such friends, I think his opinion is more biased than yours.
Apple envy.
Quote:
"So really, what Apple does is deliver the ideas and concepts from about 35-40 years ago, made consumer friendly by modern hardware."
Maybe you just made a poor choice of words but 'ideas and concepts' are great only to a point. They don't add real value to the world until they can be delivered in a practical manner. Execution matters more. Apple is really damn good at execution; they bring good ideas to life and they do it with great integrity and craftsmanship. Oracle is basically the opposite. Their craftsmanship is almost non-existent, except perhaps in their core DB product. They excel, however, at buying existing product and making it worse. Actually what they excel at is selling and extracting large maintenance fees.
Can you expound on this? First I heard Apple was already far along in the design process of the iMac before SJ.
"Tim cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran - he'd worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years - with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple's manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.
"This is really bad," Cook told the group. "Someone should be in China driving this." Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, "Why are you still here?" "
There's enough Steve in there for me.
And the iPad mini might still be a tablet but if Tim has the cajones to disagree with Steve's apparent decision that a smaller iPad would be bunk! I'd said Tim still gets a few points
I think he has a point. But Apple's current exec team doesn't have Sculley. As long as they keep trusting their product Visionaries they should be fine
Quote:
Originally Posted by Feynman
Just because Jobs is no longer with us, he did instill spirit and character. People who worked closely with him know he would operate. Not that Jobs wanted that but, the DNA has been embedded into the longevity of the company.
True, but the first thing that changed after Jobs dies, was Apple catering to Wall Street. Jobs was opposed to a dividend. Wall Street started crying, and Apple caved. Jobs could have care less about Wall Street.
Further, Jobs handled the media much better. Jobs would not have rushed out an apology after the maps release. With that said, Apple has done some things better since Jobs left.
I think Apple is in a much better position now than when Jobs left Apple back in the 80's. First, they have a rock solid line of products and mechanisms in place to improve their existing products, they aren't facing having to re-write the OS, they aren't facing a LOT of obstacles that they had back in the 80's. they also have more money than anyone else, so they can invest in things when they need to and not worry about money all of the time.
Also, not to be a Dick, but Steve Jobs didn't know the Enterprise Market. Apple has been doing better and still needs a ways to go, but they are getting their products more Enterprise friendly than they had in the past with Jobs.
I'm sure Ellison would love to be the CEO of Apple and he might actually make a decent one. But he'd have to change his attitude a little.
I've always thought combining Oracle/Sun/Apple would be a pretty interesting combination.
But for now, Ellison isn't running Apple, so we only have to listen to him every once in a while when he opens his mouth, which isn't that often.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Smurfman
Can you expound on this? First I heard Apple was already far along in the design process of the iMac before SJ.
Apple was not far ahead in the design process of the iMac when Jobs returned. What happened when Jobs came back is he called a meeting with department heads and asked them to present to him what they were working on and to justify the departments various projects. He wanted to clean house. Ive brought various projects along to the meeting, amongst them a rough concept which the iMac eventually sprung out of. Apple was not developing the original iMac before Jobs. Ive, however, had been playing with ideas that after Jobs return was more fully developed into the iMac. Jobs talent was being able to focus. He called that meeting because Apple was working on a million projects, many of which were going nowhere. He wanted to kill things that were not essential to Apple's survival.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobM
Blame it on IGZO
IGZO will solve everything. I said EVERYTHING.
Have they been doomed this whole time?
Quote:
Originally Posted by TBell
Apple was not far ahead in the design process of the iMac when Jobs returned. What happened when Jobs came back is he called a meeting with department heads and asked them to present to him what they were working on and to justify the departments various projects. He wanted to clean house. Ive brought various projects along to the meeting, amongst them a rough concept which the iMac eventually sprung out of. Apple was not developing the original iMac before Jobs. Ive, however, had been playing with ideas that after Jobs return was more fully developed into the iMac. Jobs talent was being able to focus. He called that meeting because Apple was working on a million projects, many of which were going nowhere. He wanted to kill things that were not essential to Apple's survival.
When the original Mac was announced, I actually thought of what the first Mac SHOULD have been and it's basically the iMac (just less RAM, HDD, no optical), but that was in the 80's. To me, it was obvious, that it should have had a 12 or 13 in color screen (obviously bigger if possible), it should have had built in ethernet instead of AppleTalk, it should have had a built in hard drive, more RAM and then they obviously should have had another desktop model with slots and storage which eventually became the MacII. That's what I thought they SHOULD have done in the beginning. I was looking at a design much like what Televideo had in some of their terminals rather than the first Mac. I also thought they should have used Unix in the beginning. When I was told Mac OS wasn't really Unix, but it was similar in a lot of ways, I immediately asked "why didn't they just use Unix?".
Kind of like the Televideo 990 terminal or something along those lines. That's what I thought Apple SHOULD have done in the beginning.
But, I never worked for Apple, so what I thought OBVIOUSLY didn't matter. :-)
Jesus, you guys are getting pissy because Ellison believes that Jobs was the Edison of our generation and irreplaceable. That dude has an ego the size of montana, built Oracle, is amusingly cutthroat competitive and he publically states this.
Jobs was not always successful, this is true. But he always drove his products (whether movies or computers) toward greatness in a way that is unmatched by any CEO of his generation (and the next couple as well probably).
The question you have to ask is whether the Apple under Cook and beyond intends to change the world or simply make awesome products.
This book should be interesting (comes out in November).