Business Week Special Report
In case you guys haven't heard, <a href="http://www.businessweek.com"; target="_blank">Business Week</a> has posted a detailed report on Apple.
Why do they keep referring to iMovie as iFilm? Obviously they have done an editorial search and replace that replaces the word "movie" with film, and despite all their research and preparation for this report, their copy editors are so unfamiliar with Apple that they didn't catch the mistake. Very professional.
I haven't finished reading the report, but there are some good things said about Apple, despite many continued misconceptiions.
Why do they keep referring to iMovie as iFilm? Obviously they have done an editorial search and replace that replaces the word "movie" with film, and despite all their research and preparation for this report, their copy editors are so unfamiliar with Apple that they didn't catch the mistake. Very professional.
I haven't finished reading the report, but there are some good things said about Apple, despite many continued misconceptiions.
Comments
<strong>Jef Raskin is an idiot.</strong><hr></blockquote>
More like an ass.
He do have some points (not in the article but elsewhere) but he is just so full of himself. He thinks he has seen the light and everybody else is wrong. I bet he thinks if he was Steve instead of Steve he could just do these three or four things to the OS and glory and marketshare would come to Apple. To quote Homer: "He live in a world of makebelieve"
<strong>
More like an ass.
He do have some points (not in the article but elsewhere) but he is just so full of himself. He thinks he has seen the light and everybody else is wrong. I bet he thinks if he was Steve instead of Steve he could just do these three or four things to the OS and glory and marketshare would come to Apple. To quote Homer: "He live in a world of makebelieve"</strong><hr></blockquote>
Hey, Raskin graduated from Penn State in the sixties!
He is pretty much a loser.
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: Macintosh ]</p>
<strong>
Hey, Raskin graduated from Penn State in the sixties!
He is pretty much a loser.
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: Macintosh ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
Maybe he's having a bad acid trip.
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: Belle ]</p>
What he's saying is true but it's not just realistic to for Apple to implement it at this time. Microsoft could try but they are too lazy.
The whole point of a GUI is to standardize things. You can instantly look at a set of radio buttons in a dialog box and know a lot about what to do next. Why not implement standards into everything? He's right, if you want to do a calculation like 9*5.4 you shouldn't need to load a new program to do it. The calculation should be entered in a standard box and added to your document in a standard way no matter what program you are using of the document it's going into. Right now each different program you use handles displaying information in it's own way. Much of this could be standardized so that you'd have much more intuition about what is going on than you do now. But doing this would require a new infrastructure. Every program would have to redesign its interface to meet the standards. With Apple's marketshare at 5% they can't realistically force or entice developers to do this. But it WOULD be a huge advantage over the long run if it could be done. Jef Raskin is certainly not an idiot and if he was I doubt 99.99% of the people that read this board would be qualified to have a real opinion about it.
Whether young people know it or not, 25 years ago you thought long and hard before you said a bad word about someone. And a person of significant accomplishment was given every benefit of the doubt, not thrown away as an idiot after they were no longer currently useful or in the spotlight.
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: spindler ]</p>
[edit: there's no apostrophe in "thinks."]
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: BuonRotto ]</p>
[quote] "Apple now boasts operating margins of about 30% -- triple or quadruple the average for the temporarily downtrodden PC biz. Plus it has $4 billion in the bank"<hr></blockquote>
Excuse me? $4 billion? It's actually $4.4 billion. Since when did $400 million dollars become chump-change that you could round-down?
Then, there's the whole 'iFilm' bit ...
I don't care what the rest of the article says. Sloppy profesionalism is inexcusable. I don't even bother to finish the article.
P.S. It has been changed.
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: MacsRGood4U ]</p>
<strong>But doing this would require a new infrastructure. Every program would have to redesign its interface to meet the standards. With Apple's marketshare at 5% they can't realistically force or entice developers to do this. But it WOULD be a huge advantage over the long run if it could be done. Jef Raskin is certainly not an idiot and if he was I doubt 99.99% of the people that read this board would be qualified to have a real opinion about it.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Thats the reason why I called him an ass. In a very VERY abstract way he is right: In the perfect world things would have changed and the GUI would be completly different. But unfortunetly it is impossible because Apple can´t make perfect worlds but only try to compete in this one. What Jef Raskin is suggesting is for Apple to go to Adobe, MS aso and say "Hey guys. New research have shown that it is much more intuitive for people to calculate 59 times 54.6 right in your programs instead of starting the calculator. We will build this and 100 other things into the OS that your programs MUST be able to handle to be able to run on our computers in the future. Please do that thank you." Would Apple survive this? No. The problem with Raskin is that he igneore this even though he is smart enough to know it.
Without people like Raskin we would not have the Mac, the internet, the car or rockets. But when those people just go into a corner and becomes bitter its just a shame.
Services under Cocoa is actually the ideal combination of what Raskin wants and what is possible without killing the Mac platform and its a shame he didn´t mention that.
[ 01-19-2002: Message edited by: Anders ]</p>
Tog is adamant about familiarity being the cornerstone of good UI design -- that continuity is important. He sees OS X as not being familiar enough.
Raskin is adamant about making mechanical efficiency the cornerstone of good UI design. He sees OS X as being chained to familiar interface/system conventions.
Methinks the answer takes ideas from both men, and a few others to boot.
In other words, BW wanted a certain slant to their story, and they found the right person to interview so they could get their slant. That's such poor journalism...reading this article doesn't represent the general consensus among the tech press on OS X, mainly, that it kicks ass.
BW sucks ass, I'll tell ya that much.