ex-Apple employees = crackpot

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
You know I'm noticing a trend here. Every article with comments from ex-Apple employees seems to go down the same way. It doesn't matter what that person did for Apple "they" suddenly know what's best for Apple. Latest is Don Norman and interface guy for Apple. He's currently working with MS on GUI design for Longhorn. Initially that sounds great, you think "MS has a capable guy here helping them make Longhorn better" until he opens his mouth.



Quote:

The world wants compatibility now, he says. It wants to communicate, and this means one brand dominating. ?This is not the ?computer age? any more; this is the age of very smart chips hooked into a huge worldwide network. Infrastructure is about sharing." This means two or more incompatible ways of doing things is counterproductive.



Patently false. Any IT admnin knows the network is going to be heterogenous. World Wide networks cannot exist unless they are based on open standards. HTML didn't thrive because of Microsoft it thrived because it was open.





Quote:

Apple should get out of general-purpose computing, he says, and concentrate on the multimedia production and entertainment market, where its strengths are.



Greeeat another "Geez Apple why don't you do the iPod fulltime" or "hey Apple you're better suited to making edutainment or other flashy things"



Actually Don really isn't that bad but it's amazing that everyone who used to work at Apple always feels like they can do a better job. I guess that's nature. In this case I think Don contradicts his own ideals. He relishes good design but where's the incentive for good design if there is only one platform. Been drinking a bit much of that Redmond koolaid there Don?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 6
    Good job Apple, fire the nut-balls, let M$ get poisoned (even more) from within.
  • Reply 2 of 6
    ijerryijerry Posts: 615member
    He really doesn't seem that far off his rocker to tell you the truth. Sure, he takes digs a little at Apple in the end, but he may very well be frustrated with the way that Apple dealt with things, and the way he felt they should have been dealt. That can lead to a dig like that. However, his ideas are not totally off, only in that he believes the only way to be 100% compatible is to only have one platform, when in fact it is not the platform that must be the same but the implementation of software on each platform in a standard way.



    His ideas seem to hover around the meta-data philosophy that many are adopting now, and can't be faulted for that other than having everything located in one place on your PC is a dangerous and scary thought to me...



    Anyway, glad the article was short, and we shall see what his ideas bring to the MS camp.
  • Reply 3 of 6
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,419member
    The problem is today's Apple isn't the same Apple they worked for. After the NeXT aquisition they got rid of of the laggards that were screwing the company up.



    a Monolithic Computing Platform simply means the death of computer innovation. It won't happen and I'm not worried. You have to love the Asian governments that are moving to Linux or seriously contemplating it. With the rise of open standards interopability can be easily achieved without having one platfrom. Microsofts dominance comes from reaching critical mass with closedsource applications. Even that isn't helping because you don't need MS to communicate and that's really what we use computers for..a new method of communication.
  • Reply 4 of 6
    ijerryijerry Posts: 615member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by hmurchison

    The problem is today's Apple isn't the same Apple they worked for. After the NeXT aquisition they got rid of of the laggards that were screwing the company up.



    a Monolithic Computing Platform simply means the death of computer innovation. It won't happen and I'm not worried. You have to love the Asian governments that are moving to Linux or seriously contemplating it. With the rise of open standards interopability can be easily achieved without having one platfrom. Microsofts dominance comes from reaching critical mass with closedsource applications. Even that isn't helping because you don't need MS to communicate and that's really what we use computers for..a new method of communication.




    So we agree.



    Apple has changed, thank goodness, but for people like him, they will remember the bad times, I think we are all guilty of that, and I really can't fault the guy for being human, but for working with MS and stating that it needs to be the only computer, well, I can stone him for that!8)
  • Reply 5 of 6
    ionyzionyz Posts: 491member
    Why can't ex-apple employees do something better with their time, like Jean-Louis Gassée.
  • Reply 6 of 6
    banchobancho Posts: 1,517member
    The big hoot is even to consider a MS based solution for compatibility when half (or more of) the internet is Unix. MS *only* dominates the desktop.
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