Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[Jeff Lemke <lemke@terra.cira.colostate.edu>]

Regnirps wrote:
> 
> Jeff Lemke <lemke@terra.cira.colostate.edu> wrote:
> 
> snip
> >
> >And then Apple tried the Lisa, but it was way too expensive and a bit
> >sluggish in performance.  And that was it for Apple in business, except
> >for desktop publishing.  They did find a niche there with their Macs,
> >but it really was a small niche.  It was just enough to save them, I
> >think.
> 
> >Jeff Lemke
> 
> You would have fit right in at Apple all right. The Lisa was not sluggish
> compared to anything else that came near. I remember Boeing had an Altos and a
> Lisa used for graphical presentation creation. The Lisa was bug free and easy
> to use.

Forgive me if this message appears twice.  I think I hit Re:Mail in
Netscape rather than Re:News the first time.

Sorry if I stepped on any toes about the Lisa.  I was repeating
something I had either read in BYTE Magazine in the 1995 issue of the
20th anniversary of personal computing, or something I had heard in the
PBS miniseries "Revenge of the Nerds".  I have no personal experience
with using Lisas.  Perhaps I shouldn't reference a non-Apple source of
information in an Apple newsgroup.

 
> You make the classic mistake about the niche. Everybody starts with a niche!
> They wasted their most valuable customers, the enthusiasts and early adopters.
> If you could go back and compare the sophistication of those macs in DTP to the
> IBM PCs in accounting you would be shocked. The PCs were slow cheezy crap with
> DOS3.3 or worse and needed any army of support gurus. Remember all those people
> who had business cards that said they were the company PC Wizard? MS did EXCELL
> for the Mac and it was great, but Apple dropped the ball and let it go out of
> play. Some early people did CAD/CAM but again there was no support from Apple.
> The great Guy Kowasaki "evangelism" is bunk and anyway, was aimed at very
> specific targets. Anybody with a vision that did not match the "next great
> thing" got the cold showlder. And I know, I was working in Mac DTS (Developer
> Technical Support) in Galactic Central, Cupertino.
> 
> Charlie Springer


You may be right to some extent about Apple making the mistake of not
building more than they did on their existing Apple II customer base. 
And again, regarding desktop publishing, I was referencing, in part, one
of the episodes of the "Revenge of the Nerds" documentary.  But I was
also speaking from experience on that count.  It was the WYSIWYG nature
of the graphic user interface that was the very thing that enabled
desktop publishing in the first place.  And it was most definitely the
MacIntosh that brought that about, because there were no good GUI's for
the IBM PC's, and very little graphic design and desktop publishing
software for MS-DOS in those pre-Windows days.  The MacIntosh was
responsible for beginning the computerization of the publishing
industry.  If that's not a niche, what is?  I most definitely believe
that that's what carried Apple in the latter half of the '80's.  They
had tapped into a market, perhaps inadvertantly, that was untouched by
the PC realm for several years.  

But desktop publishing really didn't begin taking hold very much until
1986 or '87, and even then there were only a few printshops that could
handle electronic files.  And by '87 the 386's had come onto the scene
(I think it was '87), and I think it's quite an overstatement to call
even the early 386's slow, cheezy pieces of crap.  It's a little ironic
to hear that coming from an advocate of Apple II computers which ran at
between 1 and 2.5 MHz, and even the Mac I's and early Mac II's were not
exactly speed demons.  But the Macs did have a very nice user interface
- I'll never argue that, and some of the best (if not the best) graphics
and layout design software in the '80's was Mac-based.  The Mac is where
those things really started.  In the last decade, though, the table has
turned to the Windows side - not for quality necessarily, but for
volume.  Most software packages that were once only for Macs are now in
Windows versions as well, while Apple's share of the market has fallen
to 3%.

In the mainstream business market, where the lion's share of money in
computing was to be made in the '80's, the IBM PC's explosive lead was
virtually unbeatable, even by 1983 when the .  I can't speak to the
comparison of sophistication of IBM PC's in accounting versus the Macs
in desktop publishing, because I'm not a business accountant, and
because it's really comparing apples and oranges (not fruit puns
intended).  But I do know, whether it was due to IBM's name recognition
or Apple's early stumbles in the business market, that IBM took off
remarkable success with it's PC and PC-XT and PC-AT long before Windows
became available.  It surprised even IBM.

Jeff Lemke