Re: Apple, IBM and PCs (Re: Apple, Jobs, and the irony of it)

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

"Michael J. Mahon" writes ...
> 
> Rubywand wrote:
> 
> >Gabriel Morales writes ...(responding to supertimer >> >):
> 
> <snip response that I'm largely in agreement with>
> 
> >> > Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were cut from the same cloth.
> >>
> >> I don't fully agree.
> > ....
> >
> >     Me neither. One seems to know what he's doing and one doesn't.
> 
> I think it's a little more complicated than that.  ;-)
> 
> Maybe it's more like Jobs is leading a rag-tag band of rebels, while
> Gates is leading an army of armies of tens of thousands of hardware
> and software manufacturers and a billion users.
> 
> Apple can "turn its users on a dime" with sufficiently charismatic
> speeches, while steering the wintel axis is like piloting an aircraft
> carrier.
> 

     True. That still leaves questions about the wisdom of scuttling
an aircraft carrier (Apple with the Apple II user base) and making do
with a cruiser.

     We can say many good things about Mac. The only catch is that
Apple, Inc had no business creating it. Instead of all those years of
fretting about whether a more powerful II would impact the Mac,
someone at Apple should have asked how Mac would impact the II and
chucked Mac out the window the moment it was suggested.

     With far less investment than went into Apple III and Mac, Apple
could easily have had a 65816 by 1982 and a 16-bit professional-look 
Apple IIe (with separate KB, mouse, graphical interface, ProDOS on 
hard disk) ready to go in 1983. From then on, it's either a dogfight
with the likes of Commodore or the entire home market just drops into
Apple's lap. ...

     So, instead of getting kicked around by Microsoft, we could,
today, have the pleasure of being kicked around by Apple!

 ....


> 
> Talk of evolution and revolution always reminds me of something
> computer science guru Brian Randell said many years ago (probably
> paraphrasing someone else):  "A philosophy of evolution instead of
> revolution is actually a philosophy of fewer but bloodier revolutions."
> Put another way--brace yourself for the "big one"!
> 
> What the next "big one" will be is anyone's guess...  A lot of folks
> are betting on a convergence of computing and consumer electronics.
> The CE folks figure that the computer's complexity will hand the
> market to them on a platter, while the computer folks think that
> the computer's versatility will cause specialized CE markets to
> implode to the computer's advantage.  Neither scenario is easy
> to believe, so maybe they're both wrong.  ;-)

     Current trends seem to favor both more CE goodies and ever more
attractive applications for computers. 

     One pretty good rule about the 'big one' is that no one sees it
coming until it's here. Look back at the sci-fi stuff leading up
to the 1970's. You'll find plenty of scenarios which mention
computers; but, who comes even remotely close to predicting
the home computing revolution?



> 
> I recall making the projection in 1994 that a full-bore HDTV with
> all the processing power you could use would, by 2005, cost
> less than $200 and plug onto the back of a big, beautiful display--
> which would cost about $1000.  So by then, the display will so
> dominate the cost of a computer that it will be hard to find the
> computer's cost in there!  And a decade later, the computer will
> have come down by a factor of 10 for 10 times more computing,
> and the display will have dropped only a factor of 2-3 (or not at
> all if it fills a wall by then)--even more dominant in the cost equation.
> (So, clearly, the computer does not actually "plug onto" the
> display, but is simply built into it.)

     Looks like you're very close to being on target.

> 
> >> It all comes down to who has the cheapest prices. This type of market
> >> leaves very little room for major innovation, which is why you end up
> >> with a multitude of copy-cat cloners, like Dell, and would-be
> >> innovators move on or die off. It takes a lot of money, dedication and
> >> resources to do true R&D. Meanwhile your competitor has cheaper
> >> systems.
> 
> Yep--if you can't create perceived customer value, your innovation
> is, quite literally, worthless.

     Good point. Too bad none of today's computer makers understands what
constitutes genuine customer value in a computer.

 ....

> >The closer hardware gets to being a relatively simple, low cost black
> >box, the easier it will be to produce a variety of new machines.
> 
> And those machines will differ from each other primarily in the shape
> and color of their cabinets--now _that's_ real innovation.  ;-)

     Think of the modules as you used to think of microprocessors. It's
like having a new 'Big Bang'.



> 
> No worries--as the computer and its peripherals become commoditized,
> there will always be high-margin opportunities--think Monster cables!
> 
> Right now I think my LCD display would be much prettier if I had a big
> oxygen-free copper, litz wire digital video cable with colorful gold-plated
> connectors as big as my fist...yeah, that's the ticket--and innovative as
> hell.  ;-)
> 
> (Doesn't it make you crazy that most people fall for this junk?  Don't
> you wish that the educational system could actually educate people?)
> 

     Yeah. Copper?-- what a bunch of morons. I'm saving up for the silver
wire helium cables!


Rubywand