Re: The IBM PC's slavish devotion to the Apple II

["Chuck Morris" <nospam@nospam.net>]

Wow!  This thread was a teensy little one when I last stepped down from my
soapbox, and now look at it!  Seriously, I'm pleased to see that the
direction of this discussion seems to have taken a positive turn.

Having now caught up on reading all the posts, I'll add a few thoughts of my
own that are not intended as replies to anyone else's specific posts.  These
are just my own observations and opinions.  As such, I certainly hope that
to the extent that they may vary from anyone else's thoughts, nobody will
lose any sleep over it.  I know I won't.

First, don't forget that the Apple II and the IBM PC were, in a sense,
developed in different eras with different purposes in mind.  The Apple II
grew out of Steve Wozniak's original efforts in his garage to develop an
affordable computer purely for hobbyists, motivated primarily (I suspect) by
nothing more than the desire to own such a beast himself.  There was no real
expectation at the time that such computers would end up being indispensible
fixtures in businesses of all kinds all over the world.  Jobs and Wozniak
formed Apple with the thought that the primary market for those machines
would be hobbyists.  And though Apple had some notion that those machines
might make some inroads into businesses, they themselves never produced a
sufficiently compelling argument to convince businesses to buy the Apple in
large numbers.  Up to this point if you look at the few other companies that
were also building and selling computers, you'll find that they also drew
their largest market share from hobbyists, for neither had they produced
such a compelling reason.  Some businesses did buy Apples and other machines
to automate payrolls, etc., but such uses did not cause large numbers of
units to fly off the shelves into offices.

All of that changed when Visicalc came out.  IMHO, this is the first true
"Killer App" of the personal computing era.  Now there was a readily
available tool that businesses could use to crunch their business data in
ways that they could define themselves, and in significantly less time than
the same results could be compiled by hand.  This was the spark that
convinced a great many businesses that the purchase of a computer for the
office was justified, and not only justified, but essential to their ability
to run their business more effectively.  Suddenly there was a real business
market to be pursued, and nobody had yet established dominance in that
market.

The IBM PC was a beneficiary of this development in the market, no doubt.  I
believe that IBM was already working on developing the PC prior to this
point with the hope of being able to make sales in the business world, but I
suspect that they had no better idea of how to cause businesses to lust
after their machines than Apple had.  As it turned out, neither they nor
Apple had to create the market from scratch, thanks to the arrival of
Visicalc.

As for the design of the machine, clearly IBM was not unaware of the overall
features found in the Apple II and other machines being produced, and it
would have been purely idiotic of them not to look at all aspects of those
in making their own design decisions.  When attempting to introduce any
product into a market where there is any sort of competition, one must
assess that competition's strengths and weaknesses to have any real
expectation of success.  Such features as the Apple II's expansion slots
were included in the design of the PC because they were a good idea in the
first place, and there is nothing wrong with incorporating a design concept
found in another design into your own, so long as no copyrights or patents
are violated in the process.  Improving upon someone else's implementation
of that concept in your own design is not only natural, but it is essential
if you wish to gain a competitive edge.  That IS how the game is played.  I
for one would never criticize IBM for having "copied" Apple's expansion slot
idea, but I would certainly have criticized them for having omitted it.

Once the IBM PC came out, Apple and IBM went in different directions.  Due
to IBM's established business relationships, they had a natural advantage
which they took advantage of as best they could.  Apple still sold some
machines to businesses as well, though in smaller numbers.  Their market
continued to primarily consist of schools and hobbyists.  The real force
that drove the IBM PC and it's descendants to market dominance over the
years though was the development of the PC clone.  While Apple refused to
allow clones of it's own machines for years, this was not the case with the
IBM PC.  This created competition among companies seeking to have the best
PC clone, with buyers benefitting from the rapid improvements of the
machines and from lower prices due to "price wars" among manufacturers.
Ironically, this simultaneously caused IBM to lose market share, while their
"platform" (meaning the IBM-PC and it's clones) rapidly gained market share.
Lacking this sort of competition from clone makers, the Apple II line
steadily fell behind in capabilities relative to the PC clones, and
continued to lose market share.  The Apple III and the Lisa both were viewed
as failures from a competitive standpoint, and by the time the Mac came out,
the battle for market dominance was essentially over.

Well, that's enough rambling for one post, don't you think?