Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

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

Supertimer wrote:
> 
> Jeff Lemke <lemke@terra.cira.colostate.edu> wrote:
> 
> >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 IIe and the overpriced Lisa
> >had been released.  I can't speak to the comparison of the
> >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 (no fruit puns intended).
> 
> IBM PC really did break into business overnight because of its name,
> but that did not guarantee the IBM PC a 95% market share.
> 
> Before the IBM PC, it was Apple that sold 95% of the computers and
> that was the Apple II series to schools.  When IBM PC hit coporate
> market, those Apple II did not disappear.  


Perhaps 95% to schools, but certainly not overall.  There were a lot of
other computer makers, Tandy being a major contender itself in the late
70's and early '80's.  All those other makers made up more than 5%
marketshare.

And didn't Apple donate a lot of machines to schools?


> Both Apple and IBM were
> shocked, but not in the way you think.  Apple retained a 60%-50%
> market share, with IBM cornering business and Apple in education.
> IBM PC made virtually NO inroads into schools at this time.
> 
> What changed this roughly 50-50 head to head competition between
> IBM architecture and Apple?  Two things really.  First, the clones.
> IBM did not make today's Wintel, Compaq did.  When Compaq
> cloned the IBM PC (and later came out with the FIRST 386 ahead
> of IBM), many cloners followed.  IBM actually lost market share to
> the cloners, but DOS and later Windows' market share grew.  The
> second reason that Apple lost its 50% share was because it cut
> off its existing user base.  Have you noticed IBM PC evolving into
> Pentium II?  The Pentium II is a 32-bit chip, but don't tell me that
> you think the 8088 based 4.77Mhz IBM PC was a 32-bit chip?  The
> key is that PC users were always assured that when the 286 came
> out, it would run 8088 software.  Then when the 386 came out, it
> would run 286 software.  When the Pentium came out, Win 95
> powered Pentiums would run Win 3.1 and DOS software originally
> bought for 386 computers.  See the unbroken chain of upgrades?
> No customer alienation.  In contrast, Apple (led by Steve Jobs
> who wanted to do something apart from Steve Wozniak) had two
> options.  Steve Jobs was pushing for Macintosh, a revolutionary
> computer, but one that could not run Apple II software.  It made
> the existing user base unhappy.  The second prototype computer
> was an ARM based Apple II.  The ARM was a 32-bit RISC CPU
> running at 6Mhz and was actually more powerful than the 68000
> unit in the Macintosh.  The difference was that the ARM powered
> unit could use existing A2 software.  This would have made the
> existing customers happy.  Steve Jobs' Apple vetoed the ARM
> based II and went for the incompatible Macintosh.  That's how
> Apple lost the 50%.  Remember....the ARM was a more powerful
> CPU...it could have easily implemented the "Mac" GUI but still
> kept the user base happy by running existing A2 software.  The
> sole reason Apple went with incompatibility was Steve Jobs'
> ego...he wanted something to call his own, separate from Steve
> Wozniak.


I didn't know there was ever such a beast on the boards as an ARMed A2. 
Interesting.  That could have been dangerous.  Then yes, I agree that
that should have been the NeXT computer.  (I better not fool too much
with caps.  Just having fun.)

But seriously, I can't see any logical reason yet that Apple didn't do
that.  

 
> When the Macintosh did not sell well and the A2 continued to
> provide most of Apple's revenues in the early 80s, Apple had to
> fire Steve Jobs.  With Steve Jobs gone, they finally came out
> with the Apple IIGS.  Now the Apple IIGS' 65C816 outperformed
> the 286 at the equivalent Mhz.  It could do 8 MIPS at 16Mhz,
> which was many more MIPS that the 286 at the equivalent
> Mhz.  Other than the MIPS difference, they were very similar
> actually.  Both used a segmented memory addressing scheme
> in a 24 bit address space with a memory range of 16MB.  The
> stock Apple IIGS can actually work as fast as the 8Mhz
> IBM AT (I have such an AT and a Turbo XT too).  This
> processor was still a far cry from the ARM unit they passed
> over.
> 
> By this time, Apple decided that Macintosh was Apple's
> future.  Now heres the irony: they finally come out with an
> Apple IIGS and it has better graphics and sound than the
> IBM clones of the day (which were doing EGA and not yet
> SoundBlaster).  Its speed was not spectacular, but comparable
> to an IBM AT revision 2 (8Mhz 286).  


Then it was about par for its day in speed (for a short while, until the
386's arrived on its heels), but there were already PC's out there with
far better graphics capabilities via third party graphics boards, like
the early TARGA boards, for instance.


> By releasing the IIGS,
> Apple convinces many Apple II users that this was Apple's
> future.  BUT, there is virtually no A2 development after this.
> There was no Apple IIGS to Macintosh transition.
> 
> Now while the 286 evolved into the Pentium II in stages,
> during the same years, the Apple IIGS remained unchanged.
> Remember, these are similar computers.  Apple COULD
> have updated the A2, but it did not.  In fact, they could have
> put in that ARM chip, which has since evolved into the
> StrongARM RISC processor at 200 to 300Mhz!
> 
> One more time -- some might say, wait a minute, this
> RISC based Apple IIGS Plus would be just like a Mac,
> right?  Yes...the point is the Mac could have easily been
> built while being A2 compatible and building on the existing
> user base.  Why didn't they pursue the ARM A2?  Steve
> Jobs decided long ago he would follow his ego and that
> "the next big thing" must be completely separate from
> the old.


I know what's been said now about Job's ego.  Maybe.  But's it's also a
little too easy to sit back at a safe distance and make character
judgements about somebody whom we've never met and never knew
personally.  Yes, actions can speak louder than words, but it's not
possible to know everything that prompts those actions. 

 
> During these years of waddling, the schools switched from
> Apple to Wintel.  Since they had to give up their software
> and hardware investment if they switch to Mac, they went
> to the PC because PC makers always made sure their NEW
> computers could run the hardware and software in the recent
> past (the previous 5 years at the very least).
> 
> Again, the ward off the obvious rebuttal -- A2 users are
> NOT advocating selling an 8-bit Apple II+ in 1998.  What
> we are saying is that NEW 32-bit units must be made, but
> those NEW units could have been designed to run OLD
> software as well as NEW.  That would let you keep your
> existing user base.  The Mac and the Apple IIGS could
> have been ONE product...SHOULD have been.  That
> would have happened had Steve Jobs not cancelled the
> ARM based A2...
 

After what I've been hearing, I would agree.  It would have been
interesting to see how much of an effect there would have been in the
increasingly crowded computer world of the '80's (and the much slimmer
profit margins of the '90's and onward) had Apple ARMed its Apples when
it had the chance to make a difference.  (They could have still called
them Macs, if they felt they needed a new marketing image.)

I still think that to some extent we tend to idealize 'what might have
been'.  I know I do that with myself.  If only I had made a couple
decisions differently, my life would be near-heaven by now, and I'd have
no money troubles, and everything would be great.  Well, no, not
really.  This is still the real world, no matter what decisions we make,
and we'll always run into walls and stiff competition in some form or
another, regardless of our path.  And unpredictable things will always
happen.  Sure, some paths are better overall than others.  But I think
we do tend to idealize our "if-only's" just a tad too much.  A stronger
Apple in the mid to late '80's would have changed the tactics of the
competition.  "IBM-Compatible" might have been "Mac-Compatible".  (Here
the Mac is a re-labeled ARM A2), or perhaps, given Apple's closed
architecture history, at the very least there could have been a much
greater push among the other computer makers to produce faster 16-bit
and 32-bit computers themselves with better graphics and sound than the
'Macs'.  There could have been an earlier move towards buyouts and
mergers among Apple's competitors in order to pool resources and R&D. 
And I think IBM would still figure very substantially in this revised
history.  Even if this 32-bit Apple/Mac had been put on the market in,
what, 1984? 1985?, the PC's and the clones already had had 3 or 4 years
to stake a massive claim on the market.  Perhaps it was the clones that
increased the flood of change, but it was IBM that opened the floodgates
to begin with their off-the shelf, nothing standard, bare bones machine
that all the deep-pocketed buyers with the ledger books loved.  I think
it's easy to underestimate just how badly Apple may have bombed with
their buggy and downright non-working A3's in 1980.  It could have
happened to any computer maker, but unfortunately Apple got caught at
the worst possible time, and then tried to fix their image with a
machine that almost nobody in the target audience could afford and
"crawled like a slug", according to BYTE.

But all things considered, it's quite possible, if not probable, that
Apple would be better off today if they had produced the missing link in
the evolutionary chain of their computers.

Jeff Lemke