Re: Wozniak vs Jobs

[gareth@vcn.bc.ca (Gareth Jones)]

Supertimer (supertimer@aol.com) wrote:
: louiss@gate.net (Louis Schulman) wrote:

(snip)
: 
: I am not sure I agree with Jobs being whole hog on lots of features
: either.  Jobs liked to keep things simple and sweet.  That's why he
: pushed for a closed, unexpandable box of a Mac.

and only two slots in an Apple II...
and only 128 K and no colour and no hard drive for the first Mac...
and no floppy disk and no colour for the first NeXT box...

I wrote an article about Steve (you can find it in my A2.Archive2 stack on
ground) which emphasized his hostility to expandible boxes, as proved over
and over, and his lack of loyalty to customers and co-workers. I remember
reading in Nibble that Apple's treatment of the II (largely through Jobs'
influence, I believe) was used as a case study of the gross mismanagement
of a major asset by the Harvard school of Business. The Woz has been
quoted as saying that Apple could have been twice the size that it is, if
it hadn't turned its back on the II all those years...and I believe him.

Has he changed? Well, his decision to effectively end cloning cost Apple's
major supplier of chips (Motorola) hundreds of millions of dollars. Would
you make the decision to screw one of your most important suppliers with
no notice and no consideration like that? Thought not. And how about your
developers - surely the juice that makes a computer company go? OpenDoc
was _finished_, the development costs paid, and developers had interesting
products ready to go, at the time that Steve axed it. Ditto with the
Newton - in the opinion of many, it was ready to hit prime time in the
education market with the eMate 300, and Woz was talking in interviews
about how it had many superior aspects to the Mac operating system (less
complex, instant-on, doesn't crash...), and cancelling that without notice
screwed a lot of developers _again_. Now Rhapsody ... the talk about it
has already limited the next stage Apple Operating System to something
that will be for servers. Want to bet we won't see yet another betrayal?

-Gareth