[Am-info] Steve Jobs and the History of Cocoa

[Mitch Stone]

I tend to agree with you; leastwise I've made a similar argument many 
times. But I have the nagging feeling that the outcome -might- have been 
different if Apple had open access to the established OEM market when they 
need it, rather than being forced to create one on their own.

Two of the Mac cloners (Umax and Motorola) had never sold computers 
previously, and a third was Apple's whole-cloth creation (PowerComputing). 
These were companies nobody had ever heard of, and few outside of Apple's 
current customers identified them as computer makers. For their part, the 
cloners did not seem to know any other business but poaching on Apple's 
established market. This scheme was doomed to failure from the start.

But -- if a company like Dell had begun to ship MacOS computers, that 
might have been a real shot in the arm for Apple's mainstream credibility.
  Some of the same profit and management issues would have remained, but at 
least this scenario had -some- hope of succeeding.


On Tuesday, May 14, 2002, at 08:55 , Paul Rickard wrote:

> ========== On 2002.05.14 11:42 AM, Mitch Stone typed: ============
>
>> Better than Windows 3.1 and with the whole suite of Macintosh 
>> applications,
>>  Star Trek could have beaten Windows 95 to the market by more than a year
>> and turned Apple into the dominant market player.
>
>     And by 1997 there would have been no Apple left for Steve Jobs to
> save. The company could never survive on software revenues alone,
> especially in direct competition with Microsoft on the x86 platform, even
> more so before Jobs came back. I don't like Microsoft's tactics, but
> Apple has no business making software for the PC. That's why I'm opposed
> to a pure-Intel port of OS X - unless Apple makes the x86-based systems
> proprietary with ROMs, the software will be pirated, copied, and hacked
> to death. If there was an x86 release of OS X Apple would go under or
> have to raise its operating system prices to Adobe Photoshop levels. The
> current business model and growth potential is the best Apple has had
> since about 1985, and I for one am happy to see it (my investments
> notwithstanding). The stock is going to soar today once Jobs unwraps the
> rackmount server hardware he promised last week. Speaking of that, about
> seven more minutes now until the big show starts... Too bad it isn't
> being streamed. I don't think it is, anyway.
>

   Mitch Stone
   mitch@accidentalexpert.com