[clue-tech] Apple Switching to Intel

[Greg Knaddison]

On 6/7/05, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> Greg Knaddison wrote:
> 
> > Maybe it's just more in a long line of stupidity (Newton, AppleII, Cube...).
> 
> Stupidity?  That got my attention...

Sorry - I knew it was a baited term and didn't take the time to come
up with a better one.  How about "so far ahead of their time that they
lost money and some nearly put the company out of business"?

> 
> All three of those products were groundbreaking!

I think this gets at the heart of why I think they were stupid
decisions and you feel they were great.  I'm evaluating the business
sense, you seem to be evaluating tech/cool/foresight factor.

<snip technical merits of the products>

> 
> I'm not just a fan of Apple, I'm a fan of any true innovators, and I
> completely disagree that these products were "stupid".
> 
> They may not have had huge commercial success, but they were certiainly
> the forerunners in all three of their respective niches, and all
> released long before anyone else had even attempted such things.

Yeah...I don't think so.  PocketPIM devices existed before the Newton,
though the newton was a good step in the direction of the modern PDA,
it was evolutionary, but not innovative. They just saw a trail in a
field and made another step in that same line.

Case modders were around for decades before the cube.  It was cute and
all, not revolutionary.  And apparently both the technical
implementation and from a business perspective (less than a year in
production) - the cube wasn't great even by it's fans accounts:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/15/apple_kills_cube/

While the AppleII might have been a competitive machine, it certainly
wasn't revolutionary.  My bottom line is that as a business decision
the proprietary hardware route just wasn't the right one at that time.
 It's amazing how many times companies have to learn the
proprietary-is-bad lesson.

In addition to being evolutionary in each of these failed ventures,
many of Apple's commercially "successful" products borrowed ideas,
code, etc. from previous projects: GUI/windowing from various other
places, HID-Mouse from the GUI folks, BSD for OSX, etc.

> 
> Unfortunately our society has shown time and again that the forerunner
> usually loses to the next guy who can tweak and fix early design flaws
> in their design and make enough changes to skirt the IP laws.
> 

This seems like an oversimplification of the situation - almost like
calling Apple "stupid."  Our society has shown time and again to
reward vendors that provide value, and we also frequently make
cow-headed stampede decisions that might not seem like the best one on
it's own, but given network externalities it probably is/was the right
decision.  Apple has been on the receiving end of the "undue" gains at
least as much as it has had it's products copied and lost revenue to
another firm.  Technology, art, politics - all fields gain ideas from
their peers and from those that came before them.

Being a fan of innovators in the technology field is like being a fan
of water in the middle of the ocean - pretty much every company is
innovating in some way or another.  We could argue about the levels of
innovation at one company over another, how much of revenues get
plowed back into R&D, or which FOSS projects produce the most
interesting implementations.  However, the truth in all these cases is
that the innovation is all pretty small at this point. Technology
innovation in the 50s and 60s, now that's pretty neat.

As business decisions, I maintain that those products were poor much
like the Intel decision.

Greg