Keeping Los Gatos classy only washes for ‘Professional Educator’ cred, got it. Meanwhile the ‘Fleet Foxes’ branded itinerant ethnic computing gear is killing it under the radar. oops. said too much.
not hands on with engineering work. [nee’ Jobs]
Lol okay, nobody necessarily needs to remember that, but it’s not like he’d polish lucite, conference distributors and crack sales projection eggs until the monthly/quarterly reviews. Is it fairer to say he was not hands-on with legal? Zoning even?
“Sales and marketing” is not what’s screwing up Apple products.
It’s the industrial design team with their obsession with thinness (industrial anorexia) and hiding controls and options on screen. No one who did market research with actual users would tell Apple that people wanted more of that at the expense of performance and usability.
By analogy, Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfus put streamlined skins on locomotives back in the '30s, creating some of the most beautiful machines ever built IMO. But they knew that no matter how cool it might have looked, you couldn’t make the engines two feet wide, nor could you reduce the engineer’s controls on the backhead to a single lever he’d have to push, pull or twist seventy-two different ways to drive the beast.
The community doing audio on OS9 is amazing. It really makes me wonder about plateaus in technology. Considering all the bloat, a reboot of the Jaguar interface running on current hardware might someday be considered a breakthrough.
This video is 100% accurate. Having been a product guy for a long time, and watched who gets promoted, I can tell you that the focus of the organization is either on Product, or Marketing, or Sales, or something else but it is never on all three. All decisions come down to a balance of these constituencies, from corporate strategy to where money is spent.
The trouble with product is that it is always a difficult argument in the board room to do what’s right for the customer, and to spend extra money to paint the back of the fence. Always. Because not all products are successful, and most people want to back a winning horse. In fact, most of the people that actually make it TO the boardroom are the types to lie in wait and and carefully back the right horse, not the risk-takers. The risk takers sometimes win and sometimes they lose. To be a true product person who survives to the boardroom takes incredible, Jobs-like skill. There are a handful of these people. 1 out of 100,000, maybe less.
So it’s no surprise that Apple is seeing it’s products start to slip. Since Ive is now in charge of product, we get beautiful visual and industrial design with less usefulness (cases in point: Macbook pro no USB and iPhone 7 no headphone jack!) We get gorgeous watches that don’t do very much. We get NO utilitarian Mac Pro or Minis, the workhorses. (My mini is now 8 years old, kept alive with an SSD and memory add-on, now almost completely dated.) The list goes on.
Apple needs a product person to be in charge. They must know this. They need a seat at the table, on par with Ive and the rest. If they don’t, they will continue to slip until they are lost. The irony of course, is that Microsoft has a true product person running things, the first since Bill, and they are starting to win again. I’m totally fascinated to see how things work out.
Regardless, the point remains, the cost of the first Mac was too high because of marketing and not the product. Of course, Woz referred to the comouter as a ‘Lousy Computer’, so it might not have been a great product to begin with.
My point of course was that Steve Jobs said a lot of things, that contradict his actions and a lot of other things he said.
It had USB, not ADB, so it was pushing the envelope of connectivity and was responsible for a ton of USB accessories coming to market shortly after it was introduced.
As for “fantastically ugly,” that’s just like, your opinion, man.
I remeber using one without USB, and the horrible puck mouse used adb. It was fantastically ugly. It was Gold Smartphone of it’s time.
And I meant to say that it was the first true success of the Mac brand. The brand survived because of the companies persistence in supporting.
It was an awful computer. Mac fans forget how obtuse OS9 was. But it lead to Steve Jobs’ best contribution to the company; NextOS, or as it is known now OSX.
His second best was the retail store, which he fought tooth and nail for. Commercially speaking, that is what truly saved Apple. I can write a 10000 word essay on how brilliant that was.
The supply-chain part is true about Amelio in the case of Apple. The lower-quality products the company pushed out during his tenure changed me from an Apple evangelist to someone who wouldn’t buy or recommend their products again. He poisoned the brand the brand for me to the extent that after he was gone I still didn’t trust it (these days for the “we know better than you, stupid user” approach to things, which the design no longer justifies).
It’s more accurate to say that Jobs was a packaging and inudstrial design guy. In Apple’s case people understandably confuse those things because it’s the glossy and streamlined luxury shells put over the actual products (the commodity hardware guts and the *nix OS) that allow Apple to charge a premium price for their products.
I can guarantee there was never ADB on any iMac, I ran a Mac Reseller when it was introduced and sold hundreds of them. That said, the puck mouse was hand-numbingly awful!
My memory failed me. USB accessories were ubiquitous enough even then that users only had themselves to blame for using that monstrosity on a daily basis.
