7 things Apple got disastrously wrong

12. As a former employee of Power Computing, I think we helped keep the Macintosh platform viable when Apple's leadership was impotent and ineffective. Even today, I think the those of us at PCC believed we were helping Apple's viability, but clearly at the expense of Apple's own sales.

People were abandoning Apple because of its high-prices. PCC kept Apple alive by keeping the costs low and affordable.

When Steve Jobs came back to the helm at Apple, it was in a better position that it had been under Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, and made the decision to end clone licensing. It was a bitter pill for us at PCC to swallow, but Apple emerged stronger and better as a result under Steve Job's guidance.

But in my view, Apple survived because of its clone-licensing, not in spite of it.

TRB

11. "4. It became synonymous with over-priced, under-performing PCs".

I think Apple hardware is still generally more expensive than PC hardware. For example Mac laptops are about %50 to twice more expensive than similar PC laptops.

Moreover, Apple hardware is not any better than PC hardware. I however prefer OS X over Windows (Vista or XP) any day (even though Windows variants have some advantages too). If it wasn't because of OS X and some softwares available on Mac which are not available on PC, I would have not switched to Mac.

10. You've got it all wrong about SCSI. First off, it was not analogous to a PC port's parallel port. Not even close. Secondly, it was quite advanced for the day, and is still commonly in use in high application. Thirdly, it is a standard - the standard that high end workstations at the time used. Fourthly, it was not at all disastrous. In fact, it was quite good. Tell me how PCs of the era could use an external bootable hard drive… oh right, you can't, because you couldn't. Every Mac, on the other hand, had an external SCSI port. Hello external hard drives. And scanners. And?

Some of your points are right on (and they have been discussed ad nauseum for years), but you are dead wrong about SCSI. At least you didn't mention the one-button mouse and Jobs' ditching of the floppy drive.

9. Having lived through these times, this article definitely has comparative times incorrect NuBus vs PCI, LocalTalk vs ethernet realities, ADB vs PS/2 etc.

sevenfeet is completely correct in his assessment.

Apple's biggest issues were:

- losing the product focus with Steve being forced out

- losing company focus with lots of competing groups

- poor marketing to really differentiate what it offered

E.g. poor leadership from Gasse et al - they did not get it...

8. SCSI isn't an Apple proprietary technology. I have a SCSI scanner attached to my PC right now!

7. 7. Apple had a lot of really bad technologies, both hardware and software. It was painful to see a lot of them go, but it wasn't Jobs that cut the majority of them. It was our buddy Gil Amelio. He may have had no vision for the company, but he did a really great job of cutting failing projects which set things up for Jobs to come in as the hero who would reinvent the compay.

6. This article has so many errors, I don't know where to begin, but let's take it from the top.

1. Too much proprietary technology? Back in the 80's you pretty much invented what you needed. Or adopted bleeding edge technology no one else was using at the time. Your examples are poor. NuBUS was an 32-bit MIT-developed technology that had bandwidth for days...a far cry from the 8 and 16 bit ISA slots that dated back to the early days of PC computing. Apple's first NuBUS machine was the Mac II in 1987. The PC world went through a few weird proprietary standards in the late 80's (including IBM doing MCA bus computers for a while) before PCI finally came on the scene in the 90's. Sophisticated Mac graphics cards in those days couldn't have been done with the constraints of ISA or later VESA buses.

SCSI was way ahead of anything that was in use for PCs at the time and it made hard drive expansion pretty easy. Remember what PC users were doing to get more storage in those days? And with any SCSI card, I can still hook up 20 year old drives to my Leopard machine now if I had to. Try that with an old DOS drive from the 80s. And SCSI buses gave us the first CD-ROM drives, which were externally connected.

2. RISC versus CISC. Back around 1990 of you remember any of the trade press, it was widely predicted that RISC would superceed CISC processors due to their natural advantages. From a short to medium perspective, this made sense for Apple since the 68000 platform had run its course. What no-one predicted back then was that Intel would co-opt many RISC technologies behind the scenes of their CISC chips. So it presented a CISC chip to programmers but used RISC tech behind the scenes.

3. Agreed. No argument there. Apple had no direction in the 1990s until Jobs returned.

4. I might agree with the overpriced/underperforming argument but you chose a poor example. The IIfx was easily the fastest PC of the day...at the same time, most people were buying 286 based machines. Your argument works better with some of the Quadra computers Apple was selling from 1993-1996.

5. "Apple had no answer for Windows 95". I'd say the problem was earlier than that. Apple really had no answer for Windows 3.1. Although still inferior to the Mac OS of the day, it was useful enough for PC clone vendors to license it as the primary OS for PCs and move away from DOS.

6. Licensing to third parties. If Apple had licensed before 1987, the entire personal computer landscape might be different. But they didn't and by the time they did in the 90s, it was too late and only ate away at Apple's bottom line for their Mac business.

7. "Core business". I'm sure you could argue this since Apple had a hard making the Mac OS better in the 90s through a series of failed projects. But I don't fault them for trying. After all, if Apple stuck to their "core business" now, we'd have no iPods or iPhones. The Newton sparked a race for similar technology from other companies that ended up giving is the Palm OS and Windows CE. And Apple's printer business was a key lynchpin with their desktop publishing strategy for a decade. The real problem with Laserwriters was that they were expensive (due to Adobe's Postscript interpreter) and that Apple didn't care about overall printer sales versus trying to shore up Mac sales. By the time they made printers work better with PCs, HP had already cornered the market.

4.

If it weren't for ADB, we wouldn't have USB. And if it weren't for Apple, we might not have wide USB adoption. The original iMac forced USB on Mac users but it took 3 years for the PC market to catchup and get off of PS/2 interfaces.

GCR recording versus MFM recording? Do you know anything about the history of floppy technology in personal computers? Steve Wozniak was using GCR recording on Apple ][ 5.25" floppies...in 1978. The better question is why IBM used chose MFM encoding when GCR recorded more data per track than MFM.

Localtalk (and the RS-422 serial standard) was designed to do away with the ugly parallel interface standard that dated back to the mid-70s. Localtalk made networking easy and dirt cheap. Anyone with cat-3 phone cable could (and did) make a functional office network in no time. Localtalk networks often ended up using spare phone wire in offices and schools that weren't being used for phone traffic anyway and had already been wired through the building. Compare that to Ethernet which was hilariously expensive per node until the 1990s. It also required coax cable to be wired everywhere and expensive bnc connectors. Finally, Mac networking software was baked into the OS and was dirt simple. Ask anyone over the age of 40 how "easy" it was to do a Novell network, or 3Com...or Banyan in those days. And don't get me started on IBM Token Ring.

5. I was one of those people who bought a clone: it was a Power Computing. It was the ONLY PowerPC Mac type machine I could afford. It was a wonderful machine. I could not afford ANY other type machine directly from Apple.

When they killed the clone market, the killed my interest in Apple. I swore I would never go back, and so far 12 years later, I have not. I did what I should have done years ago: buy a PC. Now, my old PCs run Linux.

I do not regret my decision, because at the time, to me, Apple was "The computer for the rest of us that none of us could afford"

4. Apple basically tried to squeeze IBM out of personal computers and lost big time. It was like a kid with a cap pistol trying to take down Jesse James.

Going further back into the 80's, they made no attempt to maintain backward compatibility. When ProDOS appeared they did absolutely nothing to facilitate file conversion, and the Apple III had nothing in common with the Apple II, and the Mac had nothing in common with either. We had a student whose father "donated" an Apple III from his business. It sat around as a doorstop for several years before we junked it. I was once an Apple supporter but went over to the Dark Side (IBM at the time) because I could count on being able to move up without having to learn a totally new system. Finding out that the Mac didn't automatically handle older Apple file formats finally made me fed up enough to switch.

Plus, the Microsoft system of identifying drives by letter is hands down the most intelligible way of doing it.

3. Well, ok, in that case they weren't disastrous.

There were several other minnows swimming around in the 1980s - Sinclair, Atari PCs, the BBC micro, Commodore, Amstrad, Apricot (then ACT), Brother, Olivetti, the Amiga. All of them were washed away (in time) by MS DOS and Windows, although some of them adopted the IBM architecture for a while. This was despite all of them avoiding the 'mistakes' described here. And, of course, there was IBM, which discovered that the main beneficiary of its PC architecture was not IBM, but Microsoft.

2. The point isnt that these bad decisions brought down the company, they didnt, the point is that the company would have been far more sucessful if it hadnt. In the mid 90's the company was practically bankrupt and would have been in the strong position it is today far earlier.

1. Congratulations to the author for a headline which catches the eye, but, in reality, the fact that Apple is still in business demonstrates that none of these were disastrous, and some of them were key to its success.

1) Back in the 1990s, the speed of SCSI and the ubiquity of LocalTalk were key reasons for the Mac's dominance in graphic design. PCs went through a variety of mutually incompatible bits of technology, many of which survived just one generation. While Novell users were struggling with their BNC connectors and reconfiguring the base address on ethernet cards, LocalTalk users were happily just plugging systems together, and the only way to get really fast external disk access was… by installing a SCSI card.

2) Given that Apple was Motorola based from the Apple II days, it was no poor decision to leverage what Motorola had over Intel. Apple was always the minnow, from the very moment that IBM decided to issue its IBM PC with MS DOS. However, unlike other minnows, such as the Amiga, the Amstrad, and the proprietary Apricot, Apple was able to maintain its market share.

3) Apple may have lost the plot in the 1990s as far as Time magazine was concerned, but it dominated its core creative industries. As a Windows user in the graphic design world back then, I was in no doubt that I was a poor relation. Windows 3.1? More or less a joke compared to System 7.

4) Apple may have become synonymous with over-priced PCs, but Microsoft became synonymous with evil corporate domination. Neither were true — Microsoft donated $millions in cash and software to charity (the charity I worked for was a beneficiary). But MS is still suffering from its 'evil' reputation, which spurs on virus-writers, while Apple, with its glossy Apple stores, is more seen as 'premium'.

5) I moved over to the Mac in 1996 largely as a result of Windows 95, which was so power hungry that it made every system it was installed on run slow, and had virtually no backward compatibility with 3.1 software. Windows 95 was a success because it gave the 95% of the market PC users a glimpse of what life might be like, but the constant urge to upgrade to 98, NT, and so on is an indication that it really wasn't the holy grail. As the T-shirt used to say, Windows 95=Mac 89.

6) Licensing the OS may or may not have been a good business decision. It didn't last long enough for this to be apparent. Bringing Steve Jobs back clearly was a good decision, and he took the company back along his own path.

7) The Apple Laserwriter was a more or less essential piece of kit if you were in design. PC equivalents, with their clumsy implementation of Postscript through cards, rarely performed as reliably. Apple was able to cease production of the Laserwriter when enough other Postscript printers came on the market to prevent any risk to its core user base in the graphic industries. Some of the technologies Apple tried were not ripe. But Apple has been a technology innovator right from the Apple II. Not everything works. But without the Newton, there would never have been the Palm, and without the Palm, there would probably never have been the iPhone.

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