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Re: Hmm.......... Posted: May 13, 2004 Christopher Holland, Staff Engineer, EarthLink, Inc. |
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It's a bit early to claim that the "cycle repeats itself".
I'll adopt a more reserved approach and point out that his ideas were too radical for his time, his methodologies too drastic. Many see NeXT as a failure. Yet OS research developed at his previous company are *key* to the success of Mac OS X. Mac OS X is the *key* technology that has unleashed the power of the Mac platform since 2001. Jobs has had a vision for decades, and has ferociously stuck to it, at the cost of his own perceived demise. His getting kicked from Apple probably is the best thing that ever happened to Apple and Jobs himself, as it has allowed him to pursue his vision of a NeXt-Generation operating system on his own, away from shareholder pressure. I see all this as a painful, albeit necessary "evolution" rather than the vicious circle Arun seems to envision. Apple truly is at an exciting cornerstone of computing today. PC Manufacturers are stuck with the x86 processor architecture. The main consumer operating system for that processor is Microsoft Windows, only compatible with this 32-bit architecture. Stuck at maximum clock speeds of 3.4Ghz, there is not much room left for dramatic upward performance gain without melting the computer case or living in a fridge. On the other hand, with the introduction of the 64-bit G5 clocked at only 2Ghz, most benchmarks show the processor neck-and-neck with the fastest pentium and xeons, depending on which benchmarking source you'll believe and which applications you're benchmarking. IBM this year has developed a smaller, cooler version of the same processor, which was already running comparatively cooler than similarly clocked Pentiums. IBM's chip simply is a better architecture with much room for growth, and Apple's operating system runs natively on it, TODAY. not tomorrow, in a year, or 2 years, but TODAY: 64-bit-compatible OS on a 64-bit processor. Beyond raw performance, it is worth considering that Apple has successfully focused on truly enjoyable computing and digital experiences. iLife apps are indeed powerful. I have used quite a few of them over the xmas holidays to make DV tapes, online web clips, and DVDs of family vacation footage and digital pictures. I am glad George Colony brought-up iSync, because it tends to fly under most radars, yet is quite exciting: Apple has made deals with most makers of PDAs, phones and exotic devices to interoperate with their open iSync API. Apple has developed a central Address Book application which seems simple on the surface, yet yields tremendous power thru its ability to integrate with any Application. Today, I have 523 entries in the address book. When i read e-mail, recipients show-up as clickable objects with information dynamically populated from address book data. My Instant Messaging program also recognizes people from the address book. Same deal with the Calendar application. All this information gets sync'ed seamlessly to my sony ericsson t610 bluetooth cellphone, 10GB iPod, and .MAC account. ALL THIS is what your average home customer wants to use a computer for. It is obvious that Apple has spent considerable amounts of resources perfecting key aspects of a user's digital world. People care for usability. They however don't care to plug their shiny new Windows XP computer to their DSL modem only to find out they just got infected by Sasser, because, since 2001 and the heydays of CodeRed and Nimda, Microsoft STILL has not learned that they should NOT enable *ANY* network services on a default installation of their operating system. No computing system is secure in absolute terms. Just like everyone else, Mac users *will* get hit by viruses, trojans, and worms. But security works in layers. Not running services you don't need is the most basic layer. Apple understood that, as well as the importance of architecting an operating system AROUND *better* (again, not fool-proof) security, vs making it in after-thought. Jobs has demonstrably created a superior computing platform, second to none, which is, i guess, the fruit of focusing "towards individualistic needs driven by maverick ideas". The question now becomes whether or not any of this is relevant for Apple to gain market share. Frankly, who cares. They seem to carefully target their audience. Many pundits deride Apple for being "exclusive", when in fact they're not, they're just currently not in the market of offering commodity computing solutions. They're after the people willing to spend the extra buck to get a better computing experience. Most people don't at this time have a *need* for what Apple is offering, why should this be wrong? It's not right or wrong, it just is. Apple is plenty profitable, and should be around for a while to bring about more computing advances we can benefit from. I'm not sure what Arun meant by "open" regarding Apple's "ideas" ... Interoperability? I'm sitting at the corporate network and browsing the local network allows me to seamlessly see and connect to Windows shared drives and printers. Were I to enable "windows sharing" in the sharing preferences panel, windows users could also connect to this laptop. Windows machines could also use a printer connected to it. I can author, read, modify any Office document ... those problems were solved a long time ago. open software architectures? http://www.apple.com/opensource/ open hardware support? hah, well, Darwin runs just fine on PCs (x86). You can run Linux on Apple hardware just fine too. Windows would need to be re-written for IBM's processor. This message was a reply Posted by Arun Gupta on May 11, 2004
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