Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

September 14

Something strikes me as odd everytime I take a glance at a MacWorld magazine cover. They often talk of "beating a battle" or "winning the latest round". Apart from the overt irony of sounding as convincing as Saddam after his resounding defeat, there has to a motive for the amount of posturing going on. It's nothing rational that's for sure. If you look at PC magazines, they talk about the latest gadget as it exists for the market. The Jihadesque writers would have you believe that there's some kind of war going on. Well stop the presses, have I got news for you. There isn't, and it's fuel like this that keeps the homefires burining for the suckers who got swallowed in the Macintosh camp. There's never been a war in the computer business. There's been dealmaking and collateral pull for the desktop, but there's never been any question as to the purpose of computers - to get work done. To take it to some emotional level reserved to human life, is an insult and a prognosticator of ugly things to come. The decision to what approach should be honored by the marketplace has been decided in dollars. The people at MacWorld would have you believe that the crusade is still on. The closest one that comes to mind with this argument would have to be the children's crusade.

September 15
Well the obvious has become ratified by the boardmembers at Apple. Steve's in charge. There's always one word missing from the headlines at CNN and MSNBC that broke this tidbit of news first. Duh. Why this news took almost a full day to break on the macnews channels is almost as counfounding as why this is news in the first place. Steve has been behind all of the major decisions at Apple since he was taken into the board a month or so ago. Of course he publically toned down his involvement then declining the CEO slot probably to keep the executives at Disney from having a collective freakout over questions about Pixar. Well, those questions are going to come around again as he now spends his time between both companies. Personally I can't think of anyone else who would want to be the head of this sinking ship, or who could be dangerous at the helm. Granted, it's been his baby since day one. But seeing how he nearly killed it around the time of the Apple III, Lisa, and yes even the first days of the Mac weren't celebratory at Apple, then NeXT, then NeXT AGAIN (NeXT software inc.,), the track record of Jobs is about as good as Tucker. Great PR photos. Great charisma. Not very good business sense. This is why Steve Jobs and the stock-market were going apeshit when he wrangled John Sculley former CEO of Pepsi. Now someone who wasn't a college dropout could take on the responsibilities of a full-blown company. Well the dropout is back, and guess which company going to fail basic economics 101 until he finds someone else?

September 16

I've made accusations in the past about Steve Jobs' track record all the time but let's put some meat on these charges to cast some light on why I'm so cynical about what this portends for Apple. The Apple III the first real "business computer" Apple was foisting on the marketplace opposite IBM's jaggernaut (in time not in advertising) was a disaster in Engineering. The boards were faulty and literaly falling apart. The next model unveiled was the Lisa - the first use of the people and ideas he stole from Xerox. Stole is a harsh word, since they DID after all PAY some hefty stock options for the tour they got. Whether that also included the right to hire a buttload of key people from those design teams is circumspect. Well, the Lisa had faulty disk drives, and a price tag of 10K per unit. Not a good sell, and guess what? It didn't. Then we move on to the Mac, which had a screen too small, memory too small, and a software base of applications which was - yep - too small. Sales mirrored these obvious problems. It wans't until such basic options like a SCSI port were added that people even took the toy seriously. Steve didn't like the idea of "corrupting" his magnum-opus so out he went (amongst dozens of other shortcomings). It wasn't until he was gone that Apple even regained any momentum. Steve's NeXT mistake would follow soon after, but that's another entry all to itself.

September 17

While parousing some of the new products to be introduced by Apple I noticed one announcement about a new Mac laptop. Boy! Steve IS in control! You know the price tag of this baby? Over 8 friggin grand! What a godsend for the marketplace that is now buying full package PC's with monitors for $999.00 (the monorail - a nice PC made in K.C.) Now that's a way to gain new ground in the market. The high dollar approach worked for Lisa - NOT, the NeXT cube - NOT, The colorNeXTstation - NOT, and the NeXTDimension - NOT. It has worked for major class workstations from Sun and SGI. But big newsflash, Apple is no Sun or SGI. If this is how to regain volume sales in the mass-marketplace, Apple has really gone back in time. Or perhaps it's just IQ.

September 18

I've been bashing NeXT almost as much as I've been bashing Apple and there's good reason. Not only does it represent the source of a 400 million dollar error, but it's the prime reason why everyone should be at least a little concerned about the man in charge at Apple currently. I feel at least a little qualified in doing this not only because I've worked in jobs trying to sell NeXT hardware and software, but because I acutally bought one of these black elephants. So you may wonder why I would be so down on something while the average computer buyer might be religously defending. Weeeel, I'll tell ya. The amount of mistakes that went into the NeXT computer being the biggest bomb outside of Los Alamos is almost totally those of one guy - Steve Jobs. The amount of prima-donna ego, the insubstantiated pricing, the mishandling of the software development community, and the overt denial of every screw-up rests on his shoulders. If you think some of the crucial software makers that could have made a NeXT worth owning were courted responsilbly you'd be wrong. Steve even sent personal attacks to the head of publishers to show how great his computer was. Good move there. The pricing of these computers was still stratospheric when even Apple was cutting margins. The fact that even while his sales were in the toilet, he crowed that he was cornering the market, meant only those residing off-shore were stupid enough to give him money. After loosing the dollar worth of small countries did he stop making hardware altogether. Was the software reasonably priced? Not if you think 5-10 times the going rate for an operating system that no one used was somehow reasonable. Now Steve's at Apple again. Will Apple be responsive to the marketplace, charge reasonable prices for computers, and sustain some kind of growth for the company? You tell me.

September 19

People are jumping off the Apple ship in droves. Now IBM is turning it's back on their plans for licensing the OS. Seeing how they turned their back on their NeXTstep license, it's no surprise there. Even the head of marketing left this week. Probably to do something easier like selling freezers to eskimos. The bigger news to come out of Cupertino was the mention that Apple is going to unveil a new line of NC's and servers at the next MacWorld Expo. Another shocker there. With Larry Oracle Ellison on the board this wasn't a question of "if" as much as "when". Another "when" question would be how long will the NC be on the market before it represents something other than "No Clue"? Take a look around you. When was the last time you saw dumb terminals hooked up to a mainframe in most offices? When was the last time you actually saw an NC based network? When was the last time you saw a box that cost 800 somehow provide more leverage than a PC costing 1000? When was the last time you saw a therapist for this case of denial that you have?

September 20

Besides making cheap shots at NC's you have to wonder what this great box is all about. Bascially it takes the central model of computers back to the 70's. Granted there are some apealing verbage in the sales pitch. The idea of having fewer maintenance and operating costs spread around high volumes of CPU's is tantalizing. The amount of work acutally getting done with this approach is another. The fact that there's barely any actual operating systems available that makes these things work at all is cause for concern. Java isn't ready to do it, and not that many applications are availble to do anything else after the thing takes a lengthy time to boot up. Of course this didn't stop Steve Jobs before. The last time he sold a CPU it took forever to start, had a shakey operating system, and didn't do a heck of a lot since all the major software didn't run on it. At least he learned from his mistakes didn't he?