Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

October 12

Every week begins with the same old lament - will I have enough to write about within current events, or will I have to fall back on historical observations and underlying trends. The fact is, there's never a slow week at Apple. You can thank the fact that they're a publicly held company for that. If they didn't disclose all the news they could, the investors and the SEC would hang them from the highest tree. In the case of the latest financials that are due out, Wednesday case, they don't need their help. We'll know exactly how much Jobs' return has cost the bottem line. This is in stark contrast to Jobs' old days at NeXT where he could hide the carnage in progress, and pop his head out once a year to announce that they are on the edge of profitability after more than X years worth of trying. This also explains why the MacJihad are so furious with the media. They just won't stop reporting the results that the investors are entitled to - damn them. Trust me, the NeXT community was pretty deluded when they weren't being conned outright. Looking back I'd have to say the Quark fiasco had to rank right up there with the hiding of the fact that for many months, NeXT computers sold in the double digits. In 1991 NeXT was hyping to the max that they had secured the development of Quark XPress after failing to secure more than a "pissing" comment from Microsoft. It actually looked like the black box would actually be able to do something, at a price more competitive than the absurd margins that Apple was gouging to pre-press houses, designers and the like. Sure they had Framemaker and Adobe Illustrator, but ask any designer that is pushing serious print and publications and there's a monopoly on what tool to use. What NeXT neglected to tell everyone was how tenouis the relationship with Quark actually was. In fact it wasn't even tenouis. It was a tragic joke. Between demanding that Quark abandon several man-years of code for a total rewrite of the application, to actually sending insulting e-mail, Jobs did all he could to sink the endevour. The final blow surrounded both the breakdown in communications, and the fact that they renigged on the money they were to advance for the work that needed to be done. Quark stopped, and so did NeXT's future in the publishing business. That didn't stop suckers like me and many others from obtaining and then trying to make the damn things actually pay for themselves. The fact that it took more than 2 years for this to become obvious is even more irresponsible. It wasn't until NeXTworld magazine was pleading for it's readers to beg Quark to port its software that NeXT even stopped denying that they had blown it bigtime. Now that Jobs is back at Apple, no one but a total-rube would be crazy enough to buy a Mac until Apple shows that it's going to last more than a couple of years by balancing the bottem line. Think this won't be the case? Think Different.

October 13
The news mill is already grinding out the precursor to the impending financials. It can't be good, because Apple is already admitting that they will continue to administer more layoffs to stem the rising tide of red ink that pours from all the overhead outpacing their diminishing sales. This combined with the NeXT and PowerMac purchases makes for very bad annual bottem-line indeed. Of course the fact that both of these major financial hits, almost half a billion dollars worth, are the cause of one man doesn't worry the Jihad one bit. In fact they love the man, Steve Jobs. Well if this is tough love, I'd hate to see him in a bad mood. In the history of people that have come in to command an empire of sorts, I'd have to say that Jobs right now is playing the part of a financial Nero. The amount of fiddling that he's doing right now is burning more dough than the National Treasury. But if we can see past the smoke and mirrors, we might believe that perhaps this is what Apple needs, seeing how staying the course has cost two CEO's their jobs and has gotten them in this mess to begin with. The method to this madness is what I have a problem with. At least one other poster - on the sister siteto this one - has likened the situation to the doctor killing a dead patient. Aside from inviting this person to write a guest column, I'd have to agree that in this case the doctor is either treating a dead patient, or is Kavorkian himself.

October 14

Meanwhile back on the EvangleList, the interm administrator - no longer Guy Kawasaki - is raising quite a havoc. I finally did the unthinkable and actually openly disagreed with his current undertaking, the perpetual war-of-words with HotWired over writer Joey Anuff's dig on the Mac. I could bore you with the longer letter, and if I get further involved in this nuttiness I probably will, but the short end of it was this very simple fact. The EvangleList has a small consortium of die-hard MacJihad members. HotWired, and Wired magazine on the whole, has a much larger base of readers and people who could be regarded as potential customers to help Apple bail out of it's current troubles. The fact that the List refuses to let the matter lie, and antagonise further the writer in question, is reckless to say the least. To say the most; he's pissing him off further, alienating someone who could actually say a few nice words about Apple in the future, and creating a PR risk that Apple can't afford. This is beyond grade-school logic, so I don't expect the administrator of the list to understand this anytime soon. In the meantime they've probably wrecked more havoc with the general media than any marketing group can hope to sconce over. This may explain why the media is captivated by Apple's woes, but somehow I doubt it. The fact is, anyone who comments on Apple's publically available financial news, would be hard pressed to say anything nice when all they do is catch e-mail hell from a group of infantile morons who, while perhaps being eloquent writers from time to time, are unable to see the forest from the trees. In this case, each time they send a piece of e-mail to someone who has the ear of the general public, and piss that someone off, they loose more growth opportunities than a Brazilian rainforest. Burn baby burn.

October 15

Double header of headlines. Apple looses money, and Apple looses people. The two go together better than a pair of twins in a Doublemint Gum commercial. Obviously given the side bets and everything else, the idea they would make money is out of the question. The idea that they could loose double the most pessemistic forecast is absurd. Well - they did. 161 million in fact. Since this is outside the bounderies of the financial communities forecast by a mile, it explains why they don't bother with such news releases before the closing bell. It might also explain why two VP's jumped ship. No sense going down with it, although why one of them did so fast is beyond me. He was the one who climbed on board only last summer only to double back and pull the rip cord. One might speculate that this person realized he made a major error, or found out what reporting to Jobs is like on a day-to-day basis. In either case, the war of attrition seems to be taking some casualties on the upper ranks. The amount of revolving that has been going on this year in general with the upper-eichelon, is only seen in companies that are getting ready for the dirt-shirt. The first time I noticed this behavior was during the last Time/Warner days at Atari Inc., when every manager worth his resume bailed before something nasty happened under the roof of a company that once represented more than 80% of Warner's profits. Now that Apple is taking the slide, we see the same furry critters jumping off the boat. How the public and the investor community respond to all this is only as far off as the opening bell on the stock market. I'm sure Apple's stock will make a splash.

October 16

I've talked with a few other graphic designers, and several don't seem all that compassionate about the Mac. Apple has said more than once that without Macintoshes, the design and publishing industry would be in trouble. Perhaps this is true - particularly for the non-technical artists - but every Photoshop head I know, once placed in front of an SGI with some nice 3D Alias stuff going on at the same time he's working with a dozen or so massive photoshop images usually becomes a drooling idiot that can't even remember how to spell Macintosh. The problem is that there's not that many SGI equiped departments, but several that I've worked in gives the Apple's to the newbies and guards their Indy workstations like a Rottweiler with a T-Bone. As I've passed through many pre-press production houses, the real-pig iron never had an Apple logo on it. Scitex, Dolev, SGI, Sun, and Digital were the order of the day - not because they somehow sold out the Apple dream, but because they had to get the postscript out - massive quantities - and fast. For a time Scitex and Quark worked together closely to bridge all the XPress material that had to be shoved into the mainframe and workstation towers that controlled robotic Hell scanners, and massive imaging devices. They licensed this crowbar under the name of Visionary. Due to some technical and political quagmire, with lots of finger pointing on both sides, Visionary became a blurry backdrop to an extension to XPress running on Macs in a gateway configuration. It, worked - but was much less elegant and scads less efficient than the predecessor - if for no other reason that a lot of the time was now taken by Apple boxes trying to act like the pig-iron that got the job done. Fine if you're billing per-hour on a job, not so great if they're contracts for 25% of Ralston Purina's worldwide output that are all flat-rated. The point is, that although Apple will always portend to have the most designers under their belts, and will maintain that their advantages are second to none - most high-end graphics shops don't give a damn. They're the ones using NT and Sun workstations to get the most bang for the buck - rather than be a part of Apple's PR machine. Those designers that refuse to up their technical skills in the short-term may find themselves as useful as those that used to man Agfa Quadex computers from the 70's and other machines that were once the state-of-the-graphic-arts. Those that are already technical, know that they can adapt as long as the software is there - and will do so gladly if there's more speed involved. The real speed may be matched only by how fast departments junk their aging mac fleets for faster workstations without the Apple logo on them as Apple continues to flag both in technology and in stability. Then it won't be a question of, do you like this computer, but do you want to work here?

October 17

A week or so ago I saw another letter in MacWeek that looked like it was barfed forth from Guy's EvangeList. He claimed that the cost-overheads and the amount of hastles that were happening on the PC side stood in stark contrast to the Macs that were running fine. Besides sounding like he was reading from the Apple comissioned white-papers on the matter, it didn't even make the closest sense to my own daily grind. Once you get the feel for how everything works on another platform, you begin to notice all the Macs that are crashing 3 times a day all around you. I'm not talking about an errant software program, I'm talking total lockup. The fact is this happens so much, that the most recent letter decrying the opposite this week places it as a denial on the part of Apple users that this is a normal thing to expect. I don't call it denial - I call it a blind spot. I would needle those around me every day by saying "still going" whenever I would watch one of them double over in pain for lack of saving their last hour of work. Eventually I had to stop because not only was the ribbing getting old, it was getting tiresome. To date, I've only had photoshop crash only with extreeme rareity in the last year on my Pentium 133. I'm not kidding in the slightest. We're talking Bigfoot, UFO, and Lochness Monster sightings all in one table of odds. The fact is, since System 7.5 was introduced, I've never seen a Mac be stable in the slightest when it comes to an average workday. At the risk of repeating myself, that represents half the reason I got rid of mine. I started to notice when the Mac crashed more than some 386 with Windows 3.0 installed - that it was time to move on, and get work done. I wonder how long it will take the rest of the Mac crowd to do the same? I'm guessing it's going to be around the same time those Rhapsody-Mac emulators try to stay on their feet in the normal office.

October 18

I've heard some pretty audacious things over the last month about how far Steve Jobs would go to keep Apple alive. The scariest one to date was a quote that was repeated in at least 3 other sources - which said to the effect - "The Mac is dead let's just milk it for as long as we can and get Rhapsody and NC going". Why not you did it with the Apple II Steve. The fact is this time they don't have the time or the money to do so. But putting that argument aside it would explain why he's been so short on hyping the inevitable Rhapsody argument, and putting his reality-distortion field on it's highest setting for Mac OS8. Face it, in order for Apple to even be around long enough for an NC to be purchased, a hell of a lot of OS 8 Macintoshes are going to have to sell this Christmas. The fact that mostly NeXT people are left in the downsizing of most departments, and the oblitteration of the R&D group pretty much guarantees that it's going to be the next try for NeXTstep if it kills Apple trying. Why bother inventing anything else and supporting something that the marketplace has already bought in the millions when Steve obviously has the perfect product from the last R&D group that he had under his thumb. No sense in re-inventing the wheel eh? But what if no one wanted that wheel in the first place? It's even more interresting when you consider that other wheels have left NeXT in the dust 7 years ago. But with Steve at the controlls it's full speed ahead for this kamakazi drag-racer. I'm not even going to wait at the finish line for this road-kill in progress, the race is already over.