Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

October 26

Ruetters and other assorted newsfeeds are awaiting with baited breath the news next week whether after Steve Jobs' vacation if he'll replace the interm moniker for a full-time CEO title at Apple. I predict that this is going to be preceeded by stop-gap stories claiming both, that he's taken it, and that he hasn't. It doesn't really matter because he's the CEO now until some other schmuck decides to sucker into that slot. The whole reason that he is CEO - iterm or not - is not just the smoke and mirrors of the founding-father thing, it's the fact that if he wasn't the CEO - there'd be plenty of lawsuits from the shareholders over what the hell is going on. The mere fact that there's a guy who - with one whole share of Apple stock to his name, is buying out other companies for 200 million dollars, is spending 80 million dollars on an advertising series that he wanted to narrate himself, and is making decisions that is directly affecting Apple's ability to survive - better have the CEO moniker or he's illegally running the show - bigtime. The fact that he's doing all this damage and still claims that he doesn't want to run Apple full-time is an insult to every investor. It basically says that any yahoo who has one share of Apple stock can fire the existing CEO, reoganize the board, and go on a spending spree with their cash. As long as the yahoo has a personal reality-distortion field surrounding them. Well, I may not be the most charasmatic boob on the planet, but SIGN ME UP! I'll contact my mutual find manager and have them buy one single share of Apple stock, and I'll start my own meglomaniac Apple based enterprise! Is this a great country or what?

October 27
Well the presses are rolling all over themselves with Reutters spewing that Jobs isn't going to take the full-time moniker, while MacWeek reports that this was another PR foul-up, and that he hasn't made up his mind one way or the other. Speaking of PR foul-ups, Guy's brigade of renegade first-amendment Nazis is going bonkers once again talking how any bad PR will be a self-fullfilment argument for Apple's future. Looking on this destiny argument, I actually wrote back wrapping this argument around other failed experiments that collapsed under their own weight rather than the mere critisicm of the press. My favorite from the vaults of the obscure, has to be the Pruitt-Igoe HUD developments in St. Louis that were demolished in 1975 after being built less than 20 years before. Forget your Cabrini-Greens, this sucker imploded under the violent weight only saved for actions similar to wars in Beruitt. While the international media took notice of this expensive and far-reaching blunder of design and logistics, it should be noted that no one thing caused this nightmare. It wasn't the design, it wasn't the tenents, not even the location - rather - it was a combination of bits and pieces of all of the above. No single mistake has put Apple where it is today either. But just more than 20 years past it's start date, Apple is imploding the same way. The fact that the press might actually notice this, is irrelevant - and will have no bearing on the outcome. The fact that Guy often sounds like this isn't the case, makes him sound either narrowcasted or clueless. I got a response eventually, even with the most estoteric of examples used for comparrison, and he conceeded that there were many mistakes and the PR spin is but one of them. Now if he would just tell the rest of the list the same thing, I could stop this particular rant. In the meantime, you can take a look at the building to the left of the PR satire on this month's cover treatment for a true indication of Apple's future.

October 28

I'm a sucker for kiss and tell industry books. From "Steve Jobs' and the NeXT big thing", to the latest to come out from the Apple mythology series, I love getting some glimpse into what rampant egos, and bad business sense can bring down on itself. My collection got started with "Hackers" from Steven Levey, and continued with "Accidental Empires" by Robert Cringly. The best of the breed are by reporters who understand or have been covering the industry from the inside. Next best are those by journalists who can supplant a firm grasp of the industry with former-workers who have gone on to better things, or those that are testing the limits of their non-disclosure agreements. It's the latter that made "the NeXT big thing" a somewhat preachy but otherwise on-target tome only limited by not understanding how ALL product roll-outs are generally smoke and mirror fests and other details of how the computer industry works. Well a new one came out. This one from a writer from the Wall-Street Journal, which was previewed in the latest copy of Wired. While drolling over the arrival of the juicy trash to come delivered from Amazon.com, I also ordered another book to balance it out. "The Apple Design book". This tome shows some of the best examples of industrial design that never made it out of Apple, and was formally axed with the dessolution of the R&D group this year. Before you go all misty eyed and think that I'm getting soft on Apple, lemmie tell you a little secret. I know good design when I see it. And Apple has made some of the biggest mistakes by not - at the very least - postioning themselves as the Bang-and-Olfson of the desktop set. Sure the anniversary Mac was a nice try, but like the 10 grand NeXTcube, the underpowered but nice looking boxes bearing the Apple and NeXT logos still never sold to a market that knows power-price curves. And that's a pity because I expect to find between the two books to be delivered just how trajic it was that Apple could have not only avoided a series of blunders that destined them to the scrap-heap of history, but could have actually made computing a more rewarding pastime ergonomically. Oh well, perhaps Sony or IBM will get some good ideas from all this. I wonder who FrogDesign will work with after Acer?

October 29

Amazingly enough, some people at MacWeek are gradually discovering the obvious. Apple is in fact just plopping NeXTstep lock stock and barrel onto the Mac. With a major looking at the Rhapsody developer kit, one of the columnists noticed that aside from the Apple logo replacing the NeXT logo in the Icon dock, not much has changed in the porting of the OS. Where in the past Apple claimed that they would only be taking the best ideas of NeXTstep and incorportating them into the Mac OS, Rhapsody is totally NeXTstep/Openstep or whatever the hell Jobs was calling it before it was folded into Apple. This is BAD - really frigging BAD. The columnist went on to mention all the esoteric system administration bungling he had to do as part of the whole package, due to the Unix/Mach kernal that the whole mess resides on. The upshot was - user friendly my ass. Of course the entire last half-dozen of the NeXTjihad started peppering him with hate-mail, as was claimd in a response to a letter I sent him describing my puzzlement on how this is going to somehow make Apple more savvy with the traditional user-friendly Apple core buyer. I can reaffirm right now, once this entire porting process is over, Windows 95 is going to look 10 times more powerful in the ease-of use argument. Because if you think for a minute that understanding unix kernals, file security management, shell monitoring, task managers, root proceedures, client-host management, multi-user account handles, debugging, and general unix sys-administration is something that prevented previous Mac users from running screaming away from my NeXT, as well as the whole of the general marketplace, you'd be more than a little wrong. You'd be Steve Jobs. Welcome to the NeXT world.

October 30

SGI had a major shake-up which was long overdue at the top, Microsoft is going to defend their improvements to the OS with the inclusion of browser software, and other Mac users still don't understand how a seperate but free browser on one OS is so different from what is happening with Windows 98 or even Cyberdog. The fact is, Cyberdog was also bundled with the Mac OS and - for a time - was a required bundle for other Mac OS licensers installing them on their clones. Where was Janet Reno then? Bark bark bark, but boy is she hot on Bill Gates now eh? Woof. How about an internal client within the OS that integrates e-mail, newsgroup browsing, as well as the web! Ever heard of Microsoft Outlook? Well, before Windows 98 makes browsing truly seamless with the desktop and many other bits of the OS, Janet baby is overlooking the very fact that the browser is becoming a quaint model indeed. Rather than have a launch fest between multiple internet apps, now, with Outlook you can explore your hard-drive, check on your usenet faves, and surf some webs then toggle your e-mail reponses. Very nice indeed. But this integration is not something everyone is doing so well. In fact some are falling very far behind. Netscape is one of them. The fact that Microsoft can do this in a small package comparitively, with not as large of a RAM requirement doesn't make Mark Anderson happy one bit. Because his feckless bloatware requires more. Much more. Of course that's what the Justice Department is for anyway isn't it? Why spend tons of money trying to revamp or at least modernize your product back into something competitive when you can run legal spider-webs all over the place? I can do the same thing if I want. I could start all manner of sexual harassment querys over friends, co-workers, and random aquatences, thus destroying their reputations because you don't need to convict to eliminate people these days where the law is concerned about matters involving sex. Nope, all I need to do is accuse you of sexual impropriaties and boom. Investigation and tabloid city. Of course this is where I differ from Janet Reno, Netscape and all the other characters in this Microsoft love-fest. I have this little thing that prevents me from rolling in the dough via out-of-court settlements. Ethics.

October 31

Looking back at the Apple look and feel lawsuits of the past, I remember something that was commented on by the Amiga people. Get your stinking paws off my GUI. By Apple telling everyone - at least Microsoft - that even having something like a GUI on your computer screen could be a copyright violation, they threatened all other developers of GUIs since the 1970s - particularly Xerox. Digital Research's GEM, GEOS, Windows, Amiga's OS, and everybody but Apple seemed to be in dire waters because Apple wanted to own the whole GUI for themselves. That's why AmigaWorld was noticing all the anti-Apple buttons being worn around the various convention floors at the time. Whether Microsoft decided that the Mac was going to really work, and they'd better get off their GUI pokey ass and make a respectible version of Windows after 1.0 and 2.0, or whether it was a version of a GUI made by Visicalc that scared the bejeezus out of them back in 1981, no one but Xerox had first dibs on the GUI protocol. In fact everyone was doing GUI by 1985. The fact that I remember GEOS running well on a Commodore 64, shortly after the Lisa was discontinued and the Mac - just - intoduced, made the whole GUI whose-on-first argument a strange one indeed. By that time, who cared? Apple's lawyers that's who. And the only one's with money to be had in a preditory legal situation was Microsoft. But many users suddenly realized at the time that if Microsoft lost, they might be next. And since Apple was still over-priced compared to the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, you bet a few users were pissed. Because while Janet Reno is screaming monopoly today, and the MacJihad are whining they were first, they were all preceeded by many users that were yelling at Apple to stop behaving like a bunch of greedheads, and just go back to selling computers instead of stiffling the rest of the marketplace. The fact that Microsoft is being accused of the very same thing by Apple, is irony of the worst kind.

November 1

Ralph Nader. The person responsible for all the people getting killed by their Air bags, and causing new laws to get kids out of the front seat. If there's not one person more insidious and pompous, and a threat to everything that he touches, it has to be the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and Momar Kadaffi. Now Ralphie boy is going after Microsoft. The best argument he had was that unlike Apple and the Mac, Windows wasn't origonal nor was anything that Microsoft is doing presently. Well stop the presses have we got a headline or what? Wow, Xerox, Visicalc's windows, Lisa, and everything else was just an illusion eh? Wow! That's increadible! Just because Microsoft behaved more like VHS and licensed like crazy while Apple called out the lawyers, and kept the greed at full speed like Sony's betmax, we should stop what were doing, stop choosing the obvious and better products from Microsoft, and subsidize an inferior product from a bunch of marketplace morons! But hey, what do you expect from a pinhead whose led his personal grandizing agenda to the detriment of the public with his half-baked ideas. Instead of looking at both sides of an argument, and checking the technology, we now have infant skulls being crushed by explosive balloons inflating out of our dashboards. Wonderful. Now that same intellect will be leading the mandate against what the marketplace has decided is what they want. Well I've got a hint for Nader. Silicon Valley isn't Detroit. Standards and computing platforms change and evolve and revise themselves every month, if not every week. And unlike the lumbering machinists of fossel-fueled automobiles, these companies are certainly more savy then him. I can't wait to see Ralph looking like yesterdays road-kill on the information superhighway. And I'll be reporting every mistake he makes, and every backlash he causes on the web. Count on it.