Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

April 05

I'm currently on vacation so I've been taking a week off of the net and been watching CNBC and the Wall Street Journal for new data exclusively, plus after getting a major (accidental but insured) taste of a 1992 Merlot, the ThinkPad has been in the Memphis repair center so it's been a vacation for both of us. But that doesn't mean there isn't anything to comment on. It's been nearly 10 years since MacWeek had a hyper attack of delluded Steve Jobs and his reality distorition field, thus publishing for one week only "NeXTWeek Magazine" as an insert to the Vol2. No. 42 October 88 issue of MacWeek. In honor of this, I'm going to devote an entire week to letting people in on what is now the best kept failure of the computer industry - which is about to repeat itself with the same looney at the helm - with the same product no less. NeXT. Ok, I've already confessed to being a shill for NeXT - having sold products for NeXT, and even owned one of the damn things. That alone gives me a hint of what is to come for Apple freaks in the form of Rhapsody - but in spite of accusations of not "getting it" let me give you a peek into the whole story. Lets start with some impartial data and reflect on the follow through shall we? The focus will be with NeXT's own mission statement which was what NeXT was supposed to represent and what goals they would set for themselves in showing the light to the computer industry, as well as burn Apple to the ground in an endevour that was 2 parts spite for every 1 part of Steve's own fight to get his ego into the history books. Lets start with statement one for today; "To build comptuers that change the world, that our friends can afford to buy". Fair enough, except let's see how far they failed on that one. First it's interresting to note that Apple purchased a software company - not a hardware company - so obviously something blew up between point A and point B. In this case it was the comptuers being an anal-micromanaged one of those that was costly to build and was an unfocused product that failed much in the same way the first generations of Macs did (128K), the Lisa and even the Apple III. These were Steve's products almost exclusively - until Apple's board took every product away from him and fixed them into something sellable. In this tradition of Lisa/Mac we even find irony because the first generation of hardware that was produced from this enterprise - the NeXTcube - had to undergo manjor modifications until it was eventually known as the NeXTstation in a smaller form height - and they even aquiced and introduced a floppy drive for the damn thing. It still didn't sell. There's a whole laundry list as to why it flopped but it really boiled down to two main points. One was software or lack thereof. If it was going to change the world, it would have been nice to actually do something with it. With a marketplace now focused on the painfully obvious lopsidedness of Apple vs Wintel software - this doesn't bode well as a case in point. The second point was tied into the affordability mission - which also was an excercise in abject failure. No one could. The universitites that signed on with theis enterprise were expecting a machine tailored for them that would be in the 3k ballpark, but as today's market shows, what they wanted by the time the computer was ready for delivery was a 1 thousand dollar one of those. Didn't matter anyway because the machine - configured to the point that you could actually use it - was in the area of 6500.00. To the commercial community, it was an even more grotesque picture. Like the Lisa, the cube was marketed at 10 thousand dollars, and even with the follow-ups you still saw average prices hovering around 7500, with the high-end shooting up to 15K - ala SGI price points. Problem with NeXTs, they weren't SGIs. SGI had a market and a niche that was addicted to their power regardless of the price. The NeXT was a sluggish Spruce Goose in comparison to anything touching these price levels. Worse, most of the market was gobbling up new cheap Macs, and of course Wintels. The NeXT was affordable only to those who could personally cost-justify computers that looked good but didn't do anything. Hmm., perhaps Steve was selling to his friends after all...

April 06
On to the next point in the mission statement of NeXT Inc., NeXT Computer Inc., NeXT Software Inc., Apple Computer Rhapsody. "To build a great company, so exciting and fullfilling that we can't wait to come to work in the morning". This one is interresting in that's it's fiarly fucked-up and distrubing. Making a company that is fullfilling - that's nice since there's no real joy in setting out to create a workplace that resembles hell - although whether that actually happens later is something I'll get to in a minute. No, it's that "morning" thing that makes me shiver. I've worked - and walked away from - plenty of places where if you have a life outside of work, you're not going to get anywhere in the company. That's because the people who run such enterprises are running a defecit in the same department - life. This isn't suprising for Steve Jobs though since at the age of 30, he was still living in an unfurnished house and didn't have a girlfriend - let alone a wife - at the time. This was mostly due to the fact that he lived for work alone. This habit of his, caused several people to end-up with divorces on the Macintosh team as people worked round the clock to stay up with the perverbial type-A personality of the biz second only to Bill Gates. At least Bill seems to prey on younger people for it's core audience which helps keep homlife tragedies from occuring on a regular basis - which was not only the status quo for Apple and the Mac group, but for NeXT as well. Here he actually had to deal - badly - with people who had lives. But in the core charter - we see how much value he was going to place on those lives as far as they existed outside of NeXT's walls. This wasn't just a scary aside in the middle of the mission statement, this was the red-flag for the ship of the damned, the gooship lifestyle with a crew that would mime Steve's loathing for anything that resembled the normal functions of the outside world. As for how effective this idea was, when it was put into practive, one only has to see how many people and respective lives NeXT and Steve Jobs' took down with him into the briney deep. Granted there were a lucky few including Tribble, who developed much of the core OS that is becoming Rhapsody, who bailed when the cracks in the bulkhead began to show. Others went to Microsoft, others even went back to Apple - noted by even Guy Kawasaki and the Macintosh Way in the footnote: "people went to NeXT to relive their childhood - then went back to Apple because childhood is overated". Just because I loathe Guy Kawasaki, doesn't mean I'm not well-read in his material. Hence the noteable irony which is now taking up two handicapped parking spaces at Apple right now. Steve Jobs.

April 07

Onward to part 3 of NeXT's mission statement and how reality and the marketplace fell short of it's goal - and how this bodes for Apple's and Rhapsody's future. "To treat our customers so well that they will love our products and our company". Well you're already bearing witness to one of their customer's take on how well they made their mark on this one already. I'm an owner of a 1991 circa mono NeXTstation w/laserprinter. How well was I treated? Well, to buy it I couldn't go to any store since BusinessLand had already folded because of internal and problems stemming with their relationship with NeXT. So with no storefront to call on, I had to deal with NeXT direct. Forget competitive or fair pricing. It was pretty much a single factory outlet affair with all the joy that comes from working with a company that didn't even have a customer service department. Just a bunch of unlucky boobs that sat in the field trying to find someone - anyone - who could find a use for black doorstops with Paul Rand logos on them. These guys were so starved for attention that they fell prey to the effects of isoloation and general wierdness that goes with it. Holding their own user group rallies - populated mostly with prospective customers as opposed to owners - and giving away tons of promotional material that were piling up around their offices whenever they made a sale because they couldn't find any other use for it. The best part of the buy - at the time I'd guessed - was getting a free mousepad, t-shirt, watch, drinking glasses, turtleneck shirt, and coffe-mug. Suddenly an otherwise normal workstation purchase, to do Adobe Illustrator work with at the 5K level - instead of Apple's Mac IIfx 10K level, began to uncomfortably resemble a purchase from the home shopping network, or worse, RONCO. As far as loving the product, it was solid enough, as long as you didn't need support. You weren't going to really get any. Which is really sad - considering that you needed to know UNIX to get anywhere with the stuff. The only people who got any support, were idiots who bought more than 50 of the buggers, and they needed support badly because none of the software they needed was available or was even out of alpha when they advertised such lines "the best computer for desktop publishing ever" and other horrible overhyped phrases otherwise known as barefaced lies. The other notable mention, is the fact that it's this approach that now relegates Apple users to habitual annoyance, now that their products aren't a major part of the landscape anymore. People loving products rather than people is pretty much the entire flavor and point of this site. To lampoon them is my mission statement, and with all the hate mail I get, the fool-baiting seems to be working. And if you don't believe me, just go to the letters section and read them there, or check out the BBBS area and see the rants for yourself. The sad fact is, this single part of the mission statement is the part of the equation that I loathe the most - the slimey practive of mid 80's evangelism that makes narry a difference between creating annoying televanglist followers, and people who wrap too much time and concern around computers -instead of just using the damn things and getting on with their lives. Problem is, with zelotry such as this being present in the goddamn mission statements of Steve Jobs, and his current title at Apple being the same as it was with NeXT, don't expect this crap to end anytime soon.

April 08

Part 4 of the mission statement and requiem for a nothingweight - NeXT Computer - now Apple/Rhapsody. It reads, " To lead the industry with vision and innovation". After seeing what I've seen, owned what I've owned, and worked where I worked with NeXT, you have to just quell the sudden urge to loose your Chinease/Peruvian lunch all over the carpet when you see the upshot of how far they came from even coming close to this goal. Man, if any of that crap was "vision" then they were more mypopic than your average bat. I mean let's take a look at some of the innovations NeXT introduced. With the NeXTcube it was an underpowered workstation that lacked a floppy drive - but held a slow and prone to breaking down optical drive that was the only way for a single-seat client to get data in and out of the machine. That was only one of the big reasons why no one - not even developers - could understand why they were forced to add nearly 150 dollars to every price tag, for every box of software they produced, just to get a disk in the box that the damn Cube could read from. Of course that wasn't really a problem, because until 1991, there really weren't any developers to worry about - because NeXT wasn't seeking out any software pubishers anyway. I mean get this - you've got a new non-standard OS and computer on the market. What do you do to get past the userbase/developer base chicken and egg syndrome? You sell the hell out of it. And for every developer you sign-on and support to the wall, you then go to their competitor and mention that their hated enemy is developing for your system, and get them to sign on next. What did NeXT do? Not a damn thing! In fact, they were only taking on developers - for the longest time - under the auspecies of "consideration". This kind of "vision" lead to the longest gap-time, of any software ever being deployed, for any computer or any OS in history. Even Atari didn't screw things up this bad with the ST. They pissed on Quark, they had to wet-nurse Adobe before they would even make a move, and they had to showcase WordPerfect as being a cool-product when it finally deployed in 91, while everyone else noticing that it was quickly fadding from the limelight in the after-burn glow of Microsoft Word and it's saturation of the office market. The developer sitiuation was so bad, that one mega-seat client - The William-Morris Agency - had to actually wait for one of NeXT's developers (all two programmers of it) to sit in WMA's offices and hammer out custom code - to make what NeXT promissed - work. In an age where current OS responsibilites are wrapped around turn-key solutions - NeXT's vision fell just a tad short of the mark that is expected from any technology that is supposed to actually have some kind of function or use. I refered to the "desktop publishing" thing earlier. The vision thing at work behind such tripe, was the idea that an esoteric bit of go nowhere technology from Adobe - Display Postscript, was supposed to create the ideal on screen environment for publishing. This was all in the face of reality that just demanded a suite of functional tools to actually get published material out the damn door. One such episode noted in the book "Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing" was a show down with a reseller in Minneapolis MN, that tried to get Target Co., on board with a full publishing system. At this time, such virgin turf was rare (1991/2) since most companies already had their publishing systems in place. Target was definetely a latecomer, but perfect if NeXT's vision held any water in the publishing market - or at least somehow jibed with their marketing material and hype. Well, surprise surprise, it didn't. Even a demo and tour of NeXT's offices in California coudln't shake the fact that a sorry-ass demo of FrameMaker coudn't touch the demontration they had aleady seen of Quark on the Mac. After hours of frustration - NeXT's own publishing guru couldn't even make a basic stab at Target's retail advertising trial. This wasn't vision - this was misplaced hype, misshandled developer relations fishing for something to make NeXT credible and innovative rather than functioncal, and a snide attitude that pretty much demolished NeXT's chances for ever becoming a tool that anyone could use. They wanted vision - and were going to wait for everyone to see it. Instead, they should have taken a moment to look around and see what the marketplace was doing with computers, and tried to make something usable that was better. Even a little better. By taking a left turn for some intangable and etherial goal, they fumbled the whole game before kick-off and got shut out of the industry. Forget corrective glasses for this vision - they needed a full-blown transplant of retinal material to see straight. Fact is they never did, and no one saw any reason to buy into the product - let alone develop for it.

April 09

I've addressed a lot of the gaps that reflected just how badly NeXT fell short of it's own goals at the outset of it's enterprise and birth onto the computer scene. But there's one reason why all of these various goals failed so badly. Not only one reason, but one person in fact. Steve Jobs. Yes, he often shows up too many times in my columns, but he's really the single most responsible name for all the mistakes and the general failure in logic behind each and every aspect of NeXT's collapse in the marketplace. It all boils down to micromangement. Steve's a control freak - I mean a major fucking control freak of unknown bounderies and proportions. Here's a little story for you to get just a peek at what I've personally experienced with Steve. I was sitting at a reseller of NeXTtech, about 1500 miles from the action, and the company - NeXT. Everytime we'd send out PR material or ads about new software that we found in Europe for distribution, there was usually a round of e-mail from NeXT - sometimes from Steve Jobs about what we were doing. This isn't too odd because, since hardly anyone was doing anything with NeXT, we weren't exactly covert. What blew my mind was how much we were obviously taking up Steve's. This on-again off-again show continued for a couple of years until I - as a lark - considered working for NeXT as a designer/art director. During an over the phone interview, I asked a loaded question - "what is the single most frustrating factor that sometimes creates pressure on projects as they make their way to deadline". This is a trick of mine that sometimes reveals any weaknesses in any office, and allows me to come in with my feet on the ground to potential red-flag siutuations, as well as get a feel for the politics and general bullshit. I swear I am quoting verbattem and am not making this up - the reply? "Steve". Steve Jobs I asked? "Yes". The example that followed surrounded some marketing marterial of brochure low-level nature that wasn't really important or earth shaking, that was already sent to press and was in the process of being produced. The problem? Someone left the layout on a desk in plain sight. Big mistake. Steve saw it, wanted a color change for no real apperent reason, and they had to cancel the production run, make changes and re-order it again. Big dollar fuck-up if I, or any designer worth his salt, pulled such a stunt. At NeXT- this was just the lay of the land. "We pretty much don't leave things lying around anymore and are pretty tidy with our desks" was the end quote of the interview. I was blown away and dropped the idea of working for NeXT entirely. I should have seen it coming, since I'd heard stories of BusinessLand stores having to remove expensive signage, advertising NeXT computers, because Steve saw them and didn't like them. I mean talk about anal and micro-managed - you'd think the CEO of a failing enterprise would have his hands full with other things to do. The fact is, I pick on Steve and NeXT, because they show just how low-level and into everything Steve is. The fact that NeXT seemed to go wrong in every respect, is because in almost every case - Steve had his hands where they didn't belong and was jerking the company into the ground. Forget pricey equipment. Forget mishandled PR and advertising. Forget flopped developer relations. Forget mistake after mistake after mistake. Because for each and every one of them, there was a single name at the bottem of the POs, emails and memos. Steve Jobs. Now that he's back at Apple don't you feel better?

April 10

Fallout - or the end sum of all of the above for NeXT, and it's users. Well, the closure for me was briefly jumping on board with a NeXT vendor that was still cramming NeXTstep onto Intel boxes and laptops - while trying to explain to customers what the hell WebObjects was - while failing at each and every turn. It took a whole month to realize that this was bullshit and I bailed to greener pastures. But not before handing a friend (a former co-worker) to my lawyer for him to incorperate and sell used NeXT machines to people that were twisting in the wind for support and parts. The endgame for me was driving 80 or so NeXTstations from Wiltel of Houston TX, back to Denver in a rental truck for shipment to Hawaii, and eventually, to a consortium of desperate people in Japan who were invested up to their eyeballs in a looser of a machine that hadn't been made in 3 years and needed parts badly. So badly they would end up paying full-retail for stuff that was US junk with pennies on the dollar on the aquisiiton end. That was the last thing I had to do with NeXT, shortly before I packed my own NeXTstation up and put it into storage in favor or an IBM Thinkpad - all after unloading my Apple which had similar doomsday overtones written all over it. My stuff got paid off, and I was compensated for my role, in cash, as driver for my Sanford and Son role with NeXT. For others it wasn't pretty. When the bomb dropped in 1993, the timing couldn't have been worse. Inside story time. In 1992, Alembic Systems had some choice inside sales ready to deploy to the goverment that was the only real large scale buyer of the tech - for whatever reason. Lord knows, don't ask me about logic and the government. Anyway, they were all set to go - with orders out the ass to agencies that "sounded" like the CIA (we never knew for sure), the AFDI, and other branches. We had a training center, test bed, the whole works. I was just a marketing and ad boob that knew what "NeXT" even meant. That was enough to get me involved. They rolled out their office lease in Jan. 93. In Feb 93, they stopped making the computer they were supposed to sell. Dammage control time for Alembic - bigtime. It was even worse for everyone else, because NeXT was in such sorry-ass shape, they didn't even have another product for sale until that spring - NeXTstep for Intel. By the time it actually shipped - everyone who supported them was dead, dying, or getting out of the business. The NeXTworld Expo 93 wasn't an expo as much as a delluisional wake for a corpse of a platform that never sold more than 50 thousand (disclosed) units. Of course there was one person who was happy there - Steve Jobs. He went on to say - on stage - and later in UnixWorld Magazine, that he was the last choice for users apart from Windows NT, ignoring Solaris, Apple, SGI and others. By the time the Stone Design Software Rave party was over, it was pretty much over for NeXT as far as any developer worth his salt. NeXT pretty much disapeared from the radar, trying to define why the software that previously ran on hardware no one wanted, actually could still sell in a market that no longer was even sure they were in business. How in the hell they got capital from Sun and Microsoft to stay in business after Canon and Ross Perot bailed from the investor's list is pretty much guesswork outside of Steve Jobs and his RDF. It's interresting that Microsoft was one of the last investors in NeXT and one of the first investors with Apple when Steve changed labels. Why he got 400 million for the process is even more bizzare as far as evaluations went, since they never showed anything more than a loss on the bottem-line as far as anyone really knew - since they were a private firm, never announced profitability and didn't have to file numbers with the SEC. In spite of all this, the developer base for Rhapsody as it stands as far as former NeXT vets is in the single digits, and why they stayed on, is only a bag of theories wrapped around dellusion and the depths of holes previously dug. Everyone that wasn't burned to the ground with NeXT tech - dumped it. And every developer who was sane, or otherwise still in buiness, went on to greener pastures. It's been 5 years since the tech was even made so now that the tax write-off and replacement curve is done, it's ironic that NeXT is gone as well. Now it's just a battered ball of code for Apple to play with - but that's another story.

April 11

The new NeXT - Apple Computer Inc., and why it's irony and deja-vu all over again with Nixon at the helm. If what has gone on with Apple and NeXT in the last 1.5 years, had been told to me in 1994, I would have reached slowly for the nearest phone - and called the booby hatch on your behalf - for people in white coats to make a pick-up. The buyout price - which I mentioned yesterday (400 mill) - isn't as much an evaluation of net-worth as much as assumed debt and legal liability. After 250 million dollars of burn through from major investors - conservative estimate - there was plenty of pipers to pay for all the dammage. Then there was Steve Jobs to pay off, in the most bizzare changing of the guard in CEO history. The later of the two stories regarding this, is awaiting pickup at the Tattered Cover bookstore. The upshot being, what created the biggest trail of decimation and destruction in the history of the computer industry, is now at Apple, and the singlemost person responsible for this mess is head of the ship. Now you know why - in spite of his PR and figurehead status - why I'm so certain what's in store for Apple. At least sure enough to make a website about it. I mean come on. I've not only had a front row seat to the whole NeXT debacle, I've been in the pit with the traders and the lions. If NeXTtech, Steve Jobs and Rhapsody is the future for Apple, then you don't have to reach as far as the Sex Pistols for your answer. There isn't one, and the road to it isn't going to be pretty. As far as for those who constantly talk about Rhapsody as being the greatest thing that I "just don't get" I'd have to question how much you know about the source of this wonderful product - and more importantly - why the hell didn't you "get it" when it was around for nearly a decade? It should probably be reasked why didn't anyone else "get it" during that decade? The answer for all of the above is going to be given in the form of a question. What are the odds that in the face of solid NT installations that anyone is going to "get it", suddenly turn to Rhapsody in droves when; there's no support comparable to anyone else in the industry remaining at Apple for high seat clients, there's no software in final and usable form - otherwise known as funtional license seats - accompanying it, no real historical evidence that there's going to be any response in the market after a decade of all walks of people - customer and developer alike, and not even Steve Jobs himself will go on record as to what the hell is going on with Rhapsody publically - outside of esoteric developer circles? Does everyone "get it" now?