One of the premier examples of the extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit in the United States, Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. has just sadly stepped down as its CEO yesterday. An original founder of Apple Computer in 1976 (see Apple Computer.), who pioneered the Apple 1 computer kit, the Apple II, and the Macintosh with its innovative Graphical User Interface (GUI). Jobs was ousted in 1984 and went on to found NeXT Computer (see NeXT Computer) with enormous financial backing ... including Warren Buffet.
The 1986-released NeXT computer was not a commercial success, primarily, in my opinion, because it did not include a floppy disc drive. Steve Jobs, in his typical visionary way, was years ahead of his time, substituting an early version of a CD-RAM for both a mass storage device and input/output (I/O) device. This was one of the few mistakes Jobs ever made in his technical career ... primarily because it became difficult (and expensive) to move data and applications from the rest of cyberspace onto the NeXT computer and the data-access rates of this device were snail-slow. Today, 25 years later, CD-RAMs are often the primary hardware I/O devices on personal computers ... and mass data storage is rapidly moving off of its miniature hard discs and onto static-RAM memory (such as flash drives). Here, Steve was just a few years too soon.
But Jobs can easily be forgiven this one technical hiccup for, after returning to Apple in 1997, he went on to lead the creation of the IPod, the IMac, the IPhone, and the IPad (with its GUI on steroids) which have fostered enormous worldwide markets for American technology. Even the Apple Store is a technology marketing innovation which can be partially attributed to Jobs.
Now, Steve Jobs is leaving and the future of Apple Inc. is in question. One has to echo all the kudoes being lavished on Steve Jobs. In fact, they may not be lauditory enough. So, when The Barry gives his early September address to the nation with the shibolith "jobs, jobs, jobs," my mind will certainly wander to that health-plagued founder of Apple.
5 comments:
IMHO You would have been better off if you had never heard of Steve Jobs. If Muse had been originally written for PC instead of Mac you would be a rich man today.
The aside on NeXT is a bit bland. NeXT IMHO was Steve unleashing his creativity without boundaries. The technologies that it created laid the foundation for Pixar, his wildly successful animated graphics company, and for the enhanced OS in the Macs today.
What I find most remarkable is the business story of being the founder that is ousted by the team, then watching a parade (Sculley, the snackfood peddler; Gassee, the colorful Frenchman; “The Diesel”, the German (what was his name?)) of wanna-bes set the stage for Steve proving that, yes, it is Steve that makes the difference. While they were floundering, Steve was making even greater technology.
A few other tidbits:
- Just as you say about CD-ROMs in the NeXT, Steve took a gambit at having the graphical Mac output to a Postscript printer… the dawning of desktop publishing.
- Steve always pushed a product to be great before it was good enough to offer to the world. It was maddening for developers to have a really good product unreleased because it was not yet great. When it was released, it did not have to retrench to get it right.
- Steve’s greatest team skill was delivering the end-to-end experience. Where Microsoft or HP would release something noting that content providers would fill the voids, Steve would enforce the distribution mechanisms so that royalties were provided to creative people. Drove some people crazy but it was a good thing.
That’s all for now!
You got it right!
The winning formula for developers of apps - 70% to the developer! Unheard of prior to that time. When the stores were first opened, Dell was just closing it's stores it struggled with for several years. People thought he was nuts. Now a store, on average, grosses about the same as a Macy's store!! Go figure. Purchasers not only walk away with product, they return for training (some free, some at a nominal charge), and if they need to speak to a technical person and can have the machine diagnosed and fixed there.... where else does a manufacturer do that?
Unique.
One more thing....
Great product lines...
An Apple Store Employee
BTW, a strange vibe happens if you go to an Apple store then an ATT store then a Verizon store. It’s about people. In each case, ask questions that only a bit obscure like “How many times can I burn music I purchase on to media?” The Apple guys have the answer or get the answer. They are smart, don’t brush things off, don’t make things up, and don’t lie. The other retailers are just peddling a SKU…
Den, your statement is wildly simplistic. Jobs left Apple in 1985. MUSE was developed on the Mac five years later (1990-1993) which was years before Steve returned to Apple. 1990-1997 was a lost period in hardware. Mainframes were dinosaurs, the capability of minicomputers was stagnating, microcumputers were epanding dramatically, clearly destined to put a mainframe on every desk. MUSE needed a lot of horsepower. GWP jumped on the first capable looking horse. Internet resource scalability was a few years away.
GWP went with Apple because Jean-Louis Gassee introduced a reasonably priced 32-bit color box that was fast and tightly integrated.If George Senior were a Jobs zealot, MUSE might have been on the NeXT machine. Which actually would have been quite cool. In fact, Lotus made a contender, Improv, originally on the NeXT and then ported it to Windows. Both faded away.
Also, MUSE had fans at Apple on the board, in the company, evangalizing, promoting. Microsoft was a really different climate. They didn't really support anyone. I was at a Paul Allen company where, in its final days, he and his henchmen were just brutal.
The real contender in the evololution of analytical visualization was Brio Technologies. Their DataPivot gained exposure through Microsoft's Pivot Table and Borland's Quattro Pro. Their subsequent acquisition by Hyperion got them focused and their product evolved into Essbase, later acquired by Oracle. I imagine their founders did well.
What was different? IMHO MUSE had many compelling features (combinatorial units of measure, natural language queries, currencies) that made great demos but missed a few basic Fortune 1000 requirements: (1) reducing queries into SQL-92, (2) reading directly from datasources like RDBMS brands and spreadsheets, (3) handling unbalanced data sets, (4) enabling a server/client model so that analytics could be run by business analysts on the server, and clients could read them quickly onto different platforms (granted this was before the birth of the browser.), and, in the end, (5) not enough defensible patents to draw sustenance from some of the features competitors later just scraped up while "innovating."
See http://www.tableausoftware.com to see what data analytics looks like today.
BTW, Den, if you you had bought $60 thousand of Apple 8 years ago, you'd have $4 million.
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