Ex-Apple employee says company a 'failure'

[Nomad559]

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2003/09/12/appleemp... /

Michael Mace, once a marketing director at Apple, says that overall, Apple Computer has been a "massive failure." Instead of changing the world from "bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates," Apple today is "the eccentric elderly uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer truly powerful," he writes in an open letter to the Apple Computer History Weblog.


http://apple.computerhistory.org/stories/storyReader$72

[BiggJawn]

1. For a "Massive Failure", they sure rake in a lot of Coin...

"Michael Mace, 'ONCE' a marketing director at Apple..."

Yeah, I can say bad shit about people who've fired me, too...

[myomy]

14. Right, sounds like a good fit at Microsoft.

.

[dani]

2. I agree with

some of Mace's criticisms; I think he comes across overly harshly in order to drive a point through. But here's the rejoinder (from Jim Armstrong) I like:
"Apple changed the world, and not in a little way. It changed publishing industry forever... It changed the music industry, the film industry and the video industry. Forever. It influenced in the past and is even now influencing Microsoft and the World Wide Web. "

[NashVegas]

3. Heaven Forbid a Marketing Person Should Feel Stymied

Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent? Kaleida? Jaguar ? OpenDoc?

I remember when OpenDoc came out and we were told it was going to be revolutionary. Sadly, marketing failed to explain exactly what it was, or, IIRC, made a big deal over nothing.

The #1 reason Microsoft is where it is is due to marketing.

[alfredo]

7. Jaguar is not a failure, I am using it and feel it is the best OS

out there.

OpenDoc was revolutionary, but it was a memory hog.

Read this
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/09/12/36OPconnectio...

[NashVegas]

10. It Was a Different Jaguar He Was Referring to

Sorry, didn't post that part of the article.

[DS1]

4. They got rid of him in order to expand beyond

100 employees, is most likely what happened.

ex-Marketing, oooh, there's an unbiased opinion.

[liberalitch]

5. Apple?

I'm sitting in front of one... right now!
Plus... due the dedication to education that apple has.... Hampton city schools has the best technology (available to students and teachers) of all of the divisions in SE Va.

[Deja Q]

6. Yipes!

Well, 12 years ago I thought PCs were generic crap and stuck with the Commodore Amiga. But one day I realized that open-architecture offers freedom and flexibility and easier ways to upgrade. Of course, Commodore's marketing department was crap and it took me a while to forgive the crappy Intel processor, if only IBM had used the Motorola 68000... Dunno why this Mace chap is having such a whinge on "bad computer design" though... overall, the open architecture concept is what helped make PCs standardized. Apple prefered its Monarchy approach...

Apple is the elderly uncle, crippled and senile. Instead of making their design open-architecture, they told the clone makers to "fuck off". (note that Palm Corp had the right idea by inviting other folks to use their OS, hmmmmmmmm...) This is a clear example of Apple HAVING BAD COMPUTER DESIGN WITH STIFLING CORPORATE DICTATES, the very thing he was under the illusion of trying to change!!!

Apple only had a temporary resurgence because of a novel case design, proving the consumer public is truly stupid. "Cool, what color?" became the mantra for the masses who wanted to buy a computer in 2000. :shaking head in shame: (there's a great episode of "Married with Children" which neatly demonstrates this, and it was made in 1987... Who cares if a $600 PC was more powerful, that $1200 iMac was a pretty shade of blue.

Meanwhile, over the years, Macs became less powerful yet had cost the same. SCSI disappeared one day, yet prices did not drop. In their TOTL G4 system just before the G5 came out, it had cost $2000, had 256MB of RAM (pitiful for that price), and fedatured only a Radeon 9000 video subsystem - which was outdated at the time as the NVidia GeForce 4600 card could wipe up the floor with it. Even today's TOTL G5 box has only 512MB and uses a wussy Radeon 9600 and costs $3000! If Apple respected its customers, they would have used a Radeon 9800 (but I'd still prefer the Nvidia Geforce 5900 FX Ultra) and added 1GB of RAM to sweeten the pot. Okay, so the G5 CPU is powerful - more powerfyl than the P4. No argument there. But Apple keeps shaving away at peripheral components yet not shaving away at price.

And when people see they can get a damn decent PC box for $700 whose non-CPU components outperform that $3000 Mac, guess which one they'll buy? XP is stable, and Linux is more stable and costs a lot less! (I dunno CPU performance comparisons between the Athlon 3200+ XP CPU compared to the TOTL G5, but if the cost difference for the whole computer is over $2000 yet whose peripherals are more powerful, I know where I'd turn. So would most other people. $2000 for slightly extra CPU oompf just isn't worth it, not in this economy.)

Apple is toast. They brought it upon themselves, unfortunately. Had they opened up their technology and licensed it, things would be a lot different in 2003.

The next step in evolution is Linux on a PC. "Lintel" if you must call it that, though I prefer Linamd...

[alfredo]

8. Let's see, I am running X11 on OSX, got gnome, I do

web development on Bluefish, got all the UNIX apps I need for free using the Deb package manager. I am getting all the benefits of UNIX/Linux along with the great Aqua interface.

I cannot remember the last time it Crashed on me, it may have been back in the days of 10.0.

You need to do some studying on the new G5's. If they were not up to snuff Virginia Tech would not have purchase 1,100 of them for their cluster.

No MSBlaster here.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/09/12/36OPconnectio...

People have been saying that Apple is going out of business for as long as I remember, but they are still there, they have over $4 billion cash on hand, much more than Gateway.

Apple is not looking to be like Microsoft. They want to be the best in their market, and that is the home user and the content creators.

Check out Final Cut Pro and you will see what Apple is all about.

http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro /
http://www.apple.com/shake /
http://www.apple.com/software/pro/logic /



Why run a 4gig processor when intelligent design can get the same performance out of 2gigs.

BTW, open up a G5 then open up a PC, look at the difference.

[billbuckhead]

9. Actually Apple is the only profitable computer maker besides Dell

Everyone else loses money selling computers even HP and Sony. Gateway is staying in business by reselling TV's! There's always room out there for for selling a quality high end product. Just ask BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, Audi.........well you get the idea.

[GCP]

11. XP Is stable?? WTF??

How many patches have you needed to make it "work"?

XP is a bunch of crap, it made me turn back to Apple because I was sick of the constant crashes.

[BlueJazz]

12. Apple's claim that they have the worlds fastest computer...

....is not recognized by several experts, one of them being here:

http://spl.haxial.com/apple-powermac-G5 /

As to the fact that a G5 is built better than a pc....Well, yeah...
a G5 at $3,000.00 IS built better than your average PC which is around $950.00.

Take apart an IBM Infinity Server that sells for about the same price as a G5 and tell me that crap....

I get a little tired of people crowing how much better a Mac is compared to a standard Pc. I put this "bragging" on about the same level as an Audi owner bragging to an owner of a Ford Focus how much better their car is...Duh!!

I'd like to see Apple start making Mac's that sell for $449.00 at
Best Buy and see how well they run....

[alfredo]

13. Apple does not want to become a commodity. Now they do have machines

that start at $799, the eMac. My wife has one and it is bulletproof. She is a gamer so she puts it under a lot of stress and banging around. Not a lick of trouble, it has never crashed. The games have, but never the computer.

Apple was smart, they knew they could not compete with the beige bargain boxes, so they went the other direction. their offered software is tops. Ask anyone who has used both iMovie and the MS clone they offer.

BTW, the $3,000 dollar computer is a Dual Processor, 64bit monster. the low end 1.6gig single is built just as well as the TOTL dual workstation.

Look at their Xserve, it is making waves in the server market. It competes on price/perfomance, and kicks ass in usability, maintenance, and licensing. Oh and it also uses less energy, a factor when you are running a render farm.

Also PC Magazine named Apples OSX server the best server software on the market.

BTW, the consumer models are the iMac, iBook, and the eMac. the G5's are for professionals and other power users. They are professional workstations. the price reflects that. compare to Sun and SGI workstations