[rescue] Apple WWDC Summary

[Phil Stracchino]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 01:06:04PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> On Tuesday, June 24, 2003, at 12:35 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> >(And it took Apple *how* many years longer than the PC world to 
> >discover SCSI-II?  And then Wide SCSI?  But that's another issue.)
> 
>   I haven't paid much attention to this thread, so forgive me if I'm 
> missing your point...but...I sure hope this is sarcasm.  If not, you're 
> woefully misinformed.

I beg to differ.  I was using SCSI-II in my PCs when brand-new Macs were
still shipping with 5MB/s narrow SCSI-1, and I was using Fast Wide for
LONG after Macs still supported only 10MB/s narrow SCSI-II onboard from
the factory.  (Third-party add-in controllers don't count, I'm talking
about factory SCSI support in SCSI-based machines.)

Fact is, for a long time, Apple was selling basically architecturally
inferior machines, and trading on their name and the fact that they had
graphic-arts and multimedia folks conditioned to think "Must use Mac,
must use Mac" to maintain their sales.  (Of course, it helped that most
of the graphic-arts and multimedia software was available only on Macs
or was available for Windows only in much inferior ports ...  there was
a nice little feedback circle, where the graphics folks would only use
Macs because Macs were what they'd been told were better and Macs were
what the software ran on, and the software mostly ran only on Macs
because the graphics folks only used Macs.)

The poor price-performance point of the factory Macs was one of the
reasons they never penetrated far into mainstream business markets --
the other being that, with the exception of the brief flirting before
Steve Jobs returned, Apple has always refused to allow the existence of
a second source, and the business world is uncomfortable with
single-sourced key suppliers.  The company I went to work for in 1995
switched from all Macs to mostly PCs because people were tired of a
recalculation on an Excel spreadsheet taking 20 minutes on the
fastest-then-available factory Macs when the same recalculation on the
same spreadsheet took 2 minutes on a commodity PC.

During the short period when Apple allowed third-party manufacturers to
produce Macs, the "cloners" were turning out machines significantly
superior to Apple's own that offered more bang for the buck, and
business penetration of Macs was starting to climb now that there were
multiple sources.  Of course, the first thing Steve Jobs did when he
came back was pull the plug on that, and the second thing he did was to
have MacOS 7.7 renamed to MacOS 8 to get out of the licensing agreements
that guaranteed the cloners access to all future releases of MacOS 7
(just like Microsoft took Win95 OSR3.0 and renamed it Windows 98 to
evade the stupidly-narrow language of the DoJ consent decree).

I know you detest and despise x86 PCs, but please don't allow that to
lead you into thinking that anything that's not an x86 PC must
automatically and necessarily be better.


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