On 10/6/2011 12:04 AM, Joseph McAllister wrote:
On Oct 5, 2011, at 20:00 , P. J. Alling wrote:
When he stepped down from the CEO spot, I expected him to suffer from a long
lingering illness, I guess he'd already been through the long lingering part.
On 10/5/2011 8:07 PM, Rob Studdert wrote:
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs dead
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-06/hold-hold-steve-jobs-dead/3317496
I think Apple will miss him greatly. In my mind, the rollout yesterday
(Tuesday) of the new iPhone that was NOT the iPhone 5 felt like the air being
let out of the company's futuristic technicality. Then the next day Steve dies!
Something going on there in the corporate Karma department.
It seems that what Apple has always demonstrated was the difference
between products that were designed to please one person in particular,
and products designed by a committee that were designed to offend as few
people as possible. Love them, or hate them, you had strong feelings
about them.
I don't think that I have ever used an Apple II. When I was in high
school the only computers anyone I knew had were TRS-80s and Commodore
Pets. Most of my actual computer experience was on the PDP-8s at UCSC. I
think that the Apple II came out when I was at college and had other
things to occupy my time, such as an Engineering degree, my first sports
cars (Sprites) and my first real girlfriends.
When the Mac came out, at work we had a variety of computers, each with
a different keyboard, with the backspace key in a different spot on
every one of them. However, on every one of them, CTRL-H would work as
backspace. Sometime around '84 or '85 I was throwing a party, and having
heard of the wonderful things you could do with a Mac, I wanted to write
up the invitation on it, using the fancy fonts and all of those good
things. That evening was probably my most unpleasant computer user
interface experience ever. The software was completely counter
intuitive, the keyboard didn't even have a control key, and when I did
print out the invitations, using the fancy font, they looked pretty crappy.
It seemed to me that until about the time that OSX came out, MacOS kept
just a couple years ahead of the software required to run it
comfortably. When I had a laptop stolen from my home, as long as State
Farm was buying a functional equivalent, I decided to have them buy me a
12"G4 powerbook, rather than another super portable Linux box. There
were many things that I absolutely loved, and still do, about that
computer, and quite a few that drove me to distraction with
frustration. The things that worked, just worked. The things that
didn't work for me, never would.
The gui is still bizarre in many ways, but at least you can call up a
terminal and get to a bash prompt, for when you need to get real work
done. And, I'll give them this, at least the gui is consistent. Once you
know how to do some basic things in one program, they'll pretty much
work the same anyplace else. Which is a good thing, because the
macintologist party line that everything is blissfully intuitive is
reflected by documentation that seems to set industry standards for
uselessness. I've been using a mac for my primary photography, and then
web browsing, computer for nearly four years, and have gotten to know
the UI well enough to feel that the only thing worse than the UI on the
Mac is the UI on everything else. It seems that every time I upgrade a
linux box, they throw more bells and whistle in the gui making it
flashier, prettier and harder to actually get anything done. I'm
currently working on an XP box, and it's sole redeeming feature is that
it's actually possible to correct many of it's faults by downloading
various third party programs.
I think that history will most remember Jobs for the iOS family of
devices. He created new markets by making the company build toys that
he wanted to play with. If you shared his aesthetic, they were
technological perfection incarnate. If you just wanted shiny toys, that
did cool things, they were slick, pretty, and were easy to make do cool
things. He understood that giving people choices made products harder
to learn, harder to support, and would cause people's brains to freeze
in indecision.
Apple was not the first company to rise to greatness on the vision of
one, or two people. Honda, Ferrari and HP immediately come to my mind
And while those companies survived the loss of the guiding vision at the
top, I'm afraid that Apple will also lose a lot of what made it special.
On the other hand, the sharpest of you in the PDML could apply for the recent
opening on the Board of Directors at Apple.
The sharpest of the PDML, are probably smart enough to avoid trying.
Joseph McAllister
[email protected]
http://gallery.me.com/jomac
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Larry Colen [email protected] (from dos4est)
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