Guy’s piece this week — Apple should (snicker) license to Dell? — is a timely reminder of the disconnect between what the business press says about Apple Computer and what actually ends up happening. Industry analysts seem to have a love/hate relationship with Apple. On the one hand, their praise for innovative design is often gushing, but on the other hand they criticize Apple for making any number of wrong decisions. Partly, this comes from attempts to answer one basic question: if the Macintosh operating system is so good, then why does almost everyone with a personal computer use Windows?
The answer usually ends up being framed around the paths not taken by the Apple board of directors. From not licensing the operating system through to charging too much for their hardware, Apple is often portrayed as the company that snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. To a significant degree, it is argued, the only reason Microsoft Windows was able to establish itself was that Apple failed to sell its product to those users crying out for inexpensive but easy to use personal computers. By not licensing the operating system to third party manufacturers, the cost of a Macintosh computer remained high, and the vast majority of personal computer users simply opted for the cheaper, if less sophisticated, Windows operating system.
By the early 1990s, Windows 3.1 had essentially become the standard graphical user interface for desktop computers. The Mac OS may have benefitted from a decade of development, but for most people, most of the time, Windows worked just fine. Instead of being the darling of the computer industry, Apple was viewed as a company that was well past its prime, essentially with one foot in the grave and another on a banana peel. Whenever Apple made it into the news, it was invariably described as “troubled”, “ailing”, or “beleagured”.
Of course, we now know things turned out alright in the end, but until the arrival of the iMac, the 1990s were a real low-point for Apple. Bad news was leapt on my journalists anxious to be the ones to announce the final demise of the company, and no-one seemed interested in reporting what Apple got right. Pundits were often to be heard voicing their opinions on which company would buy Apple and why the company was doomed. Instead, Mac users got used to being thought of as crazies paying for over-priced hardware and non-standard software.
But were the 1990s really as bad as all that?
What’s often overlooked by Mac users and industry analysts alike is that much of what’s right about Apple Computer now is drawn from changes that were made ten to fifteen years ago. It’s easy to draw Steve Jobs as the white knight who rescued Apple from incompetent CEOs like Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio, but that version of the story isn’t exactly accurate. So to balance the scores a little, let’s take a look at what Apple might have got right during the dark days of the early to mid 1990s.
1. Learning to engineer smooth hardware transitions
Ditching the Motorola 68000-series processors was essential. They weren’t going anywhere in terms of speed, and there was no way they were going to keep up with the new Intel ‘Pentium’ processors. Instead, Apple made the decision to use PowerPC processors larged based on ones developed by IBM known as POWER processors. Motorola would remain in the picture though, as the main manufacturer of the chips. Apple’s main problem was finding a way to transition the Macintosh user base from the old chips the new ones.
Since the two chips worked in completely different ways, software that ran on one chip couldn’t run on the other. In theory, anyone who bought a new PowerPC Macintosh would also need to buy a whole library of new software: operating system, printer drivers, applications, networking software, the lot. Instead, Apple designed a way for the new PowerPC computers to emulate computers with a 68000-series processor. While there was a slight loss of speed when emulating hardware in this way, the greater speed of the PowerPC machines largely offset that, so that even running non-PowerPC software these new computers felt fast. The emulation was remarkably good, and very few mainstream programs ‘broke’. What’s often ignored is that just as important as making the hardware work was encouraging software developers to create PowerPC applications.
Zooming forward to the present, there’s no question that the lessons learned by Apple during the PowerPC transition have held the company in good stead through the Mac OS 9 to OS X phase and the hardware transition from PowerPC to Intel.
2. Reduce costs and raise profit margins
Apple Computer isn’t a social movement or artistic philosophy, though it often feels like one, it’s a company. What matters is that it makes money, and during the early 1990s, Apple seemed very bad at making money. The board turned to Gil Amelio, widely credited with having saved at least one big American company, National Semiconductor, from doom. Amelio found that while Apple’s immediate problem was a lack of cash thanks to poor sales, the cause of its woes lay in the way the business was run. There was no overall strategy, and creative talent was being dissipated on any number of projects, many of which were either peripheral to Apple’s core business or else important but so far behind schedule as to be of no short-term use at all.
Amelio implemented a large number of changes, many of which were painful for the company. Manufacturing was shifted from the US and Europe to the Far East where labour costs were much lower. The innovative new operating system at the time being worked on, Copeland, was dropped in favour of simpler but deliverable updates to the classic Mac operating system. Perhaps the biggest change in culture was the licensing of Macintosh clones, something that had started off in a modest way under Amelio’s predecessor, Michael Spindler. Amelio hoped that by farming off the low-end marked to the clone manufacturers, Apple could concentrate on the more profitable middle and high-end markets, while still receiving their license fee on every clone sold. While Apple’s middle and high-end machines certainly did get better, the clones decided to embrace those parts of the market as well, so it is debatable whether licensing the Mac OS did any good at all. But by trying it out at least, Apple perhaps understands its situation much more clearly: it isn’t just a software company that happens to make hardware, as some industry commentators like to suggest. Selling the Mac OS X operating system to any manufacturer of personal computers may be technically possible, but it is the unity of hardware and software that makes a Macintosh a Mac, and for that, Apple needs to stay in control.
3. Innovate, but don’t be afraid to dump what doesn’t work
Throughout the 90s, Apple created all kinds of new technologies, some of which worked well and continue to influence the modern Mac, but others turned out to be dead-ends. The iMac, for example, was perhaps the biggest innovation of the 1990s, re-defining the way a computer looks and how it is sold. But even before the iMac, there are many familiar Macintosh features that have their origins in the 1990s, such as ColorSync, drag-and-drop, Sherlock, and QuickTime. On the other hand, there are plenty of things that seemed promising but came to naught: OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, Publish and Subscribe, and especially the operating system overhauls such as Gershwin, Copeland, and Taligent. A few technologies were too little, too late, like eWorld, while others died but not in vain, with elements of their design turning up in unexpected ways. Apple’s handheld device, Newton, was killed off in 1998, but some of its technology ended up being used in the iPod.
In computing, innovation is everything, but just as important is being able to cut your losses when new techologies don’t deliver. Sometimes this means abandoning technologies that don’t work (like Copeland) or are functional but peripheral to what you company is trying to do (as was the case with Newton). At other times, it means jumping ship not because the technology isn’t good, but because it is holding back the development of everything else (the switch from OS 9 to OS X exemplifies this perfectly). Perhaps the most radical change with Apple since the early 1990s in this regard is that it happily brings in new technologies where its own aren’t working. So OS X is based on NeXT and BSD operating systems, the Safari browser on KHTML, iChat on AOL Instant Messenger, and Mail on NeXTMail.
To summarise: as bad as the 1990s were for Apple, the culture change that occurred then was central to the success of the company today. For the long-time Mac users among us who remember those days, they may have been difficult, but they helped to make the Macintosh what it is today.
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