On Aug 21, 2004, at 6:41 AM, Philip Stortz wrote:
i've wondered about that before myself. it's not normally how they would do things
Interesting, One should also mention the incredible fact that IBM actually "allowed" a young
"nobody" named Bill Gates to provide and own their "new" personal computer operating system.
It makes one wonder about the level of corporate responsibility? :-)
Actually, even at the time, Bill Gates was hardly a 'nobody'; his company was providing BASIC for virtually every personal computer in production. This was, however his first operating system sale. (although he allegedly told the IBM execs that his software ran the elevator systems in their building.)
Also, the PC was a 'guerilla' project within IBM, much like the later Mac project became in Apple (I suspect Steve Jobs learned a lot from the IBM PC project); everything they did was different from the way IBM did things.
Finally, there was NO standard at the time for small systems OS'es. CP/M (of which Seattle DOS, which MS bought and turned into MS-DOS, was a variant) was the closest thing to a standard, but every implementation was slightly different. In fact, IBM actually expected to sell more PC's with CP/M than MS-DOS initially.
You had the actual dominant computer OS'es, which were the Apple II, Commodore VIC-20, TRS-80 and Atari systems. All shared some features in common, but they were all not directly compatible. The most popular software of the day, VisiCalc, ran on Apple II's. People who had never considered buying a computer were buying Apple II's as 'VisiCalc machines'. (A friends first Apple II had the Visicalc top bar and first 20 row numbers burned into the monochrome green monitor so severely you could see them when it was off.)
This fragmentation is one reason IBM was wary of entering the personal computer market; they'd actually never had to deal with significant competition before. (EDS, for all the business it took from them was still a gigantic IBM customer...all that timesharing had to be done on someone's mainframe!)
Despite their name and reputation, they were entirely unsure how to integrate small systems that were sold, not leased, and that ran software other than what IBM provided into their product mix. Another atypical example of a behemoth company doing something out of the ordinary.
Of course, what we're discussing here are the successes of such strategies. History is littered with the expensive failures produced by companies trying to replicate these sorts of successes. You cannot define business success by the business model. You need good people, a good idea and the right environment of market demand, promotion and insight into what people want before they want it.
Some companies do it once or twice. Xerox, for example. PARC, for all that it is the intellectual foundation of modern computer OS'es in many ways, and what came out of there changed the world ( laser printing, the GUI, object-oriented programming, ethernet) never really managed to help Xerox'es bottom line much because Xerox' leadership was never invested in the intellectual ferment that they had created out in California.
So the the folks at PARC just kept spitting out al this amazing stuff that was never getting used, because most of it didn't directly relate to making copies, which is what the Xerox execs were focused on. They wanted a world renowned research center ('Bell Labs Envy', I guess) but didn't have a clear idea of what they wanted it *for*.
A few companies, like Apple, have managed to strike this gold repeatedly, but look at their many spectacular failures during the 90's, even though there were astonishing things coming out of their research wing, not much was working in the marketplace.
Notice too, this largely coincided with the absence of Steve Jobs. He has always been invested heavily in the intellectual ferment he created and directed in Apple's R&D.
This raises the spectre of "What happens when he's gone?" When he left Apple the first time, it was in the hands of a technophile marketer John Scully who didn't have the fundamental grasp and understanding of the technology to direct it that Steve had.
That, imo, is what largely happened in the 90's to Apple. So much truly astonishing stuff came out of Apple during this time, but R&D was unfocused, and scattered all over. Coupled with truly catastrophic lapses in product marketing ("You have a Performa what? Oh, a 634CD, that's an entirely different computer from the 653CD!!") that never integrated what R&D was doing, and it's a miracle Apple survived at all.
-- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Phar macy Information Technology Group
Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs
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