EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

<HELP@...> wrote:
>> hardware, and become a proper OS company.

>No joke. This is why Apple got screwed by MS to begin with. After all these
>years, you'd think Steve would try to make a comeback. The dialog in Pirates
>of Silicon Valley went something like... (badly paraphrased)
>
>STEVE rants: Apple's operating system is better than Windows!
>
>BILL calmly responds: Don't you get it? It doesn't matter. We won.
>
>I wish I could remember this accurately. The dialogue was so choice. Anyway,
>the moral of the story is that, despite Steve's genius, his pride is his
>Achilles' heel. If apple ran OSX on an Intel box, they'd pull Windows users
>in by the droves. There's so much more money in software than in hardware.
>Duh!

If you have followed Steve's career or read the books like "The Second
Coming of Steve Jobs" you will know that he repeated this error at Next --
building cool looking black boxes priced at 10g's that nobody wanted to
buy. Steve loves hardware -- so much so that he involved himself designing
the minutiae of the state of the art factory to make the Next cube. 

While his OS NextStep really was the next step -- Unix based, great
programming tools etc -- the fact that he ignored the realities of hardware
(economies of scale) and tried to make another integrated solution is
testament to his stubbornness and failure to orient his business interests
to commercial reality. People say that software alone -- it just doesn't do
it for him. At press conferences during this era he would get testy when
the hard questions came and bluster that Next had hardware that would "blow
you all away."

Next became a software company only after they had burned through tens of
millions (mostly Jobs own)  and the major backer, Canon, withdrew further
support. Steve's beautiful factory was mothballed and NextStep was released
as an OS plus tools for x86 hardware. Who knows -- maybe he will go down
this road again. 

M$ is doing enough to alienate everyone with their spyware and their high
prices and their new licencing schemes. Huge organisations (eg Europe,
Britain, Asia etc) are looking at the cost of upgrades and licencing to run
XP and Office XP on tens of thousands of seats and some are deciding enough
is enough. They are going with Linux mostly though. OSX/NextStep may have
missed whatever window it had already. 

Regards,
Murray