Posts by Paul Campbell
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possibly - I don't think they did this on purpose to stop my design in particular, there probably just weren't enough tiny disk drives, a brand new technology to go around - and Compaq just wasn't focused on the tiny corner of its company I was consulting for at the time.
At the time our problem was really that we didn't have the muscle to convince a disk drive manufacturer that there was money in making cheaper (but somewhat less reliable) disk drives rather than denser ones - at the time drive prices were constant but density kept increasing, the sweet spot in the curve was already heading away from "the amount of music any normal person who can afford one of our products is ever likely to have".
We wanted a $50 drive rather than another $100 one with twice the density - the disk people just didn't see the volumes or money to be made because they'd been fighting a density war for so long - it was an alien business plan - having Apple throw a lot of money at you can change that, an after a runaway product like the iPod they started throwing read money at the issue
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remember I said that "Apple eats its young" ... the fact that it has its eyes on a percentage from everyone who writes software for its platforms now seems to me to be an indication that, well, programmers are next ....
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well yeah - the first thing I did when I bought my Mac128 in '84 was to open it, up the memory to (a whole) 1Mb, and add a hard drive (a whole 10Mb)
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Apple forced all of their developers to buy CD roms within the space of about 2 months, they stopped shipping us documentation on paper. By the end of that year EVERY new mac had a CD rom in it and we all started shipping software on CD roms - PCs were still selling stuff on floppies for years later
Apple had a real problem there - they were under injunction from Apple Music (ie the Beatles) to not do anything with music, they had to tiptoe through that minefield for years
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heh - there's probably books that could be written about M$'s various attempts at hardware ...
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actually my time circling Apple predated the internet explosion, I was doing a non-apple hardware startup during the .com boom - we had e everything eCash, eStocks, eMail, etc etc there for a while - I think Apple (Steve who was back by then) brought in the "i" to differentiate themselves
I did work on the 2nd generation of a hard drive based mp3 player that came out a few years prior to Apple's firstiPod - tried to make basically the iPod but couldn't get enough parts (the 1.8 inch small disk drives or the batteries) to build something in that small form factor in volume - turns out they were all on allocation to Apple ..... who weren't yet a player - our 2nd generation never reached the market, for that and a bunch of other reasons - the people I was contracting for (DEC WRL) had been bought by Compaq who were bought by HP ... who eventually tried to build their own iPod killer ....
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Hard News: 2011: The Year Of What?, in reply to Sacha,
At the time it came in everything was eThis and eThat .... hence my comment
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I worked in companies around Apple from roughly '84 to '94 and saw a lot of this going on - I had some of the first Mac 2 prototypes on my desk, and found/fixed hardware problems on them - Apple was always tough to work around - you worked with them at your peril, projects would get canceled at a moments notice - in fact I suspect that most projects got canceled - they owned a Cray for a while, even built it its own building, it was purty inside, almost a chapel - they designed their own CPUs, never saw the light of day - getting something to market was a challenge - firewire nearly died several times, USB was competing with it internally at the same time.
There were lots of ups and downs - I remember going to MacHack one year, while we were there Apple announced big layoffs, live on CNN people could see friends being escorted to the door, none of the Apple people there (most of their senior systems team) could get a yes or no out of their managers - they all had to go back to California at the end of the week, and rush in from the airport to see if their security card keys still worked ....
A lot of smart people left Apple after putting in years of work and seeing nothing, they're scattered all around the Valley now.
And of course Apple ate its young - the small companies (like the ones I worked for) that sprung up around Apple building stuff that Apple didn't all were eaten or withered when Apple pulled the technologies in that made good profits and included them as standard in their products.
(BTW Apple also brought CD-roms, firewire, and of course mice and real graphical displays - these were other technologies that Apple pioneered and brought to the general PC market)
The one thing that Apple does and everyone is really jealous of is simply "high gross margins" they sell stuff at higher prices - they make more $$ from every one they sell than anyone else does - it's not something you can compete to do, I suspect that there's some unwritten law of economics that says that two people can't play that same strategy in the same market - everyone else ends up fighting, spiraling to the bottom for volume and lowest margins
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to be fair the "i" more likely stands for "a vowel different from 'e' just to make us different" - if apple was from elsewhere we might have ended up with üPhones
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Jobs is sort of good and bad - he's anal about a great user experience and has great insights on what's 'right' - but he can be an asshole to work for, I've been a few cubes over when he was tearing a strip off of someone (his first time around) - people are plain scared of him - doing well at Apple can be a very hit and miss sort of thing - you can be the apple of his eye one minute and slime the next