patrick.net

Dan8267 says

True, although I don't give Steve Jobs credit for inventing anything.

I'm not a Steve Jobs fan, just he was the example given. I think Jobs is one of the most overrated people in the world. His ego and arrogance far exceeded his accomplishments. I prefer people who just get the job done and let their accomplishments speak for themselves.

Job's first shot as CEO at Apple was terrible for the stockholders, other than ipo buyers and pre ipo vested stockholders. He was fixated on the idea of windows/mac and killed further development of the very profitable apple II. Apple actually did better under Sculley from a stockholder point of view.

People somehow forget that apple was very much a small niche player until the Ipod and Imac, mostly the Ipod. Macs only had something like 2% market share. Apple talks about the Imac being a smash hit, but it sold less than a million a year the first few years.

The ipod is the only Jobs product that was a big hit in his entire career. It wasn't that original. It was developed out of a platform called portalplayer that IBM was already selling as a mp3 player. The original part from apple was the interface, which was light years ahead of anything else at the time. The cash from the ipod finally let apple do some large scale engineering work on their computer lines and come up with good selling products to get some decent market share at long last.

bob2356 says

The stockholders are the owners, I'm surprised you don't know that. The compensation committees set pay, not the stockholders. Most corporations don't give the stockholders any avenue to have a say in executive pay.

Pretty presumptuous assuming I don't own stock

I never assumed you dont own stocks, but I do presume you do not own any significant amount of it, hence I wrote "until you have any significant skin in the game". The bottom line is, if you do not like executive pay in a company do not invest in it. Like I said,
Meccos says

Until then you have no say.

bob2356 says

The ipod is the only Jobs product that was a big hit in his entire career. It wasn't that original. It was developed out of a platform called portalplayer that IBM was already selling as a mp3 player.

Never heard of portalplayer. The first MP3 hardware player was the Diamond Rio which came out around 1999. Before that, IBM had a project codename Madison, official name EMMS that was an open system for purchasing and downloading music. Basically, it was ITunes way before ITunes.

Dan8267 says

bob2356 says

The ipod is the only Jobs product that was a big hit in his entire career. It wasn't that original. It was developed out of a platform called portalplayer that IBM was already selling as a mp3 player.

Never heard of portalplayer. The first MP3 hardware player was the Diamond Rio which came out around 1999. Before that, IBM had a project codename Madison, official name EMMS that was an open system for purchasing and downloading music. Basically, it was ITunes way before ITunes.

Apple took an existing, but unreleased, technology and put a very nice and unique interface on it. Here's a pretty interesting article from wired about the process.
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2004/07/64286?currentPage=all

Portalplayer was a chipset manufacturer. Ipods up until 2006 or so were Portalplayer chipsets. Looks like IBM never sold an MP3 player commercially. I just remember reading about some development work they were doing on products in trade magazines at the time. They looking for other uses for their microdrive.

IBM developed the 1 inch microdrive as a high capacity storage for digital camera's in the late 90's, but they recognized it would be ideal for high capacity mp3 players. I know that as well as doing some work themselves they shopped the product around to use in an MP3 player to several companies, but not Apple. The original Ipod used a 1.8 inch toshiba drive, but the mini's used the IBM (sold to Hitachi by this time) microdrive up until switching over to solid state in 2005. For camera's microdrives were much faster at writing than flash memory of the time.

The status Quo will never change, the rich are psychopathic parasites.
They have no empathy nor humanity, just empty shells painted to look like humans.

Change will only come with the adoption of a new universal holiday called Bastille day. If those that steal millions of times their share were separated from their head, the world would go to bed warm and fed.

RealityBites says

just empty shells painted to look like humans.

As I like saying, this movie was a documentary.

bob2356 says

Apple took an existing, but unreleased, technology and put a very nice and unique interface on it.

The Diamond Rio was released. Even more importantly, the MPEG 2 Layer 3 Standard (MP3) was developed by a lot of really smart people, none of which worked at Apple.

Apple also didn't the solid state memory that made modern MP3 players, smart phones, and tablets possible. Nor did Apple invent the wireless ad hock network technology or the LCD displays or the rechargeable batteries or any other technology needed for today's devices.

But hey, you are right that Apple put a nice looking, polished logo on the product and that makes it so much prettier. Where would we be without Apple?

Dan8267 says

Where would we be without Apple?

You make it sound like Apple's innovation was easy.

If it were easy, other companies would have beat Apple to market with the long list of things they got right, first.

Steve made the first useful personal computer (as opposed to hobbyist computer). A large part of the Apple II's success was actually due to Markkula, who was an avid PC users and pushed the company to create the floppy disk drive at a more affordable price. At any rate the Apple II was the best PC of the 1970s.

Steve then shipped in 1984 the Mac, and after its rough edges and design mistakes were largely worked out over the next two years the 1986 Mac Plus was arguably the best PC of the 1980s, in terms of utility for the money.

It worked extremely well with Apple's LaserWriter, which revolutionized how we worked with paper. HP had released its LaserJet earlier in 1984, but it was just a glorified LPR until well after the desktop publishing revolution got going.

Then Steve got booted out of Apple and then shipped the NeXT machines. The color NeXT computers were beyond state of the art -- about 10 years ahead of the rest of the PC industry. Of course, they were priced well above what PCs cost in the early 1990s, so they were more like personal workstations.

But NeXT got a lot right with that and thus far Apple's purchase of NeXT can't be considered a mistake.

The iPod got big because it was the first PMP to be small enough to carry in a pocket but with enough storage to hold most peoples' entire libraries.

The iPhone was an incremental advance on what other companies were doing, but, again, Apple was first to actually execute on what needed to be done.

Foremost was lose the stylus. Secondly, Apple actually spent the effort and hard lifting to get a pretty good OS and graphics stack working under the pretty interface, and that pretty interface was so smooth because Apple worked to get it right first. Android only achieved parity with Apple in this area with "Project Butter".

Nokia actually shipped phones with OMAP (which had PowerVR) before Apple did, but DIDN'T HAVE THE DRIVERS WORKING for the Power VR renderer.

While Apple not only had OpenGL ES working for developers in 2008, they also had a super-slick image API (called CoreAnimation) that exposed this rendering capability for all app programmers, not just OpenGL-based games.

Remove the innovations that Apple shipped first from our current tech life, and we'd have pretty limited capabilities.

One thing Apple missed was the optical mouse. Microsoft got HP's invention here to market well before Apple. 3D accelerators -- SGI, 3Dfx, nVidia -- that too advanced w/o Apple's involvement in the 1980s and 90s.

But other than that, industry has always been slipstreaming behind Apple, for most of my life now.