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Nomad · 09-14-2003, 02:53 AM

http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/...appleemployee/

-Snip-

Michael Mace, once a marketing director at Apple, says that overall, Apple Computer has been a "massive failure." Instead of changing the world from "bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates," Apple today is "the eccentric elderly uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer truly powerful," he writes in an open letter to the Apple Computer History Weblog.

"Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop," Mace writes. "The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years."
There's no effective competition because Apple failed, and it failed because the tale of the company's employees from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, himself included, is one of "individual brilliance and group stupidity," he adds.

"Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again," Mace writes. "And yet, despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of computing. For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent? Kaleida? Jaguar [not the Mac OS X version, but an early effort to move Apple to RISC-based computing]? OpenDoc? The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user interface ideas in the Sybil project."

Apple's problem during the time was that the company's employees and executives didn't work together, but were segmented by their own projects and personal agendas, Mace feels. Things are different now that Steve Jobs has returned to the fold, but he had "to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it," he adds.

http://apple.computerhistory.org/stories/storyReader$72

09-14-2003, 02:53 AM	#1 (permalink)
Nomad Heathen Location: California	Ex-Apple employee says company a 'failure' http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/...appleemployee/ -Snip- Michael Mace, once a marketing director at Apple, says that overall, Apple Computer has been a "massive failure." Instead of changing the world from "bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates," Apple today is "the eccentric elderly uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer truly powerful," he writes in an open letter to the Apple Computer History Weblog. "Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop," Mace writes. "The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years." There's no effective competition because Apple failed, and it failed because the tale of the company's employees from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, himself included, is one of "individual brilliance and group stupidity," he adds. "Never in my career have I worked with brighter, more interesting, more capable people. Probably I never will again," Mace writes. "And yet, despite all our braininess, as a team we were the Keystone Kops of computing. For every innovation we brought to market, a dozen great ideas were strangled in the labs. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on massive projects that yielded exactly nothing. Remember Taligent? Kaleida? Jaguar [not the Mac OS X version, but an early effort to move Apple to RISC-based computing]? OpenDoc? The list is almost endless. Even today, the PC world has yet to fully deploy innovations that we worked on and failed to bring to market in the 1990s, things like component software and the advanced user interface ideas in the Sybil project." Apple's problem during the time was that the company's employees and executives didn't work together, but were segmented by their own projects and personal agendas, Mace feels. Things are different now that Steve Jobs has returned to the fold, but he had "to burn the old company to the ground in order to salvage something viable out of it," he adds. http://apple.computerhistory.org/stories/storyReader$72