Comment on the Apple Article

At the foot of this post courtesy of Business Insider is an article highlighting the key milestnes on Apple's journey to becoming the first ever company to be valued at $1,000,000,000,000. It covers the first 32 years of their 42 year journey [it ends at the iPhone].

As someone who spent 10 years at Apple in what is sometimes referred to as the 'between Jobs' years ['85-97''] there are two references in the article which don't quite reflect how 'it felt at the time'.

1. The Apple : IBM alliance is often categorised as having been a failure, by tech journalists, and John Scully [its main proponent/architect] is 'blamed'. However, I consider this a little unfair in that it fails to recognise the scope of the ambition or what was achieved.

Firstly the alliance was not ever just about PowerPC as is implied in this article. Its ambition was to provide a reference design [hardware and software] not only for PCs but also a range of other 'multi-media' devices which had been imagined but were not yet real/viable.

To provide an effective challenge to Intel and Microsoft in the PC market yes, but also to improve the economics and/or reduce the risks in building the new things. Designing hardware and software for these visions meant solving several problems:

1. OS - a common operating system able to run on a wide range of devices from the PDA [iPhone forerunner] to huge servers on a common code base
2. Low Power Chips - processors that could deliver sufficient MIPS but still be powered by a battery.
3. a common framework for handling time based media e.g. music and films and voice delivered by packets.
4. high performance cables to handle the data rates necessary to handle these new data volumes and types.

The Apple : IBM alliance delivered technical designs in this period which arguably have enabled what came next not just for Apple but for many others.

1. Apple first introduced its [BSD compliant] UNIX based OS to replace the classic Mac OS in March 2001. This project had begun over 10 years earlier. The benefits of a single OS are considerable from service possibilities to User Experience to cost of code maintenance.
2. Apple [afaiaa] contributed designs and money to help establish ARM whose chips are now a standard components of almost all smart phones.
3. Quicktime emerged in this period as a way to handle time based media. In fact a very early version was in a world first trial with BT to deliver 30 frames per second over ADSL in a world first set top box pilot i the UK.
4. Firewire also emerged from Apple in this period and later resulted in a global a standard way to transfer large amounts of data quickly between various media.

The second point I’d like to comment on is the reference to Microsoft and Apple ‘making friends’ in 1997. They did and it was great to see. The 'friendship' as cemented with an investment by MIcrosoft into Apple of $150m and a commitment to establish a new MAC First development team in California, focussed on bringing the Office Suite native to OSX.

At this time Apple was in financial difficulty and Microsoft was fighting anti trust law suits in the USA and EU over allegations of abuse of dominant position and restricting competition. There were calls for Microsoft to be broken up into two companies : OS and Applications., Had Apple failed Microsoft may well have had a tougher time with this case. #justsaying

In summary several of the IBM alliance initiatives enabled many of the things that Apple did so well in the following years. However, the total focus and standards of excellence were not attributable to anyone other than Steve Jobs IMO.

Congratulations Apple. Thoroughly well deserved.

Business Insider Article