RE: LAME DUCK
RE: LAME DUCK
Sent: 12/21/96; 5:31:01 PM
From: dpreed@reed.com (David P. Reed)
Dave - your comments regarding commitment to customers' investments in hardware struck a nerve.
I have two pieces of software developed for the original IBM PC under DOS. One was called VisiCalc, and was written to 'the bare metal' (at least as far as driving the display hardware and so forth) in order to get maximum performance out of that poor 5 MHz 8088. The other was called Lotus 1-2-3.
They still run today, on Pentiums and Pentium Pros, under Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0.
I also have two contemporary pieces of software - the Apple ][ version of VisiCalc, Advanced Version and the Macintosh version of Jazz.
Neither runs today on _any_ current Apple product. (in fact, there's a cool Apple ][ emulator in shareware that will run the VisiCalc just fine on a Pentium under Windows 95) This, _despite_ the fact that the Mac UI is only modestly different than it was in the beginning. What's happened is that compatibility has not been a real issue for Apple - as a monopoly they've been able to force their ISV's and customers to compensate for a sequence of silly minor incompatibilities introduced with every new O/S release. Approximate compatibility was good enough for the marketing folks in Cupertino (we engineers call it the 'checkbox' version of compatibility - is it compatible enough to say so in an ad without getting sued?)
Is this important? I think it is. The PC-compatible platform industry knows that customers love their software. At every step along the way, the vendors of hardware and O/S chose to maintain an incredibly high standard of _compatibility_ in order to keep and add to their installed base.
Apple's attitude toward the installed base has always been somewhat more arrogant. They love the customers who must have only the newest, hottest machines, the newest and sweetest UIs. A customer who has an investment in last year's hardware, and no money to replace it, is an albatross. The poor sod who bought Apple ]['s was out of luck when the Mac shipped. Apple's message to Apple ][ developers at the time was "we don't want you to port your ][ apps, we want new insanely great ones." I sat in Jobs office in 1982 getting raked over the coals because we had made some design decisions to preserve compatibility for the Apple ][ users familiar with our product. He wanted us to force the customer to go to an entirely new paradigm, even if the old one was pretty good.
The win for Apple in the short term was that by discarding the baggage of success they could innovate faster. Gates and Kapor and Bricklin and Fylstra had customer bases, while Apple had love fests at MacWorld with the free-floating pundits who got free new machines and software every year.
It's quite sad, but the Mac's biggest customer base today is in the schools. Believe me, they have no money to throw out all of those old machines and software. My daughters go to an all-Mac school. Most of our kids probably do. When there's a new O/S, will all those Mac's look like the Apple ]['s, gathering dust, and embarassing the educators who believed that Apple was committed to the education market?
Should Amelio care? Why should he? After all, all the money is in new sales of machines. The coolest customers will always eat the dogfood, and the less hip should get out of the way.
Read the Forbes cover article. Amelio has started drinking the water in Cupertino, and it shows.
I'd like to suggest that the most successful innovators are those who can find a technical path that enables them to lead _all_ their followers to the promised land. Beware the revolutionaries who are so interested in the destination that they must condemn any hesitation as treason, any discussions about the best way to proceed as obstructionism.
Which kind of advocacy for innovation have you seen in Gates, Grove, Cannavino, Rosen, Kapor, Bricklin? How about Jobs, Sculley, Gassee, Spindler, Amelio?
- David
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