Posts for Tag: mac os

Woulda... Shoulda... Coulda... In a parallel world, I'd be richer

Let's rewind to 1996..... My first job out of college was at a database marketing consulting division of American Express called Epsilon. There I was introduced to the lovely world of Excel grunt work and Mainframe TSO queries. However, one of the highlights of the job was that the first account I was put on was Apple Computer. Epsilon basically compiled the direct marketing lists that Apple sent promotional mailers to. Though my exposure to Cupertino was quite limited (Epsilon's offices were near the Transamerica Building in San Francisco), I did get to meet a lot of the folks in the marketing department at Apple. The atmosphere there was somewhat muted. Gil Amelio was in power at Apple and seemed to be running the company like any other computer maker - trying to sell as many cookie cutter machines as possible while cutting costs. The only difference was nobody wanted Macs and Gil wasn't really interested in doing much besides running a lean operation. As you can probably guess, that's the formula of someone looking to streamline a business either for sale or the slow inevitable march to oblivion.

One day towards the end of my first year there (as things were getting progressively worse for Apple), news came of an unexpected bold move - the purchase of NeXT Computer and their NeXT OS which is the basis for today's Mac OS X. However, the more important asset in the purchase was the return of Steve Jobs though at the time, his role was as of yet undefined. At this time, Apple's stock was hovering around $4 (split adjusted) and languished for years. No one thought much of the purchase, in fact, a lot of folks panned Amelio for over paying for NeXT. Why would you, a company with an OS the vast majority of the world doesn't use, buy a company with an OS even fewer people used? Didn't really make sense until July of 1997 when Amelio was ousted and Jobs took over. I remember on the date of the announcement, I popped my head into the Epsilon Account Director for Apple and said, "Have you heard the news?" She replied, "Yup, I'm on the phone with my stock broker now." Apple stock price was about $3.80. I bought about $5,000 worth - almost my entire portfolio was now Apple stock.

Fast forward to today, Apple just announced its most profitable quarter ever. Buoyed by iPhone sales and the impending launch of its tablet computer, Apple's future can't be any brighter. That $5,000 worth of stock would be worth about $250K today. The operative word here is "would be" since I sold it once the stock doubled a year or so later. I guess you can't really cry much over a stock transaction that netted you a positive gain but still, no one thought Apple would hit these heights 13 years ago. If you had asked me in 1997 to bet on whether Apple would still be in business 13 years later, I would have given it a 50/50 chance. Gotta give them all the props in the world. A testament to one man's blinding adherence to doing insanely great things.

Another reason why Google Chrome OS is not that big

Follow up to my post yesterday about the Google Chrome OS. First off, read the excellent Fake Steve Jobs post about the new OS and we agree on most points - he just presents in a much funnier, insightful, and entertaining manner.
 
Second, the rumblings are that Eric Schmidt needs to leave Apple's board because of potential competitive issues. He currently recuses himself from board meetings that deal with the iPhone due to Google competing Android product. Will he now recuse himself when there is talk of Mac OS? So pretty much he's just there to discuss iPods? Seems like a waste of space in my opinion. However, my prediction is that Schmidt does not leave Apple's board. This leads me to believe that the Google Chrome OS is not really going to be an OS in the traditional sense of the word which means it doesn't really compete with Mac OS and for that matter, Windows. Let's remember, it's basically Linux with the Chrome browser bolted on top. The real point of the Chrome OS is to push more Chrome installations and not to beat Windows. Believe me, it takes more than just having a superior OS to take significant market share away from Microsoft. Look at Mac OS and the ahead of its time BeOS. Both were better operating systems yet couldn't even make a dent in Windows. I hardly doubt ANOTHER Linux variant is going to fair any better.

The Google OS - It's big news, but not really that big

I picked this post up from TechCrunch and though it definitely is a major step forward, let's not make it more than what it really is. Google Chrome, in its proposed incarnation, will never replace Windows (or Mac OS) as a legitimate desktop OS; just like Linux never replaced Windows as a consumer desktop OS. The web has become a major APPLICATION that we all use on a daily basis but there are many other applications that we use that don't require us to connect online. And before anyone starts talking about ZOHO or Google Apps, has anyone really tried using any of these online office applications? Frankly, they're not that useful beyond the bare basics of what a spreadsheet or word processing application should do. Can they get better, of course. Just not today or in my opinion the foreseeable future (next 1-3 years).

But lest I seem like I am in Microsoft's corner, this is a significant announcement. The real point is not for Google to overtake Microsoft in the OS world. It just needs to make a dent and I think it will. Microsoft's empire is one based on total domination. If it ceased to own more than the roughly 90% of the OS market it does today, that will be a major hit to its bottom line. Microsoft is a bloated organization with lots of people making lots of money (roughly 91K+). If Google was able to either take 5%-10% market share OR force Microsoft to significantly lower the price of a Windows license, it could make things difficult for them. In the end, that's all Google is aiming for. Make life difficult for Microsoft in its core product (desktop) so it doesn't concentrate on Google's core product (web).

Stronger ... Faster ... Smaller? An OS upgrade that's smaller than its predecessor

It's a big Apple news day...

Having been a Windows user for the majority of my computing life, I've been trained to expect every subsequent new version of Windows to be larger than the version it succeeds. I made the switch to Mac a little over a year ago and kinda had the same expectation of the new OS 10.6 release. Stronger, faster, but maybe a little more bloated which I don't have an issue with given that hard drive prices continually get pushed down. However, I come to find that when upgrading to the new Mac OS build, you actually free up 6GB of space. That's definitely a refreshing revelation.
 
It made me think of a tech documentary (one of the best, in my opinion) called Triumph of the Nerds on PBS. One particular line was from Steve Ballmer who was describing how in the early days of Microsoft, they were bucking the trend of building big bloated software. Here's the quote:

"In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 50K-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing."

The really ironic part is that Microsoft doesn't seem to invest money in actually making its OS more streamlined. Windows just seems to get bigger and bigger. Given all the advances in coding and technology, why can't someone make an OS more powerful yet slimmer? The short answer is that they never had to. CPUs got more powerful and memory (hard drives, RAM) got bigger/cheaper. Still, it's nice to see that someone actually decided to take a step back and say, "Hey, I can make this software perform better AND reduce its overall size."