Well, hell no I’m not Steve Jobs! I used to be a big Microsoft and Intel proponent until the mid 1990s. Apple never figured out that their target audience really *were* computer geeks, and that telling them if they bought an Apple they’d stop being geeks wasn’t the best way to go. For instance, in the 1980s if you wanted to upgrade your PC you drove down to RadioShack, bought a circuit board, drove home and plugged it into an expansion slot and installed any software it came with. Voila. Upgraded. If you wanted to upgrade your Apple, you bought a new computer. If they weren’t selling a computer that could do what you needed to get done, you bought a PC. If you wanted to bypass the whole “Buy whatever they are selling and upgrade it into what you really want it to be” thing, you could go to the computer show and hand pick every component, right down to the manufacturer. Take the stuff home in a box, and build your new “perfect” PC. No such luck with Apple. You got what they sold you. Period. Same story with the software. You used officially licensed Apple software, or you used nothing. If you had an Apple. If you had a PC, you had a choice of using whatever software programmers were making for it… which was a LOT. Apple never really succeeded in getting programmers to write applications for their platform, and that continues to be a problem today. I think it was Apple’s failure to understand what kind of people the home computer market was made up of that caused them to fail so badly back then. And they did fail badly, the PC had 98% market share at one point in time. Despite the fact that in many ways the PC was an inferior product. I still think they don’t get it, but luckily for them Microsoft doesn’t get it anymore either, and IBM is long gone from the home computer market.

This, though:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk

That is hideous. Absolutely hideous. There’s no excuse for that!

thanx for the insights!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq4aPFw8fKc&feature=related

Apple was using the exact same marketing strategy in 1984 that they are using now.

That’s a picture of the Lisa II, though. Which didn’t come out until 1984. By then, this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macintosh_128k_transparency.png

Had become the leader of the resistance against the IBM entity.

This is what the original Apple Lisa looked like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R8fArhOWso

This was the competition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT

Hard to believe Intel and IBM conquered the world with that, isn’t it? And even moreso that kicked the competition to the curb even before Windows became popular. What kind of a dork chooses ASCII text screens and a command-line interface over GUI!?