[Macworld]

Post your comments for The Mac at 25: Successes, regrets, Apple?s had a few here

[mactarkus]

Actually, the 4400 wasn't in the Performa line of Macs. It was a Power Macintosh. I do agree that it wasn't a shining example of Apple engineering.

[binoy918]

Nailing the hardware and software transitions:

I think you got it wrong there, considering that Windows runs on machines having infintie no. of combinations of harware configurations and the drivers are (in most cases) developed by 3rd parties. Mac has got only limited harware combinations and so it easy to optimise the OS to match the exact harware.
There is no big deal in such kind of transitions.
Imagine to upgrade your processor or motherboard on your old Mac.

[NaOH]

My favourite 'failure' of Apple's is OpenDoc.
It was an application framework that Apple and IBM developed jointly. (Although I get the impression that IBM actually started the project, and Apple joined in.)
It was positioned as an alternative to Microsoft's OLE technology, which allows one application to link into features of another application.
OpenDoc however, turned the paradigm on its head, and was designed to be 'document centric'. The idea was that any document could be worked on by OpenDoc as long as the right collection of plug-ins were installed.
This idea would allow documents to be created that contained any combination of features the author desired. From word processing, via spreadsheet content to video clips, live web content and interactive 3D shapes.
One of the main selling-points of OpenDoc over OLE, was that instead of having to load the application that controlled the features you wanted, you just loaded the relevant plug-in.
For example: If you want to make a PowerPoint presentation, and need to insert an Excel table or graph, you can copy and paste, but that means that you won't be able to re-calculate the content without copying and pasting all over again. With OLE, you could grab the relevant information directly from the Excel spreadsheet as a live link. If you later edited that spreadsheet, OLE would ensure that the information is updated on the presentation.
With OpenDoc, this same functionality could be achieved by making a presentation where the document is actually a hybrid of a presentation, spreadsheet and word processing file. It contains all those properties, and instead of having to launch PowerPoint, Excel and Word in order to make live changes, the memory overhead is reduced massively by only requiring the plug-ins for each feature.
My favourite OpenDoc 'application' was CyberDog, an infinitely extensible web browser that could in theory have any kind of capabilities added on through plug-ins.
I put the term 'application' in inverted commas, because the only real application was OpenDoc itself. CyberDog was really just a bunch of plug-ins that were aware of each other, and able to interact.
One huge limitation of OpenDoc was that it would be hugely awkward for software makers to market their collection of plug-ins as a distinct product, if it turned out other plug-in manufacturers were making plug-ins with similar or identical feature sets.
However, OpenDoc hasn't completely disappeared.
Anyone who uses a current Adobe product will be using applications built on a similar design philosophy.
If you take a look inside the Adobe Reader application package, you can find two bunches of plug-ins. Look inside Adobe Reader.app/Content/ There you will find two folders, one called Plug-ins, the other called Frameworks.
These are essentially two different types of plug-ins that run the Reader application. This design philosophy was first used in InDesign 1, when it was first launched. In fact, early versions of InDesign used OpenDoc frameworks.
I can't help but wonder how different the Mac would be if OpenDoc had succeeded.

[palane]

Nice article, though technically there were 3 transitions (2 processor and 1 OS):
68000 -> PowerPC -> Intel
OS 9 -> OS X
Nice comment by sodium hydroxide. I'd forgotten about OpenDoc.
BB

[leicaman]

binoy918 said:

Nailing the hardware and software transitions:

I think you got it wrong there, considering that Windows runs on machines having infintie no. of combinations of harware configurations and the drivers are (in most cases) developed by 3rd parties. Mac has got only limited harware combinations and so it easy to optimise the OS to match the exact harware.
There is no big deal in such kind of transitions.
Imagine to upgrade your processor or motherboard on your old Mac.

That's like saying making the choice to do it Apple's way wasn't relevant. It is, and yes, it is contributory to the success of the transitions, but they could have easily flubbed it. Plenty of people expected much rougher transitions than occurred. It went faster than Apple expected it to by about a year to go Intel. Give credit where credit is due. Apple did pull them off, and it could have been disastrous.

Armchair quarterbacking and saying it would be easy pretty much shows more a lack of understanding the issues than it points out the author not getting it right. It's like telling Obama fixing the economy is easy. Just give us more jobs, cut taxes and increase services. How hard can it be?
Message was edited by: leicaman

[RobLewis]

I found the whole experiment with Claris rather confusing. Apparently Apple wanted to be a cross-platform software company, then changed its mind (except for FileMaker and iTunes?).
My wife still refuses to give up her ClarisWorks/AppleWorks. Really, what is there that can replace it in a single app?

[RobK]

eWorld

[lynnfredricks]

OpenDoc was great, but it was really hard to program for. A number of Mac software vendors tried to "part" out their products, only to have the rug pulled out from under them when abandoned.

I used to be a big fan of Publish and Subscribe - I used that a lot in a previous business.

[Wondercow]

binoy918 said:

Mac has got only limited harware combinations and so it easy to optimise the OS to match the exact harware.

And that's exactly why the very first OS release after each transition was fully optimized and working perfectly, right?

Quote

There is no big deal in such kind of transitions.

Then why did I live an 68K emulated Finder for years after the PPC transition? Let's put Apple aside for a minute and consider the challenge to the third-party developers....

Quote

Imagine to upgrade your processor or motherboard on your old Mac.

Macs have actually had upgradable processors (and to a lesser extent, motherboards) since the '80s.

[Luis_Alejandro]

quote:
"In the days of online walled gardens such as AOL, CompuServe and the like, Apple tried its own, calling it eWorld. "
As far as I remember (I did not check sources) AOL was made up from eWorld's ashes.
(Maybe eWorld fault was --again for Apple-- to be too ahead of its time.)

[NaOH]

"As far as I remember (I did not check sources) AOL was made up from eWorld's ashes."
Actually eWorld was a re-badged CompuServe solution.
(As far as I was able to find out at the time, Apple licensed the software from CompuServe and made their own variant of it.)
AOL already had their system set up and running well before Apple created eWorld.
Come to think of it, I still have my eWorld welcome pack with the install floppies.