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March 31, 1999

A Bruised Apple?

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Is Apple firmly on the road to recovery, or still shaky enough to be at risk from ongoing problems? Can Apple go against its own hardware and software licensing history and actually find a way to work with the open source community? How long can hype and showmanship sustain the company? Will OS X deliver enough "meat" to carry Apple beyond the current interim stage?

Discuss it in LangaLetter threads.

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Fred Langa is a senior consulting editor and columnist for Windows Magazine. Fred's free weekly newsletter is available via subscribe@langa.com. You can contact him at fred@langa.com or via his website at http://www.langa.com.

By Fred Langa

There's an old saying, "I've been down so long, the bottom looks like up." That sentiment may explain some of the exceptionally gentle treatment Apple has gotten of late. No one likes to kick an underdog--and Apple was down so far for so long that any improvement at all looks almost miraculous.

Apple has done some things well. It has hyped and advertised the iMac to death, and as a result managed to move a boatload of the curvy little boxes. (Long-time readers know how I feel about the deceptive and elitist advertising tactics Apple used to achieve this goal--you can find past columns in the archives. But there's no denying that Apple's iMac tactics were hugely successful.)

Steve Jobs, with an undeniable sense of style and showmanship, has breathed new energy into Apple, and may succeed in his in-progress work of bringing Apple back from the brink of extinction to a secure market niche. I hope he does.

But all is not rosy. If you peruse the byways of Usenet, you can find significant numbers of G3 users who are less than thrilled with their new systems. One frequent complaint is that there are far too many "out-of-memory" errors even on RAM-rich systems. Of course, the Mac's memory management/memory protection scheme is legendarily outdated---the Mac has probably the very worst memory management among all the currently shipping major operating systems. (And let's not even discuss the Mac's lack of preemptive multitasking...)

OS X is supposed to remedy many of the problems with the current Mac OS, but OS X is still some ways out.

Steve Jobs himself got bitten by a nasty confluence of G3/Mac OS/OS X problems during a live demo at the recent MacWorld Tokyo. During a live keynote demo by Jobs, several G3 machines suffered the all-too-common out-of-memory problem, forcing Jobs to reboot while the audience waited. Ever the showman, Jobs tried to make the best of it, pointing out how it was great that the new G3s have a normal reset switch on the front. (Now there's an innovation for you!) At least he wasn't reduced to begging for a paper clip from someone in the audience, as he would have been with Apple's old-style reset switch.

The out-of-memory errors were bad enough, but it got worse. The climax of Jobs' 75-minute presentation was a demo of OS X Server; using normal, off-the-shelf G3 hardware, Jobs was simultaneously going to stream video to 49 iMacs, plus show streaming video on the G3 server: 50 video streams at once. Cool!

Except it didn't work. At all.

The iMac monitors flashed on and off at random, the sound system played erratic and disconnected audio snippets in bursty, start-and-stop fashion, and eventually the whole thing just bombed. "What is going on here? I have no idea," quoth Jobs as the audience laughed.

Then last week, Apple announced the release of Darwin, the open-source version of Mac OS X server. But, in classic Apple fashion--and in a way very analogous to the way it previously tried to license hardware--Apple wanted to stay in total control. Sure, you could get a copy of the Darwin source, but you had to notify Apple of any changes you made, and if Apple didn't like your changes, they could yank your license to the source.

In effect, Apple wanted to treat open-source programmers as unpaid contract workers rather than as peers and partners working towards a common goal. Not surprisingly, many member of the open source community were less than happy about it.

Apple is busy backpedaling now, and seems to want to make things right. (See "Apple Open Source License Draws Criticism" and Apple Defends Open Source Initiative.) But add it up: Rumblings among the user base. System problems even the interim CEO can't avoid in a carefully-prepared demo. A snub of the programming talent that Apple so desperately needs.

I have to wonder. Style and showmanship can carry Apple for a while, and to his credit, Job has given Apple a fabulous opportunity to gain real momentum. But is Apple frittering its chance away?

Few companies survive near-death experiences as dire as Apple's. And I know of none that have survived two such experiences. If Apple continues to stumble and loses its way again, it could well be lights-out in Cupertino.

What's your take? Is Apple firmly on the road to recovery, or still shaky enough to be at risk from ongoing problems like these? Can Apple go against its own hardware and software licensing history and actually find a way to work with the open-source community? How long can hype and showmanship sustain the company? Will OS X deliver enough "meat" to carry Apple beyond the current interim stage? Join in!

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