Apple should be more open
Question from E-mail
Do you think Jobs will ever “Get it”? Let me explain what I mean. The PC was a bad computer. It was slow and had a poor OS. What I feel made the PC take off was the fact that the systems were open. Within a year of the release of the first IBM you had several other companies making the same products. When IBM went to the PS/2 (Micro BUS) to cut out competers, the PS/2 failed, so IBM learned and went back to the ISA/EISA/PCI bus and now IBM is doing better. Apple allowed Clones 3 years ago and did badly (I think because the quality went down on the MAC for a while then it came back). My point is do you think Apple will ever open it’s system again? I feel they should have opened the first MACs back in 84. If they had, Apple might own part of MS, not the other way around. I would like any of your comment or personal observation.
Woz
We did so well in the days when we had extremely open products. But Steve Jobs has always tried to make them tighter and more closed. He says that it’s beneficial to the user not to have all the many permutations of configurations.
We basically only had one disagreement over the Apple ][ design. He tried to get me to go with 2 slots instead of 8. I stood for 8 and told him he could find another computer. Call it artistic license. It paid off in the long run. But from that day on, he always tries to have less flexablitiy and variation possible in our computers than PC’s have. He tries to define a machine for one purpose and precisely configured for it. But people always want other things too.
You find a ton of people like I was once, engineers and technicians, who can buy PC subassemblies and chips and can make breadboards and you don’t even have magazines telling how to do this on Macs. I have no further comment.