Dvorak on Apple and Innovation in the PC Industry
Dvorak: Mac is 'an old hound that can't hunt' [MacCentral]
When I first read this I thought he was actually being perceptive and in a round about way was actually complementing Apple. Of course then I read through his followups and it turns out he was just bashing Apple after all. Very disappointing, because he made some good points.
You could theoretically look at the switch to Mac OS X as a real lost opportunity for Apple to break all the molds. You could say they did have the opportunity to bury the Mac and step to a new level with a truly revolutionary platform.
Of course, this is totally unrealistic and there's no way that Apple, even assuming they had the ideas, could have brought something truly revolutionary to market. Why is described in The Innovator's Dilemma. The market and Apple's business tolerance for risk would simply not allow them to make that radical of a shift. The very existence of things like the Carbon APIs as a first class programming API rather then just a temporary porting API is a good indication of this. The developers demanded it, they wouldn't even allow Apple to move the small step to focusing 100% on the Cocoa APIs. Stepping too far outside the bounds, in their core business, would simply destroy the company. Microsoft is in the same boat with the .Net platform.
An entirely new and revolutionary platform simply could/would not be accepted rapidly enough by the people that Apple needed to accept it. Basically, it would have meant a brand new platform with no software and not much support from the existing developer community. Apple would quite literally be starting from scratch. Regardless of how technologically superior the platform could hypothetically be, the business factors for all parties involved are simply too constraining.
Apple did the right thing. Even though it isn't an earth shaking innovation, Mac OS X is still easily the best OS around (in my opinion of course).
2:27:49 PM 
|
Xindice (Formally dbXML)