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Webomatica

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Seemingly Stupid Apple Moves That Were Actually Brilliant

Started by webomatica · 3 months ago

At the time Apple announced all of the following, the Mac faithful gasped, asked if hell had frozen over, or wondered what reality Steve Jobs was distorting. But in retrospect, all of these seemingly stupid Apple moves were actually brilliant. ... Continue reading »

13 comments

  • Nice Article Brother. should've added Pages to the mix, thought WTF I'll never turn on Word but its what I did. Pages is an Awesome WP App.
  • Dubbs... IMHO verdict is still out on Pages. Time will tell! Thanks for your comment.
  • Wait, so if you make a mistake and learn from it, that mistake can now be considered brilliant?

    Get a grip!
  • RMD, If so... maybe posting this article to digg (and the resulting onslaught of traffic) is my latest brilliant mistake.
  • I guess all Apple moves were of that kind :D
  • Arbuzz... at times I won't deny that perspective... in the mid 90s when it looked like Apple was toast I very nearly bought a PC. Even when Steve Jobs took over and started changing things it was pretty nailbiting.
  • Good article, it made me think about some of the stupid moves Apple has made in recent times- I wonder how these moves will Benefit Apple...

    As for the whole pages vs word discussion...

    I'm a mac fanatic and admire pages and its simplicity, it works how you think it would like the other Apple apps unlike word which puts all the complicated (and often uneeded) options in your face...

    BUT Pages has a long way to go yet, its very much an Apple app, but it has its quirks and relies too much on the inspector.
    It seems that all the complicated options Apple doesnt want to look at it just shoves lazily into the inspector with little refinement... like how do I change that *&^%^# margin?

    It needs to better implement some of the more complicated features into its interface such as better margins and rulers, and the ability to change font without opening up another dialogue box.
    Also ... hyphenation is always on by default! and I wish I could turn it off permanently... theres a lot Pages could learn from Word without going overboard (eg- I like Word's create a table system better where it lets you visually choose no of rows/columns as you create the table) .
  • Leigh I might have to take a second look at pages. Maybe I'm just ingrained with Word. A good subject for a future blog post though.
  • One seemingly stupid Apple move that was just as stupid as it seemed was the sacking of Steve Jobs. You wrote: " ... if Steve Jobs hadn't been canned from Apple there would've been no NeXT and therefore no OS X.

    Jobs wanted Apple to produce a significant OS upgrade, in-house, but Scully and a majority of the board feared that such an "insanely great" upgrade would disrupt their existing business model which wasn't working.

    Jobs was stupidly canned from Apple and because of it the company suffered a brain drain to NeXT inc , innovation stumbled and Apple continued to lose market share. Eventually Apple had to pay 400 million dollars to purchase NeXTStep which became OS X and paved the way for Jobs to regain control of his company on his terms.

    Apple lost several irreplacable years of innovation time and though nobody can quantify exactly how much was lost in the interim little if anything was gained from such a stupid move.
  • George that is a valid point and a good bit of history. It's almost hard to imagine how close Apple came to losing it back then.
  • Very nice article. I really liked it a lot and it gave me a few good pointers. Thanks!
  • I think that the iPod really, really propelled Apple into the big time. Before that, they were doing well with their PC's and all but it was the iPod that made them really, really popular again and well known. Only a few geeks would rate Apple before that, now everyone thinks Apple is absolutely brilliant and people will be happy to buy expensive laptops just because its Apple (and actually get less for more money). Me, though, I just buy a normal laptop and install Linux Ubuntu – works just as well (for a LOT less!)
  • Have you noticed some common denominators with Apple’s products? For one, they’re really expensive. Secondly, they’re unique in design. Thirdly, they are not that perfect in terms of features. What’s ironic however is that people around the world still crave to have a Mac, an iPod, etc.

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