OSNews

Apple captivated its customers on a number of levels. Apple put the power of computing into the hands of everyday individuals. It began in an open manner, divulging comprehensive programming documentation, schematics for its Apple II series of machines, constantly out-doing itself year after year in both is hardware designs and its system software releases. It did so in an "alternative hobbyist" spirit, challenging its developers and customers to think in an "out of the box" fashion. It had an excellent developer support organization, innovative third-party developers, and an air of excitement about it that sadly no longer exists today. Apple appears to be stuck in a rut, releasing operating systems that grow in complexity and resource requirements (memory, disk space, processing power) and computers that only push the boundaries of industrial design and feature integration based on entry-level and professional-level price points. Its PowerPC-based hardware generally lags behind the Intel x86-based machines in terms of speed and new technology adoption (with some notable exceptions like USB, FireWire and 802.11, where it played a defining role) while remaining significantly higher in cost than competing machines in the Intel world. Its software organization has embraced UNIX, a complex and outdated operating system more suitable for server, research and scientific machines than personal computers, and has more or less boxed itself in from innovating because of its inability to escape the Macintosh platform it has maintained since 1984.

Jobs' first task when returning to Apple was obviously to return the company to profitability, which he has done very well. His second task was to re-establish Apple in the industrial design space, which he has done an excellent job of. My opinion is that his third and most important task is to re-ignite the old-school Apple soul (its software), a soul that is oddly missing from its current Mac OS X approach. Apple needs a new platform, one that re-defines computing for the next 20 years, not one that celebrates and brings forward all of the warts and compatibility baggage of the past 20. It is my belief that if Apple is not already heading down a new path, one it will undoubtedly have to pursue parallel to its Macintosh efforts, its longevity is uncertain. The industry needs a leader that is unafraid of taking chances, making radical software architecture changes, creating rich and dynamic platforms for developers and users alike to build on; risky moves are the only ones that gave Apple the "head-start" it briefly had and ultimately lost in arrogance and internal struggles; it's time to raise the pirate flag once again and break itself out of the prison of old ideas, expectations and legacy compatibility it still appears to be obliviously constructing.

The Newton was a ground-breaking stake for Apple because it was a new platform geared towards many of the problems that remain today with regards to data representation, collection, storage, and exchange. Newton's runtime environment was highly dynamic, prototype-based instead of class-based, geared towards the storage and retrieval of small and larger pieces of information (notes, media clips, URL's, ideas), but never really took full advantage of the Internet. The Internet is a vast soup of all these disparate types of information and today's hierarchical file systems, relatively static and outdated programming languages and runtimes and mirrored desktop user experience are not geared towards creating, authoring, sharing and exploring these types of data. Newton is one of Apple's greatest assets. I dearly hope that Apple has not abandoned these technologies altogether.

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