In 1997, Michael Dell said of an ailing Apple, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
Every Apple fan loves to bring out that old chestnut, polish it up, and have a good laugh. I got to thinking, though: what if he had said that just a little bit earlier, when Gil Amelio was still CEO, and old Gil had thought, “You know, he’s right.”
What would the world be like with no Apple? It’s easy to think of what the world would be like if, as in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” all our MacBooks and iPods suddenly vanished, but that’s oversimplifying things.
Even if Apple ceased to be, Jonathan Ive would still be a brilliant designer, and Steve Jobs would still be a brilliant leader. All the engineers and artists who were players in the Second Coming would still be out there, as would be their drives to create.
When I was a kid I used to think invention was a sudden blinding flash of light. I thought of Orville and Wilbur Wright in their barn inventing the airplane out of thin air. A docent at the Boeing museum disabused me of that notion.
Someone was going to invent the airplane, he had said. It just happened to be the Wrights who did it first. If they had never been born, the airplane might have taken until 1904 or 1905, but it was going to happen one way or the other.
So the question is not really what would life be without the iPod. The question is, what would the iPod be without Apple? I think the iPod was going to be invented one way or the other, but by whom?
What would Mac OS X be without the Mac? Compared to the iPod, it’s easier to think that NeXTSTEP would have faded into obscurity, but what does that mean? Would Microsoft be reigning over us all, or would we all be using Linux?
Or maybe when NeXT and Apple dissolved, their star-stuff would have merged together anyway, igniting into something much like what we have today, except it wouldn’t be called Apple. The iPod and the MacBook would still be much as they are today. Only the names would change.
Addenda 
I asked my readers to comment on that alternate universe, and here are a few of my favorites...
Sean Reilly
I expect they creative minds would be distributed across many companies and for the most part, but not completely, swallowed up by each company’s stifling environment. Instead of the ipod we’d have much larger mp3 players that wouldn’t fit in your pocket and kept changing the audio formats that were playable to keep people buying new stuff. They would probably inject ads in the middle of every third song and have an interface similar to the unix email app “pine”.
The computer world would be awful. It would be impossible to buy a computer with a fan quieter than a moped engine and we’d still be using PS/2 ports and pulling 8 stickers off the front of every new computer.
As for software, Vista would suck even worse than it already does because MS would have even less competitive pressure. Finally, if a programmer didn’t know C# they would be unemployed.
Programmers like me would have given up and taken on a career in woodworking or truck driving.
(mainly just trying out your comment filter system)
I expect they creative minds would be distributed across many companies and for the most part, but not completely, swallowed up by each company’s stifling environment. Instead of the ipod we’d have much larger mp3 players that wouldn’t fit in your pocket and kept changing the audio formats that were playable to keep people buying new stuff. They would probably inject ads in the middle of every third song and have an interface similar to the unix email app “pine”.
The computer world would be awful. It would be impossible to buy a computer with a fan quieter than a moped engine and we’d still be using PS/2 ports and pulling 8 stickers off the front of every new computer.
As for software, Vista would suck even worse than it already does because MS would have even less competitive pressure. Finally, if a programmer didn’t know C# they would be unemployed.
Programmers like me would have given up and taken on a career in woodworking or truck driving.
(mainly just trying out your comment filter system)
Random Lemur
Eep! This comment system is effective at making sure you read the article.
I’d say good design in computers and consumer technology wouldn’t be as strong without the strong tradition Apple has been able to maintain. At the moment it seems lots of groups want to design well, though they don’t know how, but in leaner times there would be nothing. Apple chose design and innovation as the way out of the TechCrunch, no one else did or would have I think.
Eep! This comment system is effective at making sure you read the article.
I’d say good design in computers and consumer technology wouldn’t be as strong without the strong tradition Apple has been able to maintain. At the moment it seems lots of groups want to design well, though they don’t know how, but in leaner times there would be nothing. Apple chose design and innovation as the way out of the TechCrunch, no one else did or would have I think.
Anonymouse Lemur
Eep! I think I’d seriously consider taking up woodworking if I lived in the world Sean describes.
I feel like many of the bright lights of Apple would have looked for other places that would let them shine. In this alternate reality, I think that Google would be even more of a powerhouse, and perhaps competing on the desktop more aggressively as well.
Eep! I think I’d seriously consider taking up woodworking if I lived in the world Sean describes.
I feel like many of the bright lights of Apple would have looked for other places that would let them shine. In this alternate reality, I think that Google would be even more of a powerhouse, and perhaps competing on the desktop more aggressively as well.
Linux ad nauseum
Not long before NeXT ceased to be NeXT, the company managed to set their core APIs free, in the form of the OPENSTEP specification. It was the same API that went on to form the foundation of Cocoa. The GNUstep project (http://gnustep.org/) is another off-shoot of the OPENSTEP spec, unique in the world of Linux, where everything else seems to be stuck in a mentality of iterative improvements on Windows 95 or TWM. I suspect a major factor in GNUstep’s slow (but persistent!) progress as a technology is that anyone who is really enamored of the OPENSTEP paradigm can access better tools, a better API, and (importantly), a far greater audience by developing for Mac OS X. And who among us that develops Mac apps isn’t doing so at least partially for the love of the API? Anyone?
If Apple never pushed out Mac OS X 10.0 in 2000, I think a lot of the engineering talent from NeXT would have gone into some alternative OPENSTEP enterprise. Perhaps the strengthened development of GNUstep, or perhaps (and I think this is more likely), a startup that would offer a minor but persistently successful alternative to Windows/Linux. Something like BeOS was, back in the day, but founded on an open platform and marketed as the choice for Mac enthusiasts now that Apple is no more. And who knows? Buoyed by a steady stream of licensing income, perhaps the company (led by Steve Jobs?), could have grown its business around making must-have hardware peripherals to complement the ethos of the OS. NeXT did, after all, show that it could make some kickin’ hardware.
P.S. Love the thoughtful writing. I’m a sometime Cocoa tinkerer, and I spend altogether too much time reading blogs by people who make the kind of software I love to use.
P.P.S. First time seeing Lemur CATTA in action. You rock!
Not long before NeXT ceased to be NeXT, the company managed to set their core APIs free, in the form of the OPENSTEP specification. It was the same API that went on to form the foundation of Cocoa. The GNUstep project (http://gnustep.org/) is another off-shoot of the OPENSTEP spec, unique in the world of Linux, where everything else seems to be stuck in a mentality of iterative improvements on Windows 95 or TWM. I suspect a major factor in GNUstep’s slow (but persistent!) progress as a technology is that anyone who is really enamored of the OPENSTEP paradigm can access better tools, a better API, and (importantly), a far greater audience by developing for Mac OS X. And who among us that develops Mac apps isn’t doing so at least partially for the love of the API? Anyone?
If Apple never pushed out Mac OS X 10.0 in 2000, I think a lot of the engineering talent from NeXT would have gone into some alternative OPENSTEP enterprise. Perhaps the strengthened development of GNUstep, or perhaps (and I think this is more likely), a startup that would offer a minor but persistently successful alternative to Windows/Linux. Something like BeOS was, back in the day, but founded on an open platform and marketed as the choice for Mac enthusiasts now that Apple is no more. And who knows? Buoyed by a steady stream of licensing income, perhaps the company (led by Steve Jobs?), could have grown its business around making must-have hardware peripherals to complement the ethos of the OS. NeXT did, after all, show that it could make some kickin’ hardware.
P.S. Love the thoughtful writing. I’m a sometime Cocoa tinkerer, and I spend altogether too much time reading blogs by people who make the kind of software I love to use.
P.P.S. First time seeing Lemur CATTA in action. You rock!
John Muir
Jon Ive wasn’t even known to Steve Jobs when the NeXT merger took place as, it is told, Jobs went out looking for a star industrial designer before realising old Apple actually had plenty enough of it in-house. It would have taken similarly serendipitous discovery for Ive to make a big hit elsewhere. And the inevitability effect is quite likely unidirectional: such that the Wright brothers would never have been famous if the plane weren’t still needing “invented”.
The critical mass generated when ailing Apple and doomed NeXT teamed up should not be overlooked. Events like that are few and far between. The combination of NeXT’s operating system, Apple’s hardware and software base and Jobs’ irrepressible vision seems to me to be the cause and the subsequent iPods, iPhones, Macs and their underlying system the effect that only such a big bang could produce.
Think of Tony Fadell for instance. He had the iPod in mind for years before Apple signed him up. Why didn’t anyone take it? They had plenty of opportunity. If they did: the iPod would have had a different name and doubtlessly a less refined interface. But they *did not*. Seems strange when you think about it. Did other tech histories go that way before this generation? Did someone have not just the Flyer but a nigh-on fully worked out passenger plane on paper but couldn’t find anyone to take them seriously just to try the damned thing out?
Vision is not only in the eye of the dreamer. It needs to come from on top too.
Jon Ive wasn’t even known to Steve Jobs when the NeXT merger took place as, it is told, Jobs went out looking for a star industrial designer before realising old Apple actually had plenty enough of it in-house. It would have taken similarly serendipitous discovery for Ive to make a big hit elsewhere. And the inevitability effect is quite likely unidirectional: such that the Wright brothers would never have been famous if the plane weren’t still needing “invented”.
The critical mass generated when ailing Apple and doomed NeXT teamed up should not be overlooked. Events like that are few and far between. The combination of NeXT’s operating system, Apple’s hardware and software base and Jobs’ irrepressible vision seems to me to be the cause and the subsequent iPods, iPhones, Macs and their underlying system the effect that only such a big bang could produce.
Think of Tony Fadell for instance. He had the iPod in mind for years before Apple signed him up. Why didn’t anyone take it? They had plenty of opportunity. If they did: the iPod would have had a different name and doubtlessly a less refined interface. But they *did not*. Seems strange when you think about it. Did other tech histories go that way before this generation? Did someone have not just the Flyer but a nigh-on fully worked out passenger plane on paper but couldn’t find anyone to take them seriously just to try the damned thing out?
Vision is not only in the eye of the dreamer. It needs to come from on top too.
Perry The Cynic
I think that while requirements are global, solutions are singular. That means that a (strong enough) requirement will eventually be met, but the nature of the solution is unpredictable, except insofar as it is constrained by the problem. (One corollary of this view is that people matter, as does random chance.)
The trick, of course, is to figure out what the actual requirement is, and what the natural constraints really are. (People tend to write up requirements after the fact - after the dominant solution appeared - to fit.) For example, the requirement that the iPod fulfilled, may not have been “self-contained pocket-sized music player that is managed from a single program on a PC”. That just happened to be the solution that took off. Perhaps the requirement was “get the Music companies out of my hair as much as possible!”, with a side dish of “I want my electronics without looking like a dweeb!”
As for the PC, I’m guardedly pessimistic. Most people achieve an uneasy truce with their Windows PCs, much the way they reach an uneasy truce with the tax collector. (Note the similarity - Windows packaged with a PC works very much like payroll withholding.) If the requirement is “I want to do email and web browsing without hating my computer,” then it’s more likely to be satisfied by a restrictive GUI shell on top of Windows than by a new operating system (and thus Mac OS X would be the unlikely aberration from historical expectation).
The thing that makes Apple special, is that it has achieved critical design mass *and* critical marketing mass. Taking all of Apple’s design talent and sticking them into a startup will not produce a new Apple. (Note how NeXT did okay on design but failed quite badly at the market part. In effect, Steve brought NeXT’s design work back into Apple because he needed Apple’s marketing/customer base to succeed with it. Not saying he planned it that way, but that’s how it worked out.)
History is important. Most important things couldn’t be what they are without the history they went through, and they can’t be reproduced from scratch. (If it wasn’t for the somewhat irrational allegiance of earlier Apple customers, the Apple of today would not have made it.) This means that if you remove one solution, you’re likely to get a very different one. (Technically, it means life is “chaotic”, in the mathematical sense. But we knew that. :-)
I think that while requirements are global, solutions are singular. That means that a (strong enough) requirement will eventually be met, but the nature of the solution is unpredictable, except insofar as it is constrained by the problem. (One corollary of this view is that people matter, as does random chance.)
The trick, of course, is to figure out what the actual requirement is, and what the natural constraints really are. (People tend to write up requirements after the fact - after the dominant solution appeared - to fit.) For example, the requirement that the iPod fulfilled, may not have been “self-contained pocket-sized music player that is managed from a single program on a PC”. That just happened to be the solution that took off. Perhaps the requirement was “get the Music companies out of my hair as much as possible!”, with a side dish of “I want my electronics without looking like a dweeb!”
As for the PC, I’m guardedly pessimistic. Most people achieve an uneasy truce with their Windows PCs, much the way they reach an uneasy truce with the tax collector. (Note the similarity - Windows packaged with a PC works very much like payroll withholding.) If the requirement is “I want to do email and web browsing without hating my computer,” then it’s more likely to be satisfied by a restrictive GUI shell on top of Windows than by a new operating system (and thus Mac OS X would be the unlikely aberration from historical expectation).
The thing that makes Apple special, is that it has achieved critical design mass *and* critical marketing mass. Taking all of Apple’s design talent and sticking them into a startup will not produce a new Apple. (Note how NeXT did okay on design but failed quite badly at the market part. In effect, Steve brought NeXT’s design work back into Apple because he needed Apple’s marketing/customer base to succeed with it. Not saying he planned it that way, but that’s how it worked out.)
History is important. Most important things couldn’t be what they are without the history they went through, and they can’t be reproduced from scratch. (If it wasn’t for the somewhat irrational allegiance of earlier Apple customers, the Apple of today would not have made it.) This means that if you remove one solution, you’re likely to get a very different one. (Technically, it means life is “chaotic”, in the mathematical sense. But we knew that. :-)
Matt James
I’m not sure the association with the Wright’s plane is a good one. Yes, a plane would have been created eventually, but that would be like saying “a hard disk mp3 player” would have been done better. I think what’s interesting is that what makes the iPod is a collection of a lot of things (including iTunes, etc). So, yes, we’d have a pretty good portable MP3 player, but I’m not sure we’d have all the ingredients for what makes the iPod and iPod, not a Zune. Then again, perhaps we missed a golden opportunity in the past for an even better mp3 player. Who knows?
I’m not sure the association with the Wright’s plane is a good one. Yes, a plane would have been created eventually, but that would be like saying “a hard disk mp3 player” would have been done better. I think what’s interesting is that what makes the iPod is a collection of a lot of things (including iTunes, etc). So, yes, we’d have a pretty good portable MP3 player, but I’m not sure we’d have all the ingredients for what makes the iPod and iPod, not a Zune. Then again, perhaps we missed a golden opportunity in the past for an even better mp3 player. Who knows?
Mark Hughes
Circa Amelio, there were two good alternative OS’s: OS/2 and BeOS.
IBM was going to fumble the OS/2 marketing and developer programs regardless of who else was in the market, despite being technologically far in advance of anyone except NeXT, and a lot of creative types would never have switched to an IBM OS, no matter how good it was.
OpenStep was never going anywhere without a major company’s support; still isn’t, all these years later. Likewise for Linux, with the added problem that the core Linux developers are not capable of/not interested in style or making an attractive, pleasant user interface, so there was never any chance of a Linux desktop takeover.
That leaves BeOS, which had a good shot at becoming the replacement for the Mac even in our reality, had a charismatic and stylish leader, and was technologically interesting, which drew many hackers to it. Without Apple sucking the oxygen out of the room, anyone who didn’t want to be on MS, anyone who wanted a good media machine, would have been on BeOS.
If you ended up in that world, you probably wouldn’t even notice the difference, other than Jean-Louis Gassee replacing Jobs at the WWDC.
Circa Amelio, there were two good alternative OS’s: OS/2 and BeOS.
IBM was going to fumble the OS/2 marketing and developer programs regardless of who else was in the market, despite being technologically far in advance of anyone except NeXT, and a lot of creative types would never have switched to an IBM OS, no matter how good it was.
OpenStep was never going anywhere without a major company’s support; still isn’t, all these years later. Likewise for Linux, with the added problem that the core Linux developers are not capable of/not interested in style or making an attractive, pleasant user interface, so there was never any chance of a Linux desktop takeover.
That leaves BeOS, which had a good shot at becoming the replacement for the Mac even in our reality, had a charismatic and stylish leader, and was technologically interesting, which drew many hackers to it. Without Apple sucking the oxygen out of the room, anyone who didn’t want to be on MS, anyone who wanted a good media machine, would have been on BeOS.
If you ended up in that world, you probably wouldn’t even notice the difference, other than Jean-Louis Gassee replacing Jobs at the WWDC.
Bill
I do think that things would be really different without Apple. We would certainly have technology that performs the functions our iPods and Macs do, but its hard to say that we would love them. Without Apple there is no Mac for me to obsessively fiddle with. Maybe I would be a much better musician because of all the extra time I would have had to practice. Or maybe I would just love some other computer because I didn’t know any better.
I do think that things would be really different without Apple. We would certainly have technology that performs the functions our iPods and Macs do, but its hard to say that we would love them. Without Apple there is no Mac for me to obsessively fiddle with. Maybe I would be a much better musician because of all the extra time I would have had to practice. Or maybe I would just love some other computer because I didn’t know any better.
Colin Barrett
I think a more interesting, related question I’ve often thought about is:
What would have happened if Apple had bought Be?
This comment space is too small, and the hour too late, to write my full thoughts, but consider how close it came to happening (IIRC it was only the question of price -- Be wanted $400m and Apple was only willing to pay a quarter of that, despite paying $452m for NeXT).
Another interesting one is what would have happened if Jobs had not come over from NeXT (for whatever reason, perhaps illness, bad blood, etc).
I love this Alternate History stuff.
I think a more interesting, related question I’ve often thought about is:
What would have happened if Apple had bought Be?
This comment space is too small, and the hour too late, to write my full thoughts, but consider how close it came to happening (IIRC it was only the question of price -- Be wanted $400m and Apple was only willing to pay a quarter of that, despite paying $452m for NeXT).
Another interesting one is what would have happened if Jobs had not come over from NeXT (for whatever reason, perhaps illness, bad blood, etc).
I love this Alternate History stuff.
In Bloom County, Berke Breathed’s hacker-hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes, wielded the power of the mighty Banana Jr. Illustration provided by the internet.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
A World Without Apple
