| Tuesday, July 22, 2008 |
13:22 - A retrospective of failure
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2325941,00.asp
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Interesting article at PC Magazine showcasing a pageful of great-but-unsuccessful ideas each for Microsoft and Apple.
Rather than making fun of obviously doomed flops, though, it focuses on ideas that actually were good, but failed for reasons unrelated to their own merits or lack thereof. Though sometimes just because an idea can't be made to work by the people who first envisioned it doesn't mean it won't be realized by someone else. The Microsoft list includes things like WinFS:
Bill Gates, in his own words: "There is a famous quest of mine called integrated storage, where you have not just a file system but more of a flexible object-type database: Things like your contacts, calendars, favorites, your photos, your music—and how you rate those things—are stored in a structured environment." WinFS was this system, the next-gen underpinning to Windows, and it was planned as part of Cairo, the code name for Windows 95. It's still a great idea. But making it happen? Not so easy.
I'm sure the Spotlight team would agree, but they'd do so with the satisfied smile of those who actually made it work.
What I enjoy, though, is the tone of both the lists in the article. It's clearly not written from the perspective of a partisan on either side, but it is well-informed, and the writers (assuming it isn't simply that one took one list and the other took the second) are well versed in the underground forgotten history of both companies, referring to their "dark days" and early successes with genuine sympathy. It's not snarky toward either company, but rather paints an appropriately wistful picture of how many different ways the tech world could have developed in those chaotic, euphoric times.
It makes me reflect on the fact that now that Apple has come out so dominant in the post-iTunes world, body-slamming its way to the top of the heap with one resounding success after another and taking investors and speculators alike on a white-knuckled space-tourism ride since the iPod's debut in 2001, and now that nobody treats it as a pariah or a subject of pity anymore—it hardly seems worthwhile or necessary to write all those reflective philosophical pro-Apple essays that were such the in thing a decade ago. When people were rubbing their chins over the "visible", floppy-less iMac and struggling to wrap their brains around what NeXT was and why it was a part of Apple now, it was a time that demanded philosophy, or at least encouraged it—a die-hard fan community that felt itself marginalized and misunderstood, with nothing else to really contribute besides a couple thousand dollars in solidarity/pity purchases every year or so, really couldn't do anything else but write.
But nowadays it's no skin off anyone's nose to say they use a Mac or use an iPod; hell, it's all but assumed to be the case, if you occupy anything resembling the frontiers of the tech-geek landscape. The Apple Store isn't a lame or dorky place to hang out, as some people have discovered to their complete surprise. Nobody whines about Macs' high prices or slowness anymore (partially, to be sure, because now that they're on Intel, there's no argument to be had on either count anymore); nobody even complains that the Mac gamer world is so small, because anyone for whom gaming is that important now has the option to Boot Camp or VM their Windows world right off their Mac. All the classic arguments against Apple have been addressed and, dare I say, settled. So there hardly seems a need for any of the old-school nervous, twitchy, screedy petulance that we—heh—I indulged in so frequently.
In other words... is this what "victory" looks like? Or "vindication"? Either way, Apple had better be enjoying it, because from here there's usually only one direction a company goes.
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Brian Tiemann
