Professor Elam

Tuesday January 21 2014

This author wonders if the innovative spirit of Apple died with Steve Jobs.

Here are my thoughts on that issue.

Apple has been pronounced DOA before, recall Mike Dell in 1999 suggesting Apple collapse the company and pay off the shareholders with what was left. But it worked out the other way with Dell going private.

While Jobs is correctly credited with iTunes, then iPod, then iPhone, then iPad

one writer observed that Jobs was lucky. One cannot be ahead of the invention time line. Say what yo uwill , lots of inventors tried hearvier than air powered flight but it took till 1903 for two bicycle mechanics to get it to work. Jobs tried a table named Newton before he was removed. it flopped, as did every other tablet during that thime. The one writer made the point that Jobs was lucky to be off duty in the late 1990s. Technology had to catch up.

A decent analogy is to continue the airplane analogy. Aircraft made unbelievable strides from 1903 to teh introduction of the 707 jet in the 1960s. Yet today, some 707s, particularly as re fuelers for the military are still in service as is the long running 747. Some forward thinking projects have been complete flops like the SST, retired from service a few years ago. And it probably never makde British or French Air anymoney. INdeed Tom Wolfe relates in The Right Stuff, that the military pilots were highly suspicious of the proposed Mercury Program. They had seen too many far out projects that failed up to that time.

The idea of an integrated tv is probably realistic. Johnny Carson used to joke on the Tonight Show that every VCR in America blinked 12:00 since no one could determine how to program the darned thing. It seems incredible that tvs do not have that internal capability or at least connect to a hard drive with on screen programming that would allow that..

In college in the 1960s linguists were trying to use huge computers to translate languages. lately that has become a reality, but it was just a bridge too far then. Cut Apple some slack, look at Dell and HPQ still palying catch up.