[cma]

> In the early 80s it was priced at less than an average car -- ~$10K -- a mass market price if you could see that this would be your "information and speculation vehicle".

A car is a major purchase and people keep them for years or get significant resale value out of them. Moore's law would mean Lisa would be rapidly devalued. For businesses that could justify it generating $x amount of revenue in that time it could make sense. For individuals at the time I'm not sure.

That's not to say people don't spend extravagant amounts on cars beyond the base level of needed functionality. I just can't think of too many purchases at that level that get obsolete so quickly.

[thaumaturgy]

The economy in the early 80s was in pretty bad shape as far as the average household was concerned, and computing wasn't a "thing" yet. There wasn't yet an internet, not in anything resembling the modern sense, and there were nearly no services designed to be accessed from a computer.

So for the majority of the consumer market, computers just didn't really offer $10,000 of value.

The business market was maybe a little bit different, but still, businesses suffered badly through the early 80s too, and a computer would be an R&D expense moreso than a business expense. It would be a very long time before computers could do things beneficial enough to businesses to justify high upfront costs (plus the costs of finding or training anybody to operate the things). And, computers represented quite a big change in operations, and as anyone that's done any kind of business consulting has learned first-hand, businesses hate that.

With all due respect to the people who are much smarter than I am, the folks that invent and pioneer technology so often view it through a very different lens than the people who would use it, and they really struggle to bring the technology to larger society. Dean Kamen is my favorite example of a brilliant guy creating amazing technology that nobody can afford or find the right use for. Someday somebody else might come along and give the world the same thing but much cheaper and in a different package, and it'll change a lot of lives, and there will as usual be people to say, "But Dean Kamen invented it first and did it better." Well, sure, but nobody knew about it.

Despite the flaws that his detractors are always eager to bring up, that was something I respected about Jobs (and a few other industrialists) -- the combined ability to understand new technology, visualize how it could be brought to a broad market, and then do it successfully.

It's kinda fun to imagine how things might've worked out if Apple had never visited Xerox. Maybe SGI would do it instead and Apple would be that company that made the boxes we all played Oregon Trail on. But, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be using a Xerox OS.

[GeekyBear]

>that was something I respected about Jobs (and a few other industrialists) -- the combined ability to understand new technology, visualize how it could be brought to a broad market, and then do it successfully

Jobs participated in a Q&A at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1992, and one of the topics he discussed were the marketing pivots needed for the Mac and Next once he figured out what real world tasks those platforms excelled at that their competition did not. (desktop publishing and enterprise rapid application development)

Video of the talk has recently been made available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk-9Fd2mEnI

[Decade]

Moore’s Law was working fine. What technologists could not predict was a Republican president imposing protectionist tariffs that made advanced computers prohibitively expensive in the mid-1980s.

[firmgently]

Although consumerism was already in full effect in the 80s people hadn't been conditioned into anything like the crazy update cycle we're in nowadays. I suppose the business world may have been different (seems unlikely?) but at least in home/personal computing people weren't buying new computers every 2-3 years - people did keep them for years. Maybe technically they'd have been devalued but if you're still using an item and it's doing its job the resale value isn't a consideration (in the late 90s it was still common for people in eg. sales offices to be using thin terminals with green-screen monitors, despite Windows PCs being readily available).