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by lapcat 1252 days ago
> Lisa was a HUGE flop.

Some people are trying to make this all about money, but that's missing the point. I already acknowledged that Cook is great at making money. But he's not a "product person". The Lisa was an incredible, groundbreaking achievement despite not being financially successful. It was innovative, and laid the groundwork for Macintosh.

> Jobs stole Mac project, but not the way you think :) he stole it from Jef Raskin

For the better.

"Jef Raskin, who had fought against the application of a mouse and instead preferred a pen or a joystick." "Raskin did not particularly support the innovations the Lisa team had picked up in the Xerox PARC"

> Macbook? its just a laptop., continuation of PowerBook line under new name

Yes, my use of "MacBook" was intended to be just a generic reference to Apple laptops. MacBook is the most recognizable name.

> iPhone/iPad was resurrecting hundreds of millions spend on R&D building Newton by Larry Tesler team

I was up there with you until...

1 comments

>The Lisa was an incredible, groundbreaking achievement despite not being financially successful.

Have you ever used one? I dont think incredible and groundbreaking is how I would describe copying Xerox $16K Star into $10K Apple that takes _30 seconds_ to open empty text document and 10 seconds to save same empty text document. Opening diskette takes 15 seconds, copying _empty_ text document from one drive to the other takes 15-25 seconds, deleting a file takes 5 seconds, ejecting floppy another 15 seconds etc etc.

>Yes, my use of "MacBook" was intended to be just a generic reference to Apple laptops

again all started under Sculley

> all started under Sculley

Fair criticism. I was fuzzy on the timeline for that. So remove MacBook from the list.

What I'd say about Lisa is that Jobs saw the GUI as the future of consumer computing — in a way that Xerox never did — and spent years doing everything he could to make it happen. And it did take years to make it happen, because revolutionary change is never easy.

Ask yourself why Xerox never became Apple. Xerox executives didn't even know what they had.