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by hoppersoft 825 days ago
I think this post is cherry-picking history. Jobs also had some disastrous projects chasing ideas outside of Apple's core competency. Newton, Macintosh TV, etc. He also had some grand slam moments that could have been described as trying to do everything. The iPod? Apple had nothing to do with the music industry. iPhone? where did THAT fit in with personal computers?

Rather than poking at the Apple Car project as an example of a company reaching too far, we should be paying attention to whether any actual lessons were learned.
3 comments
Clamchop 825 days ago
Jobs left Apple in 1985, and there hadn't been anything but one model of Mac by then, and he wouldn't return until 1997. The PC-like explosion of Mac models and various peripheral projects like printers, cameras, and PDAs happened without him.

Of the time they did have Jobs at the helm, he had a remarkable track record with new products outside of their "core competencies" as you put it. This includes the Mac itself, which abandoned wholesale their existing lineage of computers and software for a pretty different paradigm tuned for the non-technical customer.

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goosedragons 825 days ago
He had some failures. The Apple III, arguably the first Mac (it really didn't gain traction until Apple loosened on things like expandability and fans that Jobs didn't want), G4 Cube, iPod Hifi, Ping, 3rd gen iPod Shuffle, Apple TV.
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JohnFen 825 days ago
The Newton ended up a commercial failure in the end (although for a while it was successful enough to support a few independent software companies, including one of mine), but a whole ton of the lessons learned from producing it were applied to very successful products following it, such as the iPhone.

I think a reasonable case could be made that the Newton was not a failure in the big picture, in the sense that without it, a couple of Apple's later efforts would not have been as good.

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mattl 825 days ago
Newton and Macintosh TV were both when Jobs wasn't around, and he quickly killed off the spin-off "Newton, Inc" company and the Newton line when he returned when Apple and NeXT merged.
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