[HN Gopher] How Steve Jobs Saved Apple with the Online Apple Store
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How Steve Jobs Saved Apple with the Online Apple Store
Author : spking
Score : 28 points
Date : 2023-11-10 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (appleinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (appleinsider.com)
| ldng wrote:
| And how rewriting of history saved Steve multiple times ?
| soperj wrote:
| Never seen a guy save a company so many times. Begs the
| question why it needed saving so often...
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Something something John Sculley?
| steve1977 wrote:
| Who was basically brought in to Apple by Steve Jobs AFAIK
| mikestew wrote:
| "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your
| life or come with me and change the world?"
|
| (Sculley worked for Pepsi at the time.)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| To be fair, Jobs-interregnum Apple was such a hilariously
| mismanaged mess that it did actually need saving multiple
| times over. Michael Dell's quip about "shutting Apple down
| and giving the money back to the shareholders" was not
| entirely as misguided as it sounds today.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow.
|
| It's pretty widely recognized that Apple was circling the
| drain in the '90s, and things didn't turn around until they
| bought NeXT and put Steve in the CEO chair. Since that point,
| they haven't needed "saving". All these different stories you
| see are about the changes Steve made to the company that
| probably contributed to the turnaround.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only
| retailer with significant online sales at the time, and their
| online store was built on NextStep's WebObjects, just as Apple's
| store would be.
|
| Also interesting that Jobs had Apple pay to use Amazon's one
| click ordering patent at a time when other online retailers
| didn't see the point of removing sales friction.
|
| > Why Amazon's '1-Click' Ordering Was a Game Changer
|
| https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
| deanCommie wrote:
| I remember being really furious that "1 click ordering" was
| "patentable" when I first learned about it as a young geek.
|
| The longer I stay in this industry, and the more I learn about
| compliance, customer surprise, and the difficulty in balancing
| usability/simplicity with flexibility/customizability, the more
| I realize it absolutely was.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Can you elaborate on the difficulty?
| barnabee wrote:
| I'm still furious that this is considered patentable.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the
| only retailer with significant online sales at the time,
|
| I thought gateway 2000 was a bit online retailer around that
| time. In fact I thought it was them more than Dell that lead
| the online push.
|
| I guess I'm misremembering as it was 25 years ago.
| jb1991 wrote:
| Gateway was everyone's computer at that time. All my friends
| and family had Gateway. Dell blossomed later.
| pigsmedallion wrote:
| I never really thought about this and took the website for
| granted. It's really brilliant how we can go back in time with
| the wayback machine:
| https://web.archive.org/web/19991008055013/http://www.apple....
|
| This is pretty precious.
| scohesc wrote:
| The first paragraph implies that Apple takes down the website to
| promote new product launches - is that... correct?
|
| Seems silly to take their website down for new products.
| mikestew wrote:
| Yup, try http://store.apple.com during the next WWDC keynote:
| "we'll be right back!". And it doesn't come back until the
| keynote is over.
|
| I assume that in ye olde days they were actually switching the
| website over with new products, or had some other reasonable
| technical explanation. These days I have to believe it's just
| for nostalgia or something.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Back when they used a third party CDN, I have to assume they
| were paranoid about uploading the details of new products to
| servers controlled by a third party until the keynote was
| already in progress.
| etchalon wrote:
| They still use a third party CDN.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| They rolled their own CDN a decade ago.
|
| > Apple's multi-terabit, $100M CDN is live
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2014/07/apple...
| etchalon wrote:
| We're talking about the website in this thread, and the
| website still uses Akamai. An nslookup on their domain
| will show you as much.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| It's showmanship. Drama, anticipation, and a reveal.
| yardstick wrote:
| It's a hype building exercise.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| It does take time for the changes to the site to propagate to
| all the servers in your Content Delivery Network.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
| westurner wrote:
| Somewhere between Macintosh & iPod _+ iTunes_ and MacOS (was: OSX
| (Unix, Bash,)) I think Apple was saved.
|
| And the white cabling with the silhouettes
| jbverschoor wrote:
| This is exactly how I remember and have experienced it, in that
| order.
|
| MacOS became big because of the included Unix. Developers
| flocked. And al ballman once said... developers, developers,
| developers!
| westurner wrote:
| The Developer story is key, I think, in addition to content
| CDNs and SAST/DAST for apps.
|
| iPod Linux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPodLinux
|
| Rockbox Firmware for an Archos and then an Nano w/ color and
| no WiFi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockbox
| podman run --rm -it docker.io/busybox xcode-select
| -p # installing homebrew installs the xcode CLI tools:
| /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/
| Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" brew install
| podman brew install --cask podman-desktop
|
| https://mac.install.guide/commandlinetools/3.html
|
| https://brew.sh/
|
| How to add a Software repository to an OS. Software
| repository; SLSA, Sigstore, Dev _Sec_ Ops:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_repository
|
| W/ Ansible:
|
| osx_defaults_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/
| collections/communit...
|
| honebrew_tap_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/
| collections/communit...
|
| honebrew_module: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/coll
| ections/communit...
|
| homebrew_cask_module https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/
| collections/communit...
|
| From my upgrade_mac.sh: https://github.com/westurner/dotfiles
| /blob/develop/scripts/u... : upgrade_macos()
| { softwareupdate --list softwareupdate
| --download softwareupdate --install --all --restart
| }
| westurner wrote:
| From
| https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1720410479141487099 :
|
| > _GitHub Actions currently charges $0.16 *per minute* for
| the macOS M1 Runners. That comes out to $84,096 for 1
| machine year_
|
| GitHub Runner is written in Go; it fetches tasks from
| GitHub Actions and posts the results back to the Pull
| Request that spawned the build.
|
| nektos/act is how Gitea Actions builds GitHub Actions
| workflow YAML build definition documents.
| https://github.com/nektos/act
|
| From https://twitter.com/MatthewCroughan/status/17200423527
| 675700... :
|
| > _This is the macOS Ventura installer running in 30 VMs,
| in 30 #nix derivations at once. It gets the installer from
| Apple, automates the installation using Tesseract OCR and
| TCL Expect scripts. This is to test the repeatability. A
| single function call `makeDarwinImage`._
|
| With a Multi-Stage Dockerfile/Containerfild, you can have a
| dev environment like xcode or gcc+make in the first stage
| that builds the package, and then the second stage the
| package is installed and tested, and then the package is
| signed and published to a package repo / app store / OCI
| container image repository.
|
| Continuous integration:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration
|
| Is there a good way to do automated testing like
| pytest+Hypothesis+tox w/ e.g. the Swift programming
| language for computers?
|
| SLSA now specifies builders for signing things correctly in
| CI builds with keys in RAM on the build workers.
|
| "Build your own SLSA 3+ provenance builder on GitHub
| Actions" https://slsa.dev/blog/2023/08/bring-your-own-
| builder-github
| al_borland wrote:
| Getting on Intel was also really big. That allowed a
| developer to have 1 computer where the primary OS ran Unix,
| but could also run commercial apps like Photoshop, while at
| the same time allowing them to dual boot or run a Windows VM.
| It was the jack of all trades.
|
| iTunes on Windows was also key, as that let the iPod blow up
| with Windows users (using Rhapsody before that was awful).
| Those iPod sales really allowed them to build up their cash
| hoard.
| re wrote:
| > Michael Dell's comment came after Apple had started to develop
| its online store, but it definitely smarted -- as you can see in
| video of Steve Jobs launching the Apple online store. You can see
| it, but you can't really hear it. Video survives of the
| presentation, but it is close to inaudible.
|
| Even though this article was published today, the video link is
| dead due to the posting account ("SteveJobsArchive") being
| terminated. I found a mirror here, though, and the audio seems
| fine: https://vimeo.com/30998833
| SllX wrote:
| That is the presentation I was looking for.
|
| I didn't realize SteveJobsArchive was dead though. Dammit all.
| etchalon wrote:
| WebObjects was so vastly ahead of everything else in the space at
| the time, it's ridiculous and hard to overstate.
|
| It did the MVC-ORM-Persistance-Templates so early, and so well.
| robear wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to do one small project with it back in
| the day. Really nice to work with.
| etchalon wrote:
| They ruined it when they moved it to Java. I get why (no one
| wanted to learn Objective-C before the iPhone), but it
| decimated so much of what was great.
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(page generated 2023-11-10 23:00 UTC)