🚀 go-pugleaf

Anybody who thinks that the presence of this or that wonderful new computer
is going to seriously impact the value of a Mac does not understand where
that value comes from.

I know of at least 10 companies that make and sell small personal
computers that are better than the Mac. Not very many of them are as cheap
as the Mac, but some are. I won't bore you with details, but even though
they are somehow better than the Mac--a faster processor or a multitasking
operating system or a bigger screen and/or color, or a custom IC for handling
graphics, better communication capabilities, or what have you--the Mac still
has more value. Furthermore, the Mac will continue to have that value long
after most of those companies have gone the way of all flash. There was one
company right here in Silicon Valley, whose name I can't remember right now,
that brought out a computer quite like the Amiga about a year ago. It had
custom VLSI chips for handling color graphics, it had such advanced graphics
capabilities that you could almost do color animation on it, and it had a
very promising operating system. As far as I know the company is now out of
business, and I have never known anybody who bought one of those computers,
because although it was wonderful it was not valuable.

The Mac is valuable because it is a very good engineering compromise. There
are a thousand variables in the design and marketing of a computer, and the
computer company must make decisions about all of them. If the computer is
too good it will be too expensive and nobody will buy it and therefore
nobody will write software for it. If the computer is too crummy nobody will
be able to write software for it. If the operating system is too advanced
nobody will understand how to use it; if the operating system is too moronic
nobody will want to use it. And so forth.

Apple has done a magnificent job of engineering a computer to fit right
smack squarely into the middle of current low-cost high-technology demand,
of writing an operating system for that computer that gets most of the
compromises right, of designing a network interface for it that does the
right things (more or less) and getting it out on time, of coordinating
efforts by 3rd-party software houses, OEM peripheral vendors, textbook
writers, retail stores, graphic designers, college professors, and so forth.

I am quite confident that on February 26, 1990, five years from today, I
will still be getting useful work done on my Macintosh, and that there will
still be reasons why I am reluctant to switch from it to the then-favorite
computer. I am equally confident that on February 26, 1995, ten years from
today, that there will be quite a number of people worldwide who are still
getting useful work done with their Macintoshes. I probably will have moved
up by then.

This is why I am not worried about this or that new computer having much
impact on the value of my Mac. While the Mac is not perfect, not
state-of-the-art, not as good as it could have been, it probably would not
have been as successful if it had been better. The Mac has succeeded in
raising the consciousnesses of a whole generation of Americans about what
computers can do; until the Mac came along, most people thought that the IBM
PC was a good computer. Now they know better. If the Mac had been 40%
"better", or 50% "better", it might not have had the impact that it has had,
and therefore it might have been a failure even though it was "better".

If you read the history of computer design and computer sales and computer
company failures, you will see this happening over and over and over again.
The best computers are not the ones that are most technologically advanced,
they are the ones that are suffiently advanced to be worth switching to, but
not so advanced as to be cut off from the (changing) mainstream of
technology.
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA