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January 24, 2004
1984...
The Superbowl ended, but nobody was talking about the game. They were talking about that commercial. The one that promised a new age beginning on January 24th. An amazing bit of advertising, evoking Orwell and the tyranny of DOS, and everyone had the same question on their lips; "Was that chick wearing a bra?"
Apple had pilfered Xerox Parc designs and concepts and put them into a massively overpriced little computer with a cute personality. Just seeing it made you want to hug it, it was adorable. It was also buggy, black and white, and slow. It put a comic picture of a lit bomb on the screen when things went bad. Now that's cute! "Hey you just lost your work, but we can still laugh about it, right?" But somehow it sold. It was actually hard to get your hands on one in the early days.
There was a definite "rock star" attitude afforded the original Mac developers, and that was probably one of the biggest mistakes Apple made. Instead of shipping things on time, they slipped because the developers refused to compromise on some amazingly minute things. And more green M&M's damn it! In the end they over promised and under produced. They kept their zealots, that's the way cults work, but failed to make new converts. Windows 3.1 walked in, talked business and low cost, and walked away with the lion share of people who wanted to use a graphic computer for work. You can argue the details, but that's the short story version.
Today, Steve enjoys his 4.325375 percent of the market and continues to radiate his reality distortion field. The classic commercial, proudly proclaimed to have only been broadcast once, has this year been repurposed with a CGI enhancement to celebrate the iPod. Sorry, but now we're supposed to guess what that athletic chick in the red shorts is listening to while she throws the hammer? Maybe "Start Me Up?" And we're still wondering about that whole bra thing...
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Before you start, we love the Mac. We've owned seven of them including PowerBooks. At this very moment Nine Inch Nails is playing The Becoming on the Mac as we write this on the Dell. iTunes does rock. But seriously, if we had to choose only one, Steve's box would be off at the recycling center without much thought. |
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