Many of the big boys were well capitalized enough (dell / Compaq / etc) to have built an integrated hardware/software platform like Apple did to keep things beautiful.
Whoah you have a serious historical blindspot here. Back in the day everyone did have their own integrated platform. Microsoft killed every one of them. Apple only managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth due to the loyalty of their userbase after coasting on their achievements made in the 80s. It was a very close call though, Apple almost didn't have time to bring Jobs back, it was only because they had a stronghold in publishing which persisted longer than it should have because of weak color management in Windows.
The idea that an OEM manufacturer like Dell or Compaq had the ability to build and market a brand-new OS exactly during the time when Microsoft was driving nails in established OS coffins on a weekly basis is just not realistic.
Points well taken. My frame of reference was the 1990s - I wasn't referrng to the wild-west spirit of 80s but I completely forgot about BeOS/BeBox, NeXT, and other commercial vendors. . .
Still amazing to watch Apple pull it off after all these years.
I'm amazed Schwartz is making a big thing of his time there, let alone in a "what I couldn't say" bent. He was CEO - isn't it the role of the CEO to blast the inefficiencies out to get a company to function?
Even five years ago Sun could have made a play for desktop dominance. They had a good codebase, operating system teams, hardware teams, brand, well-regarded language platform and VM, ability to recruit star hackers - everything you should need to be a strong competitor to take back the desktop (which they'd had in the 80s) if they'd wanted to.
Whoah you have a serious historical blindspot here. Back in the day everyone did have their own integrated platform. Microsoft killed every one of them. Apple only managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth due to the loyalty of their userbase after coasting on their achievements made in the 80s. It was a very close call though, Apple almost didn't have time to bring Jobs back, it was only because they had a stronghold in publishing which persisted longer than it should have because of weak color management in Windows.
The idea that an OEM manufacturer like Dell or Compaq had the ability to build and market a brand-new OS exactly during the time when Microsoft was driving nails in established OS coffins on a weekly basis is just not realistic.