the Death Watch for Apple Computer

When I established this counter on Jan 1, 2000,  Apple was exhibiting many of the signs of a company in the process of "spiraling in".

• They had run out of innovative new ideas, and their competitors have caught on to all their older innovations.
• They had lost a lot of money
• They had sacrifed assets to make the bottom line look temporarily better
  • First they killed the new OS, which left Macintoshes running a relic designed for 128K Macs in 1984.
  • Then they killed the Clones, basicly admitting that they couldn't even compete with themselves in the hardware market.
  • Then they killed Claris, basicly admitting that they can't develop software anymore, either.
  • Then they killed the Newton, admitting that their most recent great new idea wasn't so great after all.

Sorry, but that's the way I saw it. I wished it weren't true.

In the five following years, Apple has unquestionably pulled off a Still Here in their core business, and has managed to maintain and even enhance their reputation for innovation.  So here's what they did right, which kept them in the game.

• They built another new operating system which is arguably better than the one they scrapped.  The surface layer of the operating system may still look like the old 128K Macintosh legacy, but it now has solid UNIX foundations, and a clear path to leave that old junk behind.
• They continued to build innovative computers.  I was skeptical about the original IMacs, where the main innovations seemed to be different colors of plastic case, but newer G3, G5 Gx hardware has been solid, if not revolutionary.
• And finally, Apple has been genuinely innovative as well as successful with the IPOD and ITUNES.