Hlycrp. The Knowledge Navigator just took another stupendously huge step closer to becoming a reality -- first the iPad, now this!

I've been waiting for Apple to come good on the Navi since I first saw the concept video in 1987. BRING IT ON, STEVE!

Originally Posted by Brains

Hlycrp. The Knowledge Navigator just took another stupendously huge step closer to becoming a reality -- first the iPad, now this!

I've been waiting for Apple to come good on the Navi since I first saw the concept video in 1987. BRING IT ON, STEVE!

Okay... who stole our Brains!?!?

That's the first time I've seen you enthusiastic about a "new" apple product in ages, Brains! It's good to see.

Funnily enough, I saw the Siri stuff on another site and they talked about how Siri were influenced by the Knowledge Navigator and I instantly thought of you.

Y'know, looking back at that era and since, I really wonder who was the true visionary?

It was John Sculley who recognised Bill Atkinson's "HyperCard" for the revolution it was, who defied the board by agreeing with Bill that it should be given away with every Mac. Without HyperCard, Tim Berners-Lee would not have created the World Wide Web.

It was John Scully who founded and funded the Advanced Technology Group, the birthplace of QuickTime, AppleScript, OpenDoc and PlainTalk -- with the exception of OpenDoc, all now accepted as a standard part of MacOS.

It was John Sculley who pushed for the Newton and thereby inventing the whole PDA industry; Jobs comes along twenty years later, copies everyone else by gluing a phone into a PDA "creating" the iPhone.

John then commissioned the Knowledge Navigator video, the concepts it showed in 1987 turned the whole concept of user interfaces and triggered the creation of a new branch of computer science, Human-Computer Interaction, as well as completely revitalising research into speech recognition. "Navi" to its fans & advocates, it showed Hollywood that a computer you could talk to didn't have to fill a space-ship and that you didn't need a keyboard -- Minority Report and Star Trek TNG would have been a lot different without it.

And of course, along comes El Jobso twenty years later with his touch driven iPad and now the ability to use it simply by using natural spoken language.

Jobs isn't a visionary. He's a dictator, his only true skill is finding shit that people will buy because its friendly and then screw them for all he can get out of them.

Originally Posted by Brains

his only true skill is finding shit that people will buy because its friendly and then screw them for all he can get out of them.

Your point being?
Isn't that what all sales people (aspire to) do?

I swear to god, you posts get more bitter with each day lately…

Sculley's "innovations" were all well and good, but the company was losing money hand over fist towards the end of Sculley's reign. No company = no products.

brains is spot on. He's influential, and makes a turtle neck look bloody grand.

Originally Posted by grfxninja

Your point being?
Isn't that what all sales people (aspire to) do?

I swear to god, you posts get more bitter with each day lately…

I'm with Brains on this one. Scully has always been portrayed as the guy who almost sunk Apple, but never credited with the good things he did. He was just 20 years too early!

I don't think Jobs is the visionary that can come up with an idea or a concept and run with it. I think he looks at an idea that's already in the wild, and tweaks it. Mp3 players -> iPod. eMate -> iBook. Treo smartphones -> iPhone. Newton 2000/Win Tablets -> iPad. That he excels at

And back on track, Siri reminds me of how the Assistant used to work on the Newton (albeit with voice rather than handwriting). That was the one thing that really separated the Newton from the rest of the so called PDAs. The ability to "think" and the global data sharing made the Newton a fantastic tool. I hope the iPad eventually follows the same path (especially if there is a Moreinfo app for the iPad - that rocked!!)

I think that it's a big slap in the face to all the smart guys and girls at Apple to say that Steve is responsible for anything.

He is, in my view, the guy that gives the green light to what is good. While that might not sound like much compared to someone who comes up with the ideas, it's as Jobs said at All Things D: a few years ago:

Proud, not just of the products Apple had shipped, but also the products it had decided not to ship.

That's probably more important than anything else. The one BIG mistake that I see as a product Apple shipped since I've been buying their stuff was putting their name to cROKR - the Motorola pile of shite.

That is where there is value in having a Steve Jobs onboard.

Hey, I didn't call Sculley a business genius, you can thank Del Yocam for formalising & restructuring Apple into an efficient and accountable world-class company. And it was Mike Spindler who was responsible for the split personality product lines that caused more confusion than anything else. Gassee was charismatic driving force that refined the Mac line, as well as coming up with the original idea to keep prices high. Co-founder Mike Markkula admired Sculley's vision, but deplored his lack of direction, so Sculley had to go. Unfortunately, his choice of replacement -- Spindler -- wasn't any better, and in some ways much worse. It wasn't uncommon to find Spindler curled up in a ball under his desk with a panic attack due to stress. Gil Amelio was just Markkula's yes-man, the only right thing he did was over-ride the Board and choose Jobs and NeXT over Gassee's BeOS and then piss off to the park with his platinum handshake.

Jobs did revitalise Apple, but not because of OSX, nor his recruitment of Jon Ive as lead designer. He did the right thing by killing the clones, but the wrong thing in completely closing down the ATG. Apart from his uncanny eye for (as lavo put it) finding an idea and tweaking it, Jobs' first and foremost skill is purchasing. No matter who had the components he wanted, he could swing the most incredible deals and get pricing and supply contracts that were the envy of Silicon Valley. His first baby, the original iMac, despite its record low price, had a post-production margin higher than any other computer in Apple's history.

A visionary isn't going to be able to cut corners, find something that catches the eye of the general public in the fastest way possible, and then produce the goods for the lowest cost possible. No, for that you need a ruthless, utter bastard who is prepared to exploit any opportunity, who wields dictatorial power over the corporate entity as if it were his own personal feifdom with his hand in every pie and eye watching over every shoulder. And the Board let him get away with it because the money started flowing back in hand over fist, with revenue flows not seen since the early part of the Jobs / Sculley / Gassee golden years, when Apple could do no wrong.

Jobs holds all the cards now, and he may have had a vision of bringing the graphical interface to the masses, but he was never ever a visionary.

great product:

can't wait to see it in OS5!

neither Steve Jobs or John Sculley is responsible for the innovations of HCI and interactive computing, the research has been around for years, but as others have said Steve is good (or has the right type of people working for him) at knowing when the technology and society is ready for these innovations. Tablet computing has been around for years ... but it took apple and their boffins to put all the pieces together.