Sculley: Apple Shoulda Picked Intel

Sculley: Apple Should Have Picked Intel

'Had Apple switched to the Intel platform, the company would have had more options, [Sculley] said. For one thing, not embracing the endless commoditization of Intel-architecture chips meant Apple couldn't compete on price against "the Dells of the world," he said. The die was cast. Apple took another path and ended up a different kind of company, Sculley said.

A smaller one, perhaps, as even its fans acknowledge.'

Also:
Motorola Will Spin Off Its Money-Losing Semiconductor Business

"Motorola's luster in semiconductors has been fading since the 1980's. Its PowerPC design, developed with I.B.M., fared well in industrial applications but failed to live up to a goal of competing with Intel in the personal computer market."

The timing would be perfect now for Steve Jobs to release OS X on Intel boxen. People are ripe for an alternative to Windows.

It's true that Motorola stopped being able to keep up with Intel quite a while ago. But Skully was ousted and has never said anything good about Apple since he left.

The reason that Motorola is having to spin off their processor division is that Apple is no longer buying chips from them. It's taken quite a while but IBM is fully up to speed now producing the new chips for Macs. And this is the same chip family as powers their high end servers so the market for the chips is that much bigger than Apple's alone giving them more money and more R&D.

5 years ago they were promising us an awful lot from Motorola, and they really dropped the ball. For a while it was looking like that would have been the right thing for them to have done. But I find it funny that Skully waits till Apple is back on top in performance and selling more machines every day before he attacks them again.

Sounds like sour grapes to me /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

Too fresh a switcher to participate in this discussion /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

LOL-

When I worked for Apple (91-97) it was fun, kinda like being in a Soap Opera.


GregR

and just out of curiosity, do you use a Mac now, or a PC?

Saaby

I just bought a new Imac with the w-i-d-e 17" flat panel display.

BUT, I really like XP and I was soo close to crossing over. I really wanted a Sony Viao laptop. Sony made Apple's first laptops. The Viao Laptops seem to have tons of included options like the Macs.

GregR

Comment:
Motorola has always had pretty good engineers, but when it came to marketing, they would have trouble selling water in the Sahara.

The 68XXX design immensely better then the Ipax family, and the fact that the M68 family ruled the Unix and workstation market place for more than a decade was no accident. Organizations like Sun, Apollo, HP, and even IBM looked at the product and decided they liked it and bought in, in spite of Motorola's best efforts.

The Motorola architechture gave you more bang per instruction, and more work per clock cycle. Unfortunately Motorola had other things on their mind, and they never marketed those products very effectively, although the controller engines based on the M68K design are still very much alive and well. It was very easy to port software to them if you run development on a Unix platform.

Apple's other problem was a bad case of the NIH (not invented here) syndrome.