The truth at Apple is stranger than fiction

There have recently been some articles talking about the Apple-Microsoft war or the lack of an Apple-Microsoft war.  I enjoyed David Pogue's post, "Getting Hung Up on the Apple-Microsoft War," and Gene Steinberg's "The Mac Versus Windows Holy War: Real or Fake?"  The comments to the articles are as enlightening as the posts themselves.

Most people agree that Microsoft won the operating system war long ago, but reasonable folks are able to admit that Apple is making some progress.  I also see more and more people willing to come out of the closet and say that both systems have their pluses and minuses.

I don't pretend to exactly know the state of mind in today's Apple inner circle, but I would like to share one incident that took place in very late 2002.  I think it offers some valuable insight into the "Apple-Microsoft War."

At the time I was attending an extended training session with about fifty other Apple directors.  I was director of Apple's federal sales team.  The course was a customized class on leadership spanning several months.  Two or three months before the end of the course we broke up into small groups in preparation for presentations to a committee of two Apple senior executives.  I'll keep the names of the Apple executives confidential to protect the guilty, but there are plenty of people around who will verify my story.

One of the whole reasons behind the training was an effort to get more creativity from the ranks of Apple's very talented employee base.  It was also designed to help you manage more effectively and to provide you with additional contact with senior Apple executives.

During the course, the outside instructors commented a number of times that few people in the group seemed to be willing to go out on a limb and make decisions.  Finally one of the directors who worked in the software area basically laid out the way things are at Apple.  He explained that he could be an absolutely great manager and make fantastic decisions, but if Steve knew one of his employees, all bets would be off because any of his decisions could be overruled by Steve talking to the employee.  A number of people piped in including hardware designers who said that new products often had to be air freighted at great costs because of last minute changes by Steve.  A number of people spoke up with examples of Steve getting involved in minute details. 

I might even have mentioned the time that Steve personally decided on the folding chairs which were to be used at the FOSE Computer show in Washington. (That might lead you to believe that Steve had something to do with the way options were handed out.)

Against this backdrop we were asked to come up with ideas that could revolutionize Apple in one way or another.  The most interesting thing about the preparations were that few people wanted to volunteer ideas.  There were some people who had already had some experiences that made them a little nervous about sticking their neck out.  Eventually, being a salesperson at heart, I sold my team of five or six people on the concept that a really revolutionary idea would be for Apple to partner with Microsoft in the enterprise.  I tried to get people to imagine the unbelievable attendance we would have at seminars where Apple and Microsoft dedicated themselves to a more seamless enterprise.

Now you have to think back to remember the environment when I proposed this.  Apple's latest release of OS X which I believe was Jaguar did not support Active Directory in any meaningful way.  Many Apple enterprise customers were screaming because the only that they got full Exchange functionality was to run Outlook in "Classic" mode.  Also Microsoft was under tremendous pressure in the anti-trust investigation and Linux was gnawing at their rear.

Against those facts, I thought Apple and Microsoft really working together to deliver great enterprise functionality would be a fantastic win for our customers.  Based on that my group went out and talked to some large customers and asked them what they thought about better cooperation between Apple and Microsoft.  Well to sum it up, they were ecstatic that the idea was even being floated.  We made some Quicktime movies of a very prominent CIO and a key person at another system integrator, and headed off to prepare our presentation.

I think we only got ten minutes for the presentation and five minutes for questions.  We worked up some impressive numbers on how large the enterprise market was and what a cost effective way this would be to attack the market.  We presented some good reasons why MS might like to partner with us.  Some of our thoughts and hopes on cooperation with MS were based on some technical discussions some of our folks had been party to with Microsoft people.  We also knew that many key customers including four or five top federal CIOs were pushing very hard in Microsoft customer councils for better cooperation with Apple.

We started our presentation with the short clip from the high level federal CIO whose agency bought millions of dollars of Macs yearly.  His first statement was that he was hoping for better cooperation between Microsoft and Apple because it was becoming harder and harder to sustain the Macs he loved so much because of increasing incompatibilities between Macs and Windows machines on the network.  Before we got through the clip, one of our senior executives completely flipped out.  He went on tirade about whining customers and how Apple didn't need them.  After we finished the presentation, his comments were that we were completely clueless about Microsoft and how hard they were to work with as partners. He basically said it was impossible to cooperate with Microsoft.  He also said that neither we nor the customer knew what we were talking about since everything that was needed for Active Directory support was included in the latest release of OS X.

Needless to say, as an exercise to get people to try to be creative, this particular one was a failure.  In fact we ended up in a couple of hours of therapy with the course instructors.  The senior executive that flipped out apparently was pulled from other sessions.

I bring this up only to illustrate that believing that Apple executive management doesn't have some deep seated paranoia and fear of Microsoft might not be a correct analysis of even the current situation.

Now things might have changed, but I don't think so.  The executive who flipped out was one of Steve's closest advisors.  The Quicktime movies actually got passed on up the line to the head of Apple's worldwide sales team.  There were a significant number of people who believed that the customers were right and that Apple needed a closer or better technical relationship with MS.  I was told they were used in presentations to Steve.  Of course I was never able to verify that.

I can tell you that at that time we did not get the closer technical cooperation or even support from corporate for the Active Directory integration that we needed.  I've recounted this story before but it serves notice here that Apple at Steve's level (at least at that point in time) didn't really believe in spending money to make the Active Directory connections fairly seamless for Mac users.

We were told there was no money in the budget for the needed software.  I had a system engineer who was already working on it on his own time.  I gave him the green light to spend as much time as possible to make Active Directory integration happen in our next OS release.  He spent about nine months doing that.  He was eventually spun into the developer group after it was clear that what he was doing was absolutely needed and that he was doing a great job making it happen.

The Apple-Microsoft War might well be dead for most of us, but there may still be some flames burning in Apple's inner most group.  Time will tell, but don't write it off completely yet.

Comments

[name]

The very best thing Apple can do is try to be interoperable with the rest of the computing world, which like it or not, happens to be Wintel based. I and many others have stood by Apple for many years but it got increasingly hard to do so due to so since every day there was another application or website that required MS products to function. I personally think it was wise to migrate to Intel, and am bullish that Apple is on the right track to hang onto the customers they have, and even grow market share.

Apple should forge a path of embrace and assimilate; they are the better user experience and Apple will win out in the end if they continue to excel. I truly hope they never choose to embrace and extend though, for it is MS tactics like this that have caused interoperability on the internet to begin with. So I guess we could apply this famous statement to computing even... Why can't we all just get along?

[Peter]

While I agree with you about executives flipping out, etc., I can understand a certain reticence about working with Microsoft.

The software business is littered with the bones of companies that partnered with Microsoft. Heck, take a modern example, how do you think Microsoft's "Play For Sure" partners feel about Zune?

Needless to say, I didn't see your presentation. But I have to ask what Microsoft was getting out of partnering with Apple, besides good PR? Microsoft doesn't want Mac OS X servers serving up Active Directory entries to Windows clients or Mac clients connecting to Windows servers. Microsoft wants Windows clients connecting to Windows servers. "Windows Everywhere" is the mantra there, not "Windows Where It Might Make Sense For Our Customers." Microsoft will support Macintosh only where it helps them sell more Windows boxes.

From the sounds of it, the nameless executive--while it sounds like he was out-of-line in the way he dealt with the presentation--had a legitimate concern with "partnering" with Microsoft.

[ocracokewaves]

These were designed to be break through ideas. While I don't really want to get into a debate on what MS would have gotten out it, that particular time was unique in that MS was under tremendous pressure from the government and from customers.

They were getting skewered by some of their largest government customers.

This was also back when Linux seemed to be making some tremendous strides and MS was being accused of making things difficult to connect.

We thought this could be a huge PR victory for MS and a huge customer satisfaction victory for both Apple and MS.

It would also have been partnering with the lesser of two evils, if you look at Apple and Linux. MS still makes money off of Apple users. They make nothing off Linux users.

Sure partnering with MS isn't easy, but have you ever tried partnering with Apple. Now that's a death sentence.

I think MS may have more successful partners than Apple.

I don't think MS loses much sleep over loss of enterprise market share to Apple. Now they may be worried about the iPod but that is another game

[Blabbering Tin-Foil Hat Poster]

"Sure partnering with MS isn't easy, but have you ever tried partnering with Apple."

Raises hand and groans. You should also try talking to some longtime NeXT developers as well who worked their butts off "evangelizing" Rhapsody during those early times. Lot of their own feedback ended up going nowhere on plenty of avenues including the whole braindead 'pax' which ended up causing the infamous ever changing permissions issue by poorly created installer packages or better yet, overwriting symlinks when a directory was involved.

Apple also has a proven history of promoting new technologies only to drop them later. Sure, some of those were before Jobs returned but all this lead to was some frayed developer relations where so many things were moving targets. If it weren't for the need for Classic, Jobs would have probably nixed PPC right from the start since OPENSTEP was already optimized for the Pentium. Those who remember running the earlier Rhapsody DR's before the X86 version was killed know how horribly slow the PPC version was by comparison. That is why Marklar continued as a covert project since the inner circle insiders pretty much knew they were going to get off PPC sooner or later because deep down, the whole AIM "alliance" was pretty messed up. IBM at the time was more concerned about enhancing clock speed and not adding a vector processing unit (i.e. Altivec). Motorola didn't give a damn about the desktop and more so after all the Mac OS licensing thing which Jobs pulled causing them to do an inventory writeoff of their StarMax systems. While there is no evidence, one has to wonder if the G4 speed stall was just Motorola SPS getting even so to speak. No doubt Hector Ruiz who was head of SPS at the time burned a bridge with Jobs. Guess who is CEO of AMD as of 2000? And for all of Jobs Pentium snail and bunny suit burning ads, the master of spin had to end up eating some humblepie.

So it was no surprise when Apple tried to sell everyone on Objective-C (renamed to Cocoa in Mac OS X) and no large developer jumped for joy. When Adobe and Microsoft just blinked essentially telling Apple hell no, they had to go back and figure something else out (i.e. Carbon). Then the master of hyperbole did the "really easy to tweak and port" routine at the next WWDC. You wonder why application compatibilty was so dicey over several major Mac OS X releases until 10.3.9? Well lot of bandages were haphazardly required in the API's to accomplish this. Apple is fortunate to have some very smart people who have been able to "save the day" on so many different occasions. There were smart people who figured out the 68k dynamic translator for the PowerPC transition. There were a few smart people who figured out how to get a good portion of the Mac OS Toolbox API's to be revamped for use in OS X as Carbon. The list goes on when you look at how certain situations could have been very bad if there were no viable solution. Take a look at the Intel transition and you'll see how lucky Apple was with Transitive having a usable PPC translator. Also, if you noticed, many have found OS X Intel far more responsive than OS X PPC even when it came to the Quad G5 versus a 1.86GHz Core Duo. Again, while there is no obvious evidence, it would not surprise me if there were some earlier motives to not do plenty of optimizations (and no, I am not talking about GCC being better optimized for Intel than PPC; but Apple purposedly not doing the needed optimizations in OS X PPC) since it was already known from years ago that PPC was going to be put to pasture. This also jives with the whole G5 thing where Jobs may have set up IBM to fail due to whatever falling out that occurred behind the scenes (the 3GHz an year from now claim being one and the "mother of all thermal challenges" with getting a G5 into a Power Book which was likely doable; if Apple really wanted this, they could have paid to have it done but as word has it, they didn't want to spend the money and Intel in the meantime was showing promise with Pentium-M back then as well as their future Core roadmap).

Digressing, look at the work Adobe and Microsoft had to do to get to Carbonizing and now they get to do it all over again by moving to Xcode to do a Universal Binary. Any developer would begin to feel like it was dejavu by this constant flux and need for transitioning. Lot of non-developer folks like to rail at Adobe for taking the route they are taking by sticking to their schedule and waiting until CS3 to release a native version. However, I actually don't blame them one bit since it is a lot of work to just move their project over, programming in updates and new features, testing and debugging, profiling and doing optimizations, doing more QA testing, etc. Some of this is Apple's fault for putting up so many damn moving targets to begin and also sometimes not sharing enough information with even their most important partners until the very last minute. I still remember back in 1998 there were developers who were skeptical about Carbon and that it might eventually be phased out sometime down the road. Time will tell if that skepticism was warranted or not.

Probably the most recent burner is Altivec as Apple was pushing this technology not only in their own OS and apps but to developers who could make use of it. For some (especially in the scientific field), all that hand optimized code is pretty much a deadend once G5's begin losing plenty of ground to Intel based Mac's and porting that to SSE is going to require some hard work. The point again is this tendency to burn partners every few years and often times, finding out at the last minute (I'm sure even large developers like Adobe and Microsoft weren't clued in about the forward push of the Intel transition back in January). Contrast with the fairly stable programming environment on Windows (pains me to even say that) and vast amount of information Microsoft provides at Technet including fully functional but time limited demo software. That can at times be a breath of fresh air for those who find their jobs easier to do compared to the teeth pulling which occurs in the Apple Developer camp. If you need one more example, look no further than Leopard. Lot of the fancy stuff (like probably a Core Animation influenced Finder) are going to be kept under wraps until mid-cycle in the seeding process so there is likely going to be a need for more regression testing since who knows how much stuff is going to break once all those secret things are added and enabled. And knowing just how porous the whole testing thing is (because of how cheap Apple is in this area), Leopard is going to cause so much grief at the start.

Finally, go and re-watch the 1997 MacWorld Boston keynote (a copy is on YouTube) where Jobs talks about the renewed relationship with Microsoft (starts at around 26 minutes). There are times you can just see it in his face that he is lying through his teeth. Steve is just being Steve in doing the spin needed to do whats needed at the time (and that is to keep your enemy close at hand to ensure the continued development of Office). Also note what Jobs says after Gates finishes his satellite speech (who also seemed to be choking on what he was saying); "we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose". Then right after that, the true intention is alluded to; ".. if others are gonna help us, that's great, because we need all the help we can get". Meaning he is just using Microsoft as a means to an end for Mac Office. Then of course the infamous "the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned" is probably the exact opposite of Steve's actual intentions when you look at whats been happening since then. He's been taking more potshots at MS and I only see that increasing now that the Intel transition has completed. He is probably one of the chief instigators in that inner circle to want to chip away at Microsoft as much as possible.

What will embolden him even more is when various options of running Windows and Windows applications (i.e. CodeWeavers CrossOver) w/o Windows on Intel Mac's increase. And since both Parallels and VMWare are going to be competing to make their software as Mac-like as possible and including features like drag-and-drop between environments, there is probably going to be a point in time where someone is going to attempt to utilizing some of the core technologies Apple is delivering to further encapsulate certain key apps. Personally I'm not a fan of that since you end up with the ISV situation IBM had with OS/2 but I see this as a hedge in the event that bridge is reburnt with Microsoft and/or the Mac Business Unit torpedoes their own self like they are probably doing by not seriously devoting resources into porting VB to the UB version of Office. All that does is makes it even less cross platform compatible than it already is given so many features are missing from the Mac version that important business, government, and educational licensees may decide that it no longer meets their minimum compatibility requirements. The Mac Business Unit itself is only relevant so long as they can garner lucrative site licenses from their now only remaining revenue generator and chopping off scripting (even if what is currently available isn't equal to the Windows VBScript) just because it is deemed too difficult and the effort required to port it would take away from one of the original objectives of Mac Office (making use of Mac features) shows how clueless whomever is in charge of that unit is because instead of some basic cross platform scripting compatibility, their removing it completely and in the process, making the Mac version of Office useless for places that worked around the limitations in order to exchange documents which utilized VB between Windows and Macs. I know some will think I am out of my mind (not helped any by my own crazy blabbering earlier in this comment) but I would be surprised if there is another version of Office after this latest 5 years commitment time period is up.

Anyway, going to remove my tin-foil hat since this has gotten too long and also gone off on too many different directions.

[Gabriel Radic]

Well, since everyone is beating on Apple's politics, I'll try to get out a word about the product that started it all, Active Directory support in Mac OS X.

Being a UI designer, I always appreciate a well designed application. The Directory Access utility is an intuitive piece of software, with a nice, fluid workflow. It's a beauty to use the application, at least for advanced users or system administrators (not always the same people), which are the target "audience". Nothing like the Windows equivalent, with it's confusing labels and error messages. Actually, the Windows AD interface has drastically fewer options, but they managed to make it that much harder to use. That's Microsoft to you...

However, as of 10.4.7, AD support on the Mac just doesn't work. You could easily "set up" an AD access on the Mac, but when you get to actually use it, like accessing files on the network via the Finder, all you'll get is a timeout error message.

I tried it on a Linux/SMB environment with Jaguar, and it didn't work. I just blamed it on the server, even if the Windows boxes around worked just fine. A few weeks ago, I tried it again on another network, with Microsoft's latest Windows Server (2003?) and Tiger's vastly improved Active Directory support. On both occasion I had the sys-admins next to me to help with the administrator credentials and stuff. Same result.

What's my point? There's isn't one. This is just a bitter report from the trenches.

[Edward]

Oh boy, Blabbering Tin-Foil Hat...

You're getting everything off your chest!

Keep coming out with all that dirty information, it'll make you feel better and all of us a lot more enlightened about Apple's management.

Thanks.

[Daniel]

The AD support is working as expected. I have a network of 15 PCs, when we started having a PC/Mac network we changed from Windows Server to OSX server 10.3. To tell the truth its working better for both PCs and Macs!