← Back to context

Comment by BirAdam

6 hours ago

This. When Woz created the Apple I and Apple II, the entire microcomputer market consisted of hackers, tinkerers, enthusiasts, and hobbyists. Had Woz been acting alone, the Apple I and Apple II would have made a splash at Homebrew, but they wouldn't have been products. Jobs made them products. After VisiCalc, this market expanded to finance professionals, but it was still a tiny market. It was really Raskin and Jobs who proved the viability of the Xerox PARC (and SRI before them) advancements around the GUI that propelled computing to a more general audience. Then, MS caught up, dominated the market in the 1990s, and Apple came back only when Jobs returned and began pushing industrial design and OS X. From the point until quite recently, most companies R&D could have just been attending Apple product launches and imitating as best they could (that's hyperbolic, but not entirely incorrect).