[Droid Incredible General] ooofest:
Perjhaps, it is - but, not as you anticipated.

Lisa is not an exception to prove the rule - every company has its duds and poor investment glitches in the road towards a larger, smarter path. Trial and error with what's needed by your current and potential clients/customers is a rule in the business, not an anomaly.

The Mac innovation ushered in their future path to expand upon, it was just wasn't fully evident at the time to all that it could be a growth base for a new, highly insular model that would continue to sell in the world of IBM PCs and their upcoming, soon-to-be-successful clone competitors. Because, anything that IBM got into would warrant a first look compared to rivals . . . especially a company that put the highly attractive Mac out the door and (mostly) onto college campuses, into individual homes, etc.

NeXT was an experiment that was never bound to Apple or its customers at the time. I knew and worked with people in NeXT, seeing prototypes before the cube got out the door. Their business case was meant to target beyond the Mac, but its ideas eventually led to a significant shift in how Apple grew the Mac concept to adapt for both business and users later on.

No, this melding eventually became the basis of what Macs and Mac OS are today, in many respects. Jobs was right on the technology, just needed more Woz-like associates in s/w and h/w to eventually see that through. With a stronger vision to be implemented on what made the original Mac a success: usability that is reliable and contained.

You don't remember this history terribly well. IBM came from a history of conquering whole market segments through h/w, s/w and service sales+support of proprietary systems. The IBM PC, with PC-DOS and then later OS/2 were related to how it was never able to grow much beyond its existing customer base and couldn't translated their proprietary desires into mass appeal - they were clunky, only oriented towards certain business functions from IBM's perspective and that ushered in a couple, major things:

Clones, whose efforts essentially forced open PC interfaces and architectures, h/w and firmware-wise, over time. Leaving IBM behind in this space pretty quickly because its focus was selling PCs as bundles with existing customer deals, etc - usually not near as profitable as selling larger, even more proprietary h/w, s/w, etc. with services over the years. This gave rise to Intel and other, strong parts manufacturers as major industry players over time.

Microsoft Windows, which IBM rejected at a certain point in their collaboration with Gates, who went on to build a MS-DOS shell into what gave clones a reason to infiltrate both the consumer and business markets against IBM, in a big way over time.

IBM has come back to embrace *ix, Windows, etc. as a necessity. What they dropped and dabbled in came around, big time, over the next couple decades in their space.

Apple's use of SCSI was completely warranted for their vision at the time, as it was the reliable interface of choice by everyone in the growing server/workstation market and would give them very good experience in how to build something that works without much maintenance . . . plus, could have an external interface using the same bus. With Firewire, etc. they still needed a breakthrough in the market to gain enough of a foothold for the future, which essentially meant accommodating PC standards with their differentiating technology advantages. Jobs was pushing the envelope of where they could go with a proprietary, controlled architecture that made their support necessarily bound to only their company - which could also bind services to their company, too.

The iPod wasn't just a major expansion that reignited their presence in the consumer market, but it was built on support, service and manufacturing models that they were uniquely positioned to offer and evolve (especially in their planning for parts acquisitions and investments), from their history of innovation and closed designs melding with open standards to become more nimble, it turns out.

Not just a market, but evolved their manufacturing, offering and inventory methods in ways only Apple had become enabled to do for this worldwide, consumer need over time - that included taking advantage of their proprietary thinking by brilliantly including the h/w sales and support with control of content sales. The Apple Store and itues is still a standard today for how you offer and support content, firmware for devices, etc. for minimal cost. It was a MUCH larger play beyond simple h/w and the took their years of experience with ideas in their uability/manufacturing/support/service/complimentary sales spaces flying around that finally found a cohesive focus in the consumer world without any question that they led in that market.

This all fed back into their Mac offering world by and propped it up to a solid, growing base as they also revamped what notebooks and ligher portables should be with consumers. Then, they ramped up integration of their content connections with computing offerings - e.g., iPad - to keep folks bound with their entire set of offerings. Apple knows how to control their internal operations and external presence quite well from these years of what you'd like to uncontextually offer as somehow damning tech failures along the way, and their recent surpassing of Exxon in terms of total business value only shows that all of these models have reached a pinnacle of business achievement - both in I/T and beyond.

Socialism = fascism? Wow, that's just . . . wow.

I'd recommend you walk away from Fox News channel, because that's a level of Up=Downist revisionism which only that style of ideologically-enforced ignorance can offer. It's so highly laughable that I really can't be arsed to give you a full history lesson until you reboot your view of the world.

{Liberal, shared benefits and efforts with open government} = {Conservative, dictatorial control by a single majority} !

No wonder you have such a hard time understanding Apple's business history and how it led to their huge success today. You can't get your extremes in perspective.

- ooofest