TCPalm Looks Back At 20 Years Of Apple

by , 12:00 PM EST, January 29th, 2004

TCPalm has posted an article looking back at Apple's history. Subjects covered include the state of the computer industry in 1984, what may have caused Apple's market share to dip down into the current 5%, IBM PCs and the rise of Microsoft, Steve Jobs' ousting and return to Apple, Apple's entry into the music business, and more. From TCPalm:

Unlike IBM and its clones, Apple and Mac remained closed systems unwilling to share their computer architecture with others. And, unlike IBM, Apple never truly marketed the Mac to the business world, which found IBM's inexpensive, off-the-shelf PCs good enough to do the job.

In his book "Apple," Silicon Valley writer Jim Carlton recounts how the Mac's easy-to-use Graphical User Interface could have made Apple the industry standard-bearer, but Apple executives refused to license it, declaring, "No one will ever catch up."

IBM, meanwhile, let upstart software maker Microsoft take control of the technology and replace its clunky MS-DOS commands with icons and other user-friendly features.

At its peak, Apple had a 20 percent market share, but by the time Microsoft introduced Windows 3.1 software in 1991, Apple had missed its chance to make major gains. It now accounts for less than 5 percent of the world's computers, compared with the 95 percent of PCs, laptops and handheld computers run by Microsoft products.

You can read the full article at TCPalm's Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

We've pointed our readers to an awful lot of these articles in the last few weeks. The Mac's 20th anniversary seems to be the center of everyone's attention, except Apple's. That's not bad for a company that has been going out of business since it was founded.

TCPalm