Wednesday - April 24, 2002
Three Cheers for Apple, IBM, and Motorola. May they never work together
again!
I read today that the AIM Alliance is showing
more signs of dying off. They have been drifting apart noticeably in recent
years, but now IBM has formed another alliance with Sony and Toshiba,
effectively announcing the end of the decade old attempt to work
together.
I'm no expert on these
matters, and I don't know all the history of AIM, but essentially it was an
alliance of Apple, IBM, and Motorola to develop a microprocessor superior to the
Motorola 68K series, and compete with the Intel/Microsoft team. The alliance
developed the PowerPC, which has been used in every Apple Macintosh since the
mid nineties. It's a great processor and the technology has usually been faster
than the Intel processors introduced at the same
times.
But the alliance, in my opinion,
has been overall a failure. How many people know about the PowerPC? Few. How
many people know about "Intel Inside" and the dancing clean room guys? Everyone.
When I worked at Apple I saw some proposed commercials made by Motorola touting
the PowerPC, but I never saw them aired. It was as if the alliance made the
three parties think that they didn't need to market their product. Why should
Motorola pay for an ad that will also benefit
IBM?
So I'm glad this alliance is
losing its luster. Maybe now Motorola will realize that the consumer market
requires marketing. Maybe now they will work to improve their product on their
own, using their own initiative and creativity, and eliminate some of the
inter-corporation politics involved with changes and upgrades to the product.
Maybe this will help the expected resurgence of the Macintosh as computer
operating systems become less and less relevent to compatibility and user
interface becomes more important.
That's all.
Go Back to the Start, Do Not Collect $200 Send me your two cents
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