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Thinking on about last night's scribble about Apple, I was minded about Steve Job's early adoption of a totally enclosed proprietary approach to Apple product. Everything about the Mac - hardware, software, etc. - was in-house, and third-party involvement in any way not to be countenanced. It's not unlike the ethos that he created after his return to the company in the late nineties, at least as far as the iPod, iPad and iPhone were concerned: totally ring-fenced products and software, with any third-party software input - at least for the iPad and iPhone: the iPod being a special case during its lifetime - totally controlled by Apple itself through the Byzantine channels of the Apple Developer Program.

To an extent, Job's early views on the issue were pretty understandable: the company was relatively small and upcoming compared to the industry standards and the giants of the day, such as IBM; they were treading very new ground back then, and were cognisant that what they were doing could easily be undermined. Also, Jobs had very strong views about the purity of his vision for personal computing and frankly didn't want anyone to sully his product through shoddy design: fair enough. In the early, Jobs days of Mac, the machine stood alone in the world of personal computing in that it could be connected easily in an office or academic environment in a Local Area Network [LAN] via Apple's own AppleTalk, which was truly plug and play in the twenty-first century sense, fifteen years early: just wire everything together and it worked out of the box, including printing on Apple's own hardware.

The Mac was a complete package from the out, but the only developers allowed to produce new software were limited and highly constrained, and as for hardware, Apple did it themselves in the early days. During the years after Jobs' forced exile from the company, the new administration opened up to the outside world of developers and worldwide accepted standards in order to expand the market share of the company's otherwise still niche product line. However, one thing that springs to mind was the necessity to come to terms with the fact that an awful lot of business was to be had in allowing not only third-party software development to be encouraged [something Jobs later acceded to with the App Store and its developer program] but relenting on going with the standard interface protocols of the time, such as the much-loathed SCSI [Small Computer Systems Interface], which gave Apple access to a whole raft of external hard drives, optical drives and tape storage devices, which, given Apple's dominance in the design and print industry [very storage heavy], was a completely logical move.

Rolling on to now; after Jobs' return to the company, its transformation into the cash-rich behemoth that it is today, and his subsequent passing from this mortal plane, his stubbornness on proprietary, in-house standards having returned for the remainder of his tenure [to great financial success, to be fair] has loosened to a degree. Gone is the non-standard but rather elegant and eminently functional Lightning Connector from all Apple products, replaced by the now universal USB C connector; to be frank, a seemingly trite but actually eminently sensible and welcome move. With a new CEO incoming, maybe more of Apple's barriers to the outside world will slowly fall away; but as I said last night, their design philosophy needs a new and highly talented face to drive the company forward, lest the mediocrity of the rest of the industry subsume it purely for profit... 

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