From: Barry Rosenfeld (barryrosenfeld_at_comcast.net)
Date: Fri Oct 03 2003 - 19:26:57 PDT
Interesting to see Sculley talk about Newton actually being profitable. I
recently sat next to an Apple employee on a long flight, and it turns out
that he was involved with the Newton at the end. (He told me that Merck
came to Apple after the termination announcement and insisted that they
re-open the production line. Apple told him that it would take an order of
10,000 units to reopen the line. Merck said fine, we'll take 20,000.)
I told him about the various theories floating around about why Steve Jobs
killed the Newton, and he told me that it was strictly business. He said
that they killed it because they could not sell the product at a price which
would allow them to recoup their R&D investment in the product. I said that
I didn't understand why Apple would care about the price that Newtons would
sell for, since Apple was in the process of spinning off Newton Inc. when
they killed it. He said that Jobs decided not to spin Newton off because
Apple could not afford to lose the skilled engineers who worked on the Newt.
He said that once Newton was terminated, the Newton engineers were
reassigned to work on what eventually became OS X.
I have long been one of the conspiracy theorists on this subject, but,
having worked for a giant corporation for a number of years now, this answer
sounds plausible. --Barry
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 00:41:49 -0300
Subject: [NTLK] John Sculley and the Newton
From: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Helv=E9cio_Mafra?= <helvecio.mafra_at_newted.org>
< <http://news.com.com/2008-7351-5085423.html>
http://news.com.com/2008-7351-5085423.html>
The most interesting part regarding the Newton is:
> Do you see other similar cases of missed opportunities at other
> companies?
> I just don't have the view into the research labs at what a lot of
> companies are working on, so I don't know if I can add a lot of
> perspective to that. I can look back at something like Newton and feel
> that it could have had a very different future than what had turned
> out. Newton could have been one of Apple's most profitable investments
> ever. Most people are aware Apple spent over $100 million developing
> Newton, but Newton was a chance for Apple to start with a clean sheet
> of paper and to be able to license both the chip design, as well as
> the software. We had a number of partners who had already signed up
> with it. The software didn't live up to the early ambitions that we
> had and the handwriting ended up being a pretty big embarrassment
> because it just didn't work.
>
> But the hardware inside of Newton, which was the ARM processor, has
> gone on to be incredibly successful, and it actually enabled Apple to
> make this huge amount of money out of the original Newton investment.
> But it's so easy to look backward on things and see decisions that
> could have been done differently. It's obviously a lot harder to look
> forward.
Cheers,
Helvécio
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