Apple has always been, and always will be, a hardware-first company. It produces beautiful devices with elegant designs and humane operating-system software.
The NeXT purchase is too little too late. The Apple of the past was an innovative company that used software and hardware technology together to redefine the way people experienced computing. That Apple is already dead. Very adroit moves might be able to save the brand name. A company with the letters A-P-P-L-E in its name might survive, but it won't be the Apple of yore.
I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.
The reason why Apple computers have worked so well over time is that, unlike Microsoft, they don't bend over backward to be compatible with every piece of hardware or software in the digital universe. To code or create for Apple, you follow Apple's rules. If you're even allowed to.
In a biological system, the software builds its own hardware, but design is critical, and if you start with digital information, it has to be really accurate.
My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.
Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?
It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, and software has been treated as a form of speech ever since. So if software code is speech, Apple says the First Amendment also means the government can't tell Apple what to say.
We're not in hardware for hardware's sake. We're in hardware to be able to express all our platform and productivity software in a way that's unique.
When someone builds a bridge, he uses engineers who have been certified as knowing what they are doing. Yet when someone builds you a software program, he has no similar certification, even though your safety may be just as dependent upon that software working as it is upon the bridge supporting your weight.
With software products, it is usual to find that the software has major `bugs' and does not work reliably for some users... The lay public, familiar with only a few incidents of software failure, may regard them as exceptions caused by exceptionally inept programmers. Those of us who are software professionals know better; the most competent programmers in the world cannot avoid such problems.
There's a fundamental problem with how the software business does things. We're asking people who are masters of hard-edged technology to design the soft, human side of software as well. As a result, they make products that are really cool - if you happen to be a software engineer.
I think Nintendo is fortunate, having been in this business for over 30 years, to really understand the dynamics and recognize that it's software that drives hardware, and it's new, unique, compelling experiences within software that make it stand out.
From the beginning, the Mac has been about Apple taking responsibility for the whole thing: hardware, software, how applications can work, and, increasingly, Internet services.
[Apple and RIM] are probably restricted, in some sense, to a certain maximum. ... If you want to reach more people than that, you sort-of have to separate the hardware and the software issue.