MurphCID wrote: ⤴Mon Aug 06, 2018 6:42 amAnother mistake was when they allowed Jobs to cripple then kill the Apple III computer. Jobs did many things right, but he also did many things wrong. Not having a cheap, affordable Apple computer after Jobs got out of control hurt Apple. I get sick of all the FUD coming out of both Cupertino, and Redmond. The same is rapidly happening to Google in my mind.
Oh, there's no question the pooch got screwed at Apple during that time. However, this was more than just what Steve did.
The IIgs was in the process of development at that point. The Apple III was simply an attempt to continue on the Apple II legacy, which honestly in my view was yet another distraction internally for Apple. What should have happened, in my view, is the entire Apple II team should have rolled over into the IIgs team, and instead of putting further resources into another iteration of the II, they should have focused on the far more flexible and capable IIgs.
Steve no doubt felt those projects were both a distraction and a bit of regression. He did, after all, feel the Mac was both the future of Apple, and the future of computers generally. I think he's right, and of course the Macintosh was my squeeze, but with the benefit of hindsight, Apple should probably have treated the Macintosh as a pre-development effort and focused on putting out not a Macintosh Plus, but a higher-res and somewhat more refined IIgs with full legacy II support. It already had a number of other things going for it, and with the resources (and related budget) freed up from further exclusive Mac and also Apple III development, they could have probably introduced the IIgs as a 68000-based system, then scaled it up with the 68020 or 68030 and between having the best of what the Mac offered and the full intrinsic support for the Apple II platform, it would have made it a lot harder for Microsoft to compete because the Apple II was already a deployed and at the time fairly successful business computer. Being able to go public with a machine which sacrificed none of that and provided nothing but a massive leap forward would have been a boon to everyone.