While there can be no doubt that Steve Wozniak is a genius who single-handedly helped create the home computer revolution, I was startled to see Woz's claims about Mac OS 7's stability in a recent interview:
Macworld caught up with Wozniak while he was in London promoting his biography iWoz. In this book Wozniak claims that the OS 7 crashes were linked to running Microsoft Internet Explorer, rather than the Apple operating system. He says that his own research made it clear that people with IE installed on their Macs were suffering from crashes, but those who used alternative browsers, such as Netscape, were experiencing no problems. Wozniak’s theory was not given credence at the time because IE did not have to be running for the crashes to happen.
Wozniak told Macworld: “There wasn’t an objective engineering type look at the operating system that we had. It was not at fault, although it was implicit a little, it was not the reason Macs were crashing. Apple thought it was and it gave a horrible opinion inside Apple as to what steps we should take to correct it, and these steps were wrong. There was nothing wrong with OS 7.”
First of all, there was no surer, more reliable way of crashing a Mac back in those days then to run Netscape. People frequently refer to Microsoft's bundling of IE on Windows as being the death knell for Netscape, but let us make no mistake: Netscape deserved to lose their market. I'm not saying this as a Microsoft employee - I said that at the time, as an Apple employee who had the job of working on the QuickTime plug-in for Netscape and IE. Netscape back then would crash if you looked at it funny.
Second, classic Mac OS was unstable. It was so unstable, that I eventually started developing new QuickTime features on Windows NT instead of Mac because at least that way I wouldn't have to reboot my computer every half hour. Of course this was made worse by the fact that I was developing software, but that was the thing -- any simple mistake in a program could bring down the entire computer. And there were lots of programs, including from Apple, with simple mistakes.
You could possibly debate whether or not Mac OS X was the best direction for Apple to take, but I don't see how you can debate whether or not Apple needed to move beyond Mac OS 7/8/9. And if nothing else, the NeXT acquisition meant that Apple got Steve Jobs back. Given Apple's performance since then, the benefit of that, at least, seems well beyond dispute.
Posted by Mike at October 25, 2006 01:25 PM