Cupertino's One of Us

Week of 6 March, 2006

Cupertino's one of us
Just a slob like one of us
 - Mister Evil

Steve,

How's it hangin'?

You've come a long way, baby. You started with virtually impregnable Unix and you took it and bent it and shaped it - and now you've got something that's hardly better than what we have.

We had shit on a stick to start with and we've turned it into a gourmet meal. You had class, baby! Real class! Hey and how you fucked up. You're no better than we are now, d00d. So stop pretending you're special and that your users are protected by 'the power of Unix'.

We have Unix too. We've had it longer than you have, you loser. We should have used it. That's water under the bridge now. You could have marketed it. You're such a fool - you ruined it instead.

I told you a long time ago you had to license your operating system. I told you that if you did, you could rule the world. And I warned you that if you kept up with your fruity hardware lock-in, you were going to be doomed to the margins.

YOUR margins, Steve old friend: the same margins you've always lived in.

People have been getting restless. They know our software is shit. They've been looking around for alternatives. And what other alternative do they have except Unix? And what's the prettiest most 'turnkey' Unix system out there?

Right: your 'iPod peripheral'. (Sorry, Allchin can be such an ass at times. But you know that.)

I remember when we all started this, years ago - it seems like lives ago. Nothing was connected. I was glad they even had 'computers' that fit on shelves. You came out with your redwood box. That was cool and we had fun.

Then Alan Kay happened, and Smalltalk-80 happened, and the Star happened - and suddenly it was all graphics. And we kept pace with you. We made Multiplan for you.

But you were still king.

IBM took your market away. CP/M was the big leader anyway, but you never recognised that. You came out with the Mac and it had TWO applications - and Sculley wanted $2500 for that, with only TWO applications? Lucky for you that you knew Warnock and could make a deal to supply DTP.

Your years at NeXT were good. That was some fine system. It wasn't market ready, but it was fine. Good clean interfaces, good clean design. And after all those years you were finally turning a profit.

What the heck did you go back to Apple for? Did you really think Apple would be able to take care of NeXTSTEP? I once said I'd piss on NeXTSTEP, but I liked the system. What I really meant when I said that was that I was pissed at you and would have liked to piss on you. And I know a lot of people including myself who would love to piss on Apple. But no one wanted to piss on NeXTSTEP, my Mini Me.

You sure fucked up. Of course, today you're drooling at the bit because you have a controlling interest in WINNIE THE POOH and you don't have any time anymore for your iPod and its peripherals. (Sorry, that Allchin again.) So that more or less means I win by walkover, little man.

This business of letting anyone run code as root on system startup - that's the kind of thing we'd do, you jerk! We don't have a secure system! We don't have a secure file system either! We're FORCED to leave things like this because of all the backward compatibility with all the hundreds of thousands of legacy apps out there! But we try! You know full well we try!

But you didn't have to do any of that. You got your basic OS on a silver platter from Berkeley. Voila. Free. Free as in beer. Free as in do anything you want to it.

But you took that last bit too literally. You totally fucked up open source code and even I know you don't do that. You had people delivering updates to your company. You didn't need to do any work on it - just use it. They'd have taken care of the patches and everything.

Too easy for a dweeb like you, Steve.

People hate me, but they don't think I'm stupid. As much as I sometimes hate being me, I'm sure glad I don't have to be you.

Bill