Over at Fast Company's Co.Design Blog, Aza Raskin, son of Apple legend and Mac co-creator Jeff Raskin, takes a look at at memo written in 1981 detailing the creation of the first Mac. It's a great piece detailing early design decisions that still affect Apple to this very day. Raskin even adds in what seems to be the secret of Apple's success:
The secret of mass marketing of software is having a very large and extremely uniform hardware/software base.
Regarding the legacy of The Apple II and Apple III, Raskin understood that severing ties with the previous generations of a system was necessary -- if not absolutely critical -- to keeping the current generation on the cutting edge. This remains one of the largest ideological differences between Apple and Microsoft, and is an ideology still firmly entrenched in the upper management of Apple. Raskin believed that innovation was more important than backwards compatability, and he summed it up very tidily in this historic memo:
The Apple II/III system is already lost. We cannot go back and simplify, we can only go forward.
This memo not only shines a light on the history of Apple, but also on its future: Mac OS X is the Apple III, and iOS is the new Mac. Is there any doubt that Apple will do as its done before, and step forward boldly, innovating at the cost of what customers have grown fond of over the years?
If you're an Apple fan, you need to read this article, and the memo that inspired it. Right now.
[via Co.Design]
