Macintosh, every mention
63 scenes · ← back to Macintosh
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 28David Rosenthal 21Ben Thompson 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Macintosh comes up
Trader Joe’s: Hawaiian shirts and counter positioning (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:50:41 Ben Gilbert This is amazing that the timing of this is right around the time that the original Mac is released.
- ▶ 1:50:51 Ben Gilbert Using desktop publishing software on the original Macintosh.
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:55 Ben Gilbert A .exe or a .app on your Mac.
- ▶ 19:30 Ben Gilbert And web usage isn't bad for Microsoft, but if the platform of the next generation becomes the web, and people are writing web applications instead of Windows applications, that makes Microsoft's platform a lot less valuable versus other…
Meta (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 20:26 Ben Gilbert I think I listened on Sound Jam, but it's just because I had a Mac.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 45:40 Ben Gilbert The company would have been completely out of business because it was so existentially important to anyone using an Apple computer to use Office that if Office, you know, Microsoft decides, oh, we're gonna stop developing Office, people…
- ▶ 46:07 David Rosenthal But then the fourth point, which I didn't even remember at all, was that Internet Explorer would become the default browser on the Mac displacing Netscape.
- ▶ 46:36 Ben Gilbert Steve Jobs wanted to message this as Microsoft believes in the Mac as a great way to use the Office suite.
Starbucks (with Howard Schultz) · Acquired
- ▶ 28:25 Ben Gilbert Like, we're now 12 years into Microsoft, Apple's four years past the Macintosh.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:15:57 Ben Gilbert That failed, but what succeeded was the Macintosh, and it's a wholesale ripoff of Xerox PARC that lives on today in Apple.
- ▶ 2:17:37 David Rosenthal So, the Alto, go look it up on Wikipedia, go look at pictures, like, it's the Mac.
- ▶ 2:17:42 David Rosenthal The Alto is the Mac.
- ▶ 2:17:44 Ben Gilbert It's the Mac with the monitor turned on its side.
- ▶ 2:17:46 David Rosenthal Yes, it's a vertical Mac.
- ▶ 2:17:55 David Rosenthal The Mac doesn't come out until 1984.
- ▶ 2:17:59 David Rosenthal How on earth is Xerox making the Mac in, like, the pre-eight-bit era, the pre-microprocessor era?
- ▶ 2:18:15 David Rosenthal So what you see when you look at photos of the Alto is you see the Mac.
- ▶ 2:23:45 Ben Gilbert The next chapter of our Microsoft story is the Macintosh in 1984.
- ▶ 2:26:08 Ben Gilbert Alright, so David, why are we talking about the Mac?
- ▶ 2:26:11 unnamed speaker Because I think it's fair to say that the Mac made Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office made the Mac.
- ▶ 2:26:28 unnamed speaker Far and away, the first thing to point out is the first version of Microsoft Excel was for the Mac.
- ▶ 2:26:34 unnamed speaker It's especially crazy for all the finance people today who are like, oh, Mac, Excel isn't real Excel.
- ▶ 2:26:41 unnamed speaker No, Excel was on the Mac.
- ▶ 2:27:12 unnamed speaker And one of the first ways that they see to bring the graphical user interface to their products is launching Excel for the Mac, because they basically see the way that we got destroyed with Lotus one, two, three,
- ▶ 2:28:09 unnamed speaker The Macintosh came out in 1984, and everybody remembers the great intro video and the hello script, and I've watched that Steve Jobs keynote because of course I have.
- ▶ 2:29:13 unnamed speaker Yeah, that gets kind of rechristened as like, that's the original Mac, right?
- ▶ 2:29:22 unnamed speaker But in the meantime, Microsoft, the applications group, is working their ass off to make something really great for the Macintosh, and they come up with Excel.
- ▶ 2:30:19 unnamed speaker Excel coming out for Mac to take advantage of the GUI.
- ▶ 2:30:47 unnamed speaker So this is like, okay, we see the Xerox PARC stuff coming out in the Mac.
- ▶ 2:31:26 unnamed speaker I think it is also really fair to say Microsoft was right there with Apple in the Mac development phase.
- ▶ 2:31:34 unnamed speaker Obviously, they're working on Excel, working on other, you know, what would become the Office suite applications, you know, together for Mac.
- ▶ 2:31:42 unnamed speaker Shows Bill Gates the Mac project in 1981.
- ▶ 2:32:10 Ben Gilbert The whole marketing message is Excel on a Mac is better than Lotus one, two, three on a PC.
- ▶ 2:32:54 Ben Gilbert And it started on the Mac.
- ▶ 2:33:06 Ben Gilbert And so what you've got here on the Mac in the first version of Office is Word, which they've developed in-house, File, Chart, and Multiplan.
- ▶ 2:36:04 David Rosenthal Speaking of though, Microsoft here is in bed with Apple working on the Mac.
- ▶ 2:36:19 David Rosenthal Do our own graphical operating system, or at least user interface, and this is the origins of the Windows product, and they actually announced it in November of 1983 before the Mac ends up shipping, which their partner Apple is of course…
- ▶ 2:36:36 David Rosenthal Now, just like development of the Mac was rocky, development of Windows was super freaking rocky within Microsoft, too.
- ▶ 2:38:26 Ben Gilbert The idea of windows overlapping on top of each other, that was a sort of uniquely Mac thing and a thing that smart engineers at Apple figured out how to do that in a performant way that offers good user experience.
- ▶ 2:38:46 David Rosenthal And so, I believe Microsoft and Apple actually did, like, a licensing agreement while they were working together during this time that said, hey, Microsoft can use a lot of the stuff that's being developed for Mac for Windows one point oh.
- ▶ 2:40:54 David Rosenthal Windows, the Mac, all of this, these are hedges for the company.
- ▶ 2:44:55 David Rosenthal And what we're doing with windows and with the Mac is, you know, those are small things within the company.
- ▶ 2:47:33 David Rosenthal Thank God for Microsoft, and I think, again, this probably was Bill's strategy all along, that they hedged with Windows, with the Mac.
- ▶ 2:52:12 Ben Gilbert I mean, the prestigious thing to work on at Microsoft was OS two and eventually Windows NT, but the Windows team in the Windows three era is almost like the Mac team over at Apple.
- ▶ 2:58:19 David Rosenthal For OS two, some of them were targeting the Mac, like Microsoft itself, but nobody was targeting Windows.
- ▶ 3:08:24 David Rosenthal One, it's the legacy of this bet on the Mac, bet on Excel, and, you know, bet on Windows, you know, shortly thereafter, that enables Microsoft to go into the enterprise because, yeah, even though they've just broken up with IBM and OS two…
- ▶ 3:22:26 David Rosenthal The Mac obviously shared a lot of these elements, but it was at so much a smaller scale.
- ▶ 3:22:33 Ben Gilbert I mean, the Mac just never had any real PC penetration.
- ▶ 3:23:13 Ben Gilbert Grew up using a Mac, loved every bit of my Mac, was even an apologist in the sort of OS nine era of this isn't very good, but I'm still going to say it's good.
- ▶ 3:23:36 Ben Gilbert I always looked at it like, well, it's not a Mac.
- ▶ 3:23:39 David Rosenthal Well, that's how Mac users always looked at.
Nike (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:33:50 Ben Gilbert Dude, this is like very Steve Jobs, Macintosh,
Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired
- ▶ 1:49:11 Ben Gilbert I played that on the Mac.
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:01:05 Ben Thompson So I had the lowest hanging fruit in the world to sort of pick, right?
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 16:34 David Rosenthal And Forethought were the makers of a little Mac application that then became a Windows application called PowerPoint.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 3:08:23 David Rosenthal Ok, but it's Apple.
Nvidia: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022) · Acquired
- ▶ 17:35 David Rosenthal Like, everything Apple gives to iOS and Mac developers to develop on Mac.
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 41:05 Ben Gilbert And with power computing and all these sort of Mac clones that Apple authorized and said, we're going to enable our OS to run on these other PCs.
- ▶ 41:13 Ben Gilbert I actually owned one and it was a cheaper Mac and it did not save the company because they had no ability to take the profit dollars that they earned from that and build something defensible with it.
- ▶ 42:25 Ben Gilbert Well, it's funny because the Mac, just the desktop line, has a lot of power today.
SONY (75 years of electronics history in 3 hours) · Acquired
- ▶ 56:52 Ben Gilbert It's kind of like Steve Jobs and the Mac.
- ▶ 1:14:48 Ben Gilbert And he talks a lot about how the Mac factory was designed to emulate the Sony factory, that sort of super crisp, pristine look, the idea that the factories were spotless, that John Scully says this made a huge impression on him, and while…
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 31:45 Ben Gilbert I mean, there was, um, I used Camino on the Mac.