Nothing like success
After losing cash over its Newton project, Apple thinks
that now it is so popular with its legions of black-shirted
goose-stepping fanboys that it can repackage the project again.
While it has been known that Apple was going to release a
tablet for a while, it seems that it is going to stubbornly do it the
same way it did last time. Apple has rehired Michael Tchao, one of the original
developers of Apple's Newton personal digital assistant. Tchao will be the vice president of product marketing for
the project. Tchao spent 10 years at Apple, overseeing product
marketing for the Newton. He was supposed to have twisted the arm of former
Apple CEO John Scully to including the company's handwriting recognition
technology into what would become Apple's first consumer device.
The gear was a lemon and was plagued by poor reviews that
pointed to the difficulty in its handwriting recognition capabilities.
Newton and the tablet failed to catch on and Apple abandoned the
project in 1998. With Tchao on board it seems to suggest that Apple
wants
the same ideas that lead to the Newton fiasco repeated.
However there are a few differences this time. The first
is that Apple has got a better hardware skillset than it had in the
1990s. It is better at creating gadgets than it is at making PCs,
which was not the case in Newton's day. But perhaps the biggest
difference it that Apple is more
popular than it was then. It has people who believe that what ever the
company makes should be “ground breaking” and technologically superior.
This time it has Steve Jobs behind the project. He might
have something to personally prove to Scully and is therefore focusing
all of Apple's efforts into the project.