Yes, they did, and I experienced it personally. I had wanted a Lisa, but didn't have the $10k required. At the time, my IBM PC featured a command line user interface. When Apple introduced the 128k Mac, I got a friend that worked for the University of Texas to buy me one at his employee/student discount, $1900, down from the list price of $2500.
What did I discover? Along with thousands of other early adopters, 128k was barely enough memory to load the Mac operating system! Since the Mac didn't come with an internal HD, it had to constantly spool to virtual memory on floppy disks if you wanted to do anything! Which made it terribly slow.
Jobs himself was often among the first to point out Apple's "failures". But you're talking about a time when desktop hardware was in its infancy. That's not where we are in regard to the Cloud.
This system wasn't tested according to modern engineering standards. In my life I don't think I've witnessed a worse rollout. These guys had the time to do it right. And when they saw they couldn't make it happen, the House gave them the perfect opportunity to put it off, and they refused.
The administration has a lot of egg on its face right now, and over the coming week or two if these issues aren't resolved it is going to sour a lot of people on the concept. The average user is thinking, "If they can't even get THIS right, do I *REALLY* want to be dealing with this outfit for my insurance?"
When you fuck up the rollout, you don't get a second chance a lot of times. |
