WebOS doesn't force you to do absolutely everything with HTML/JavaScript, contrary to the article (and a lot of the assumptions in this thread). Palm is kind of a victim of its own hype in this respect.

That's true now, but it wasn't true when it mattered, at launch. When the original Pre shipped (which was the first public release of webOS), there was no native SDK available; the HTML interface was the only interface available. Later on Palm released the native SDK, but it was too late; by that point webOS had already lost momentum in the marketplace.

(It's worth noting that this is exactly the same thing Apple did with the iPhone; originally that device was web-apps-only too, and it wasn't until after much wailing and rending of garments that Apple relented and provided a native SDK. But Apple could get away with that because of the iPhone's position as the first real personal smartphone, which made it sexy even if it wasn't as developer-friendly as it should have been. The Pre had no such safety net.)

Found it! It was called Sash.

IBM had a labs project back in the early 2000s that let you build desktop applications entirely in JavaScript. I wish I could remember what they called it! It was pretty impressive, especially considering the state of JavaScript at the time...

HyperCard never really made the transition to color and "big" 14 inch displays very effectively

I was never a HyperCard guy myself, but I have vague memories of seeing people doing some interesting multimedia stuff using HyperCard to drive laserdisc players hooked up to big (or big for that era, anyway; 30-40") TV monitors. But that was the niche-iest corner of the HyperCard niche.

Or an even simpler explanation -- rather than going through Apple's portfolio looking for things to axe, Jobs instead went through the portfolio looking for things to keep, and axed everything that didn't make the list. Given Apple's cash-strapped position in the late '90s, the list ended up being relatively short -- desktop Macs, laptop Macs, OS X -- so anything that wasn't directly related to one of those things was going to get cut.

You must have missed it in 2005 when several of the AFL-CIO's largest unions walked out of the federation and nobody got their legs broken.

That's understandable, given that your comment indicates your perception of organized labor froze in place around 1955 or so.

Yes, it went from "crappy monochromatic layout in HTML tables" to "crappy monochromatic layout in HTML + CSS, with some slow AJAX stuff sprinkled in for good measure."

Actually he was ranting in Tagalog. It's just that Slashdot's crappy UTF-8 handling rendered it as all-caps English.

You've heard the joke, right?

A new CEO meets with his outgoing predecessor on the last day before he takes over. The old CEO takes him aside and gives him three envelopes, labeled "1", "2", and "3." "These are only to be opened when you hit a crisis," the old CEO explains. "The first one is to be opened when you hit your first crisis, the second one on your second crisis, and the third one on your third. They contain hard-won wisdom that will help you weather each crisis."

The new CEO takes over and for a while things go great. Then, suddenly, the company lurches into crisis. The new CEO remembers his predecessor's words and opens the first envelope. Inside is a letter that starts "Blame everything on me. Fire a bunch of people that I hired. Announce you're heading in a radically different direction." The new CEO takes the advice and survives the crisis without breaking a sweat.

More months pass, and then the company hits another rough patch. The new CEO remembers how well the advice in the first envelope worked, and eagerly opens the second. Inside is a letter that starts "Blame market conditions. Reorganize the company." The new CEO takes the advice, and again makes it through the crisis. He begins to respect his departed predecessor's wisdom.

Several more months pass, and then another crisis hits, this one the worst so far. Out of ideas, the new CEO remembers his predecessor's third envelope, and rips it open.

Inside is a letter that starts "Prepare three envelopes."

People forget what a huge leap it was to ditch everything that came before (including several up-and-coming products) and focus on OSX.

There are so many things wrong in this sentence.

First, choosing to focus on OS X wasn't a risk for Jobs. OS X was the entire reason Apple brought back Jobs in the first place. OS X didn't start out as an Apple product, it started out as NeXTSTEP, the operating system built by NeXT (the company Jobs founded after getting ousted from Apple) for their workstation line. Apple bought NeXT in 1996 specifically to get NeXTSTEP to use as the foundation for its next-generation Mac OS. The whole point of the acquisition was to get NeXTSTEP productized into a new Mac OS.

Second, there weren't any "up-and-coming products" Apple killed to make room for OS X. The NeXT acquisition came about because of the utter failure of a decade's worth of Apple attempts to reinvent the Mac OS. Taligent and Copland were both attempts by Apple to invent the next-generation Mac OS on their own; both ended up legendary disasters. Apple bought NeXT specifically because they knew building a modern OS was a task that they couldn't accomplish. Any attempts they had lying around were long discredited by the time Jobs returned.

Third, Apple didn't burn their boats and ditch the legacy Mac OS overnight. The NeXT acquisition was in 1996; the first version of OS X, OS X Server 1.0, didn't come out until 1999, and the first version actually marketed to consumers (OS X 10.0) didn't hit shelves until 2001. All during OS X's gestation period Apple continued to market and refine the classic Mac OS -- it actually went through two major version releases, OS 8 and OS 9, while OS X was being developed -- and they made sure to ship OS X with a "classic" abstraction layer so that it could run legacy Mac OS applications.

It's kind of ironic really. Thirty years ago Sculley priced the Mac high, arguing that profit margins were more important than market share, and today is the Apple fan's favorite whipping boy. Ten years ago Jobs priced the iPhone high, arguing that profit margins were more important than market share, and today is the Apple fan's favorite business genius.

Yet a surprising number of companies try to make money by making bad products. Or average products.

Because that strategy works! As long as everyone else is doing the same thing. If the entire market is made up of average-to-bad products, everyone winds up competing on price, and the way to win on price is to cut as many corners as you can possibly get away with, which leads to more average-to-bad products.

Moreover, in many cases like that, one competitor will try to break away from the pack with a superior product, only to find that in most cases people will not pay more for a superior product. They will buy the cheapest alternative that can plausibly appear to meet their needs over more elegant solutions that cost more. This is why our houses are filled with particle-board furniture and appliances that break every three years, unlike our grandparents' houses, which were filled with sturdy (read: expensive) furniture and reliable (read: expensive) appliances.

(Some will argue that a product that doesn't find a market is by definition inferior to one that does, of course, but that line of thinking leads to the conclusion that the Big Mac is the pinnacle of fine cuisine.)

In other words, the interesting thing about Apple from a business perspective isn't that they made better products, it's that they convinced people to pay more for a better product.

You're grandfathered in because you signed up for an unlimited plan before they got out of the unlimited-data business. You can't open a new account at Verizon with an unlimited data plan.

And I would venture to guess that they will eventually start squeezing those of you who are grandfathered in as well, too. They'll either force you to switch to a metered data plan in order to qualify for subsidies on a new device, or do the sort of thing that AT&T has already started doing:

Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users. These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle. Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period.

Sprint is actually the only major national carrier still offering unlimited data plans on smartphones. AT&T and Verizon have abandoned unlimited data completely in favor of metered billing. T-Mobile doesn't do metered billing, but they silently throttle your connection if you exceed something like 2GB of data use in a single billing period.

The problems with your business idea are (1) it's a niche business (since most people these days just take whatever CPU their OEM gives them) and (2) the people in the niche find figuring stuff like this out for themselves to be enjoyable, not tedious. They're hardware nerds -- that's why they're building their own rigs in 2011 -- and that means they love poring over spec sheets.

Generally speaking, good businesses are found by looking for things that people hate doing and offering to do it for them for a small fee. (As the old British saying goes: "Where there's muck, there's brass.") Selecting the exact right component doesn't sound like that sort of thing to me, at least not for the build-your-own-box crowd. You might have better luck with something like a one-stop sourcing service -- once you've figured out the exact components you want, bring us your list and we'll help you find the absolute lowest prices on those parts from vendors we certify as reliable. Comparison shopping a dozen parts across two dozen sites actually is tedious. If you can demonstrate a consistent way to get the same parts for less than you would pay by just buying them all from Newegg, without the pain of having to manually compare all those prices, that would be valuable.