One of the interesting things is that Dell was really the only retailer with significant online sales at the time, and their online store was built on NextStep's WebObjects, just as Apple's store would be.<p>Also interesting that Jobs had Apple pay to use Amazon's one click ordering patent at a time when other online retailers didn't see the point of removing sales friction.<p>> Why Amazon’s ‘1-Click’ Ordering Was a Game Changer<p><a href="https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wharton-podcast/amazons-1-click-goes-off-patent/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...</a>
> Michael Dell's comment came after Apple had started to develop its online store, but it definitely smarted — as you can see in video of Steve Jobs launching the Apple online store. You can see it, but you can't really hear it. Video survives of the presentation, but it is close to inaudible.<p>Even though this article was published today, the video link is dead due to the posting account ("SteveJobsArchive") being terminated. I found a mirror here, though, and the audio seems fine: <a href="https://vimeo.com/30998833" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://vimeo.com/30998833</a>
I never really thought about this and took the website for granted. It's really brilliant how we can go back in time with the wayback machine: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19991008055013/http://www.apple.com/education/hed/students/jello/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://web.archive.org/web/19991008055013/http://www.apple....</a><p>This is pretty precious.
> The new online Apple Store brought in $12 million of revenue in its first 30 days, for an average of $730,000 per day. That's three-quarters of where Dell's daily revenue had reached after its first six months.<p>Uhh...<p>12,000,000 / 30 = 400,000<p>If I wanted to be charitable, I could guess that they might have gotten their numbers mixed up talking about net and gross revenue, but... This feels like a pretty big oversight.
WebObjects was so vastly ahead of everything else in the space at the time, it's ridiculous and hard to overstate.<p>It did the MVC-ORM-Persistance-Templates so early, and so well.
There's a neat interview with Marc Benioff where about 15 mins in he mentions talking to Steve Jobs about an App Store, and I think later in the interview he also tells how he gave Steve the domain AppStore.com and it all is just a very sweet story really :)
The first paragraph implies that Apple takes down the website to promote new product launches - is that... correct?<p>Seems silly to take their website down for new products.
Somewhere between Macintosh & iPod <i>+ iTunes</i> and MacOS (was: OSX (Unix, Bash,)) I think Apple was saved.<p>And the white cabling with the silhouettes