Ex-Apple employee says company a 'failure'

Michael Mace, once a marketing director at Apple, says that overall, Apple Computer has been a "massive failure." Instead of changing the world from "bad computer design and stifling corporate dictates," Apple today is "the eccentric elderly uncle of the computer industry -- still interesting, still beloved, but no longer truly powerful," he writes in an open letter to the Apple Computer History Weblog.

AppleLore is an event that celebrates Apple's historical contribution from its inception in 1976 through 1993. It will be held Saturday, Sept. 13, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The event is open to Apple and Claris alumni who worked at the companies during the years being celebrated. The Apple History Weblog is on ongoing record of AppleLore. Registered attendees can populate the Weblog with their personal stories, experiences and anecdotes about key events in Apple's history.

"Although we successfully forced personal computing to move to the graphical interface, since then fundamental innovation in personal computing has ground to a stop," Mace writes. "The operating system most computers users work with every day is stuck in 1993, with very little fundamental improvement in the last decade. The applications on users' desktops, bloated beasts like Word and PowerPoint, haven't substantially improved in years."

View: Michael Mace Open Letter