Pretty wild 3 years in to actually selling NeXT Cubes and Mr. Jobs flat out says "We've had historically a very hard time figuring who our customer was".
I think that's a very fair and accurate assessment, but surprising they let it go so far out of control. They really started out going for the academic market for years, but there really wasn't much demand there.
We wrote a WYSIWYG editor for Yellow Pages (Gouden Gids in NL). It was also used for the Golden Pages in Ireland, the Puerto Rico YP, the YP for Norway, the YP in SA and the NTT one in Japan.
Understandably for the time, people were blown away by it.
In the video jobs mentioned he wanted to sell 50,000 units in 1992. The actual numbers were 20,000 units in 1992 and 50,000 in 1993. This just reminded me of Tesla ramp up. Musk was right about volume but too optimistic on timing.
"You agree that Google may collect and use technical and related information, including but not limited to information about your computer and/or mobile device, operating system, peripherals, applications, connected devices, network traffic, and data use to facilitate the provision of the Software and Services, including support and other related services. The OnHub Privacy FAQ describes the categories of data collected and how you can use privacy settings to change what data is collected by the Services. "
I'm no lawyer, but from my semi educated reading, that tells me Google reserves the right (which to me means they absolutely will) to collect your network traffic and actual data, send it to the Google databases and use it for whatever purpose they so choose. Does anyone read it in any way more legally limiting than that?
I think that's a very fair and accurate assessment, but surprising they let it go so far out of control. They really started out going for the academic market for years, but there really wasn't much demand there.