[Swordmaker]

You can't both make hardware and license the software that makes it work. Wisdom from John-Louis Gassée PING!

The Apple Mac License Myth Ping!

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[Leisler]

Who would know if Apple makes money, they never pay dividend. But, hey it’s quirky and it feels good.

[wita]

My son is an Apple fan. For the life of me, and can’t understand this article, so I won’t send it to him until I do. Is there a one sentence explanation as to whether the author has a clue.

[Yossarian]

Gasseé must be getting old - there's not a single sexual double-entendré in the article.

And yes, it is as rambling and nonsensical as Gasseé is himself. He is french, after all.

[Dr. Sivana]

The author of the article speaks authoritatively while the article is full of false facts, premises and conclusions. When the author claimed that except for the processor, the IBM PC was basically an Apple II clone, because it had slots and a tape port. You may as well say a Buick is a clone of a Studebaker because they both have four wheels and a place to pump gas.

By far the biggest problem with the Apple Macintosh was Jobs unwillingness in the mid to late ‘80’s to let the then successful software vendors (Satellite Software/WordPerfect Corp., Ashton-Tate, Lotus) make software that could play nice with their PC counterparts. I am not just talking about having a Mac style interface. Jobs did not even want direct data level compatibility.

On the PC side, the software was able to load the data files, and sometimes completely emulate the significant CPM base already in existence (especially WordStar and DBase II).

In my opinion, Apple had the biggest margin when it had faultless 8 MB+ (Mac II, SE/30) machines that could run pre-emptive multitasking via multi-finder, and PCs were still playing games with 640K limitys, Sidekick and Desqview. Apple’s base configurations were awful.

Jobs learned a lot during his sojourns with NeXT and Pixar, but a bit too late. Even so, it was Spindler and Amelio who almost killed the company. Jobs, and oddly enough, Sculley, weren’t so bad.

[Dr. Sivana]

I just noticed that the author of the article was Jean-Louis Gassee, one of the original Mac guys. He should have known better to make so many misleading and erroneous statements, He also should know better than to recycle articles he was writing 20 years ago in Mac User. I can only fear that he is old and senile now. I bet John Dvorak could beat him in shuffleboard.

He Jean-Louis, the BeBox was the wrong product at the wrong time.

[RightOnTheLeftCoast]

"Lotus 1-2-3 is called an “integrated application”, the rage at the time, as it incorporated a spreadsheet, a word processor and a database"

Way wrong.

1-2-3 was a spreadsheet only. Absolutly no word-processing or database. Lotus' Symphony was their first stab at an integrated app. And it didn't exactly set the market on fire. There were others by that time, including the rather nice Frameworks.

[Star Traveler]

All I gotta say about Jean-Louis Gassée is that it's a good thing that Apple Computer did not buy his BeOS, or Apple would have been sunk.

Instead, Apple brought back Steve Jobs and he knew what to do in order to make wildly successful products and make the company wonderfully successful and to give the consumers the excellent products that they have from Apple.

Steve Jobs talking with Bill Gates

[Bob]

We’re back in 1981. IBM introduces the PC . At the time, it’s pretty much a clone of the Apple ][, slots, a cassette tape interface, game controls and all. The big difference is a 16-bit Intel processor, the 8086,...

The original IBM PC used a 4.77 MHz 8088 processor. While it was, internally at least, a 16-bitter, its interface was eight bits.

[montag813]

Can one run Leopard OS under VMWare? If not what kind you run it under on Windows PCs?