6 Jun
2014
6 Jun
'14
5:41 a.m.
On 06/06/14 12:14 AM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 06/05/2014 08:01 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
...Which they didn't exactly have in January, 1984. :)
If they had, the Lisa may not have failed. Many Macs were sold to people
who had not previously owned an Apple product - it was also sold as a
business machine. The Mac created that pool of loyal users.
As we all know, they soon walked back on the Mac's incompatible
interfaces and added SCSI, Ethernet, later USB and PCI, etc. (Third
parties provided other interoperability solutions.)
Being PC compatible would not have made any sense for Apple from a
marketing perspective; their angle was "being the alternative". And the
competition appears to have been, ah, fruitful. Apple was able to do
things differently (e.g. picking 68000 over 808x; building an entirely
new, carefully considered UI Toolbox and integrated applications) and
users had a meaningful choice.
--Toby
On Thu, 5 Jun 2014, Chuck Guzis wrote:
It's really surprising that the attitude didn't hurt Apple badly. Other
companies before them attempted to "lock in" their customer base (i.e.
create a captive customer community) and some fared rather badly.
It's just very strange in a period where everyone was trying to be
compatible with the IBM PC.
I guess it really helps to have a user community of devoted acolytes. A possibility, but at the expense of
compatibility with anything but
another Mac.
And would they consider THAT to be a downside?
--Chuck