10 Apr
2000
10 Apr
'00
7 p.m.
On Mon, 10 Apr 2000, David Vohs wrote:
Anyway, Hans has a good point going here, Apple did with the Macintosh what
TI tried to do when the TI-99/4A was out: try to block out third party
developers.
Maybe not quite as bad as TI, although that $150 "developers club" affair
is pretty close (at least to me, who was a starving college student at the
time).
I was used to getting an Apple II, or a TRS-80, or whatever, taking it out
of the box, and writing useful programs with it. Certainly not having
Apple tell me (in so many words) that I was wrong for wanting to *program*
the Mac. Just play around with MacDraw and MacPaint, and everything will
be fine.
That really put me off Apple products for awhile. I was so glad when the
Amiga came out: 1, it was color, 2, it was inexpensive color (about $1000
or so, vs. $3000+ for the cheapest Color Mac back in 1985 or so), 3, you
could easily get programming information about it, even in the early days.
What can we learn from this? Very simple, never try to
tell
people they can't develop hardware & software for a machine, because that
will only give people the extra push they need to develop stuff for a
computer.
Yup, applies to that "I-Opener" as well, ha ha!
But this is something I have noticed: We all know how
many PC manufacturers
are abound (maybe too many), by there are how many Macintosh clone
manufacturers? (I can't think of any off the top of my head)
There were at least three: UMAX, Motorola (StarMax) and Power Computing.
(I have a PowerBase 240). More or less nice machines, but they all went
away when Steve Jobs came back. Boo.
And the Government is jumping in Microsoft's back
for being
monopolistic?
MS has pulled some sneaky stuff over the years, though.