From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos
From Address: sdlitvin@earthlink.net
Subject: Re: William Shatner wants YOU to buy a VIC-20
Your Name wrote:
> "Steven L." wrote in message
> news:7aadnQNt_fx_gJXWnZ2dnUVZ_judnZ2d@earthlink.com...
>> Graeme wrote:
>>> On Nov 20, 12:04 am, "Your Name" wrote:
>>>> The VIC-20 *was* "the best thing since warp drive". We had one which
> was
>>>> later upgraded to a C64, and then my brother bought an Amiga 500 ...
> and
>>>> then Commodore was destroyed by inept and incompetent management, so we
>>>> moved to Apple Macs.
>>> Yeah, it was. People forget how groundbreaking those systems were in
>>> their day.
>> Yep. I had an Amiga 2000. At the time, it was far ahead of either Mac
>> or PC.
>>
>> But Commodore management wasn't what destroyed the Amiga (though that
>> factor certainly didn't help). It was doomed to fail, in the face of a
>> flood of very cheap PC clones, some of which could be put together by
>> hackers themselves (and hackers had been a main market of the Amiga).
>>
>> When Microsoft Windows, with the tons of applications for it, started
>> appearing on all those cheap PC clones, the Amiga was doomed.
>
> Untrue. The Apple ][ and Commodore's C64 had much more software than PC
> clones at the time.
Sure.
But C64 software didn't show off the Amiga's capabilities.
When a new machine is released, its manufacturer has to court
third-party software developers to write *new* software for it.
But why should a software developer write software for the Amiga, when
he was guaranteed a market two orders of magnitude larger if he wrote
software for PC clones?
> The real reason Microsoft established such a hold is due
> to the stupidity of "big business" who as usual went for the cheap option
> and fell for Bill Gates con-man patter without actually knowing what they
> were doing.
That's false as well.
IBM had developed the Intel-based PC. And that gave it a major
advantage: Businesses all over the world already had business
arrangements with IBM for mainframe processing. IBM had a well-deserved
reputation for customer support. And unlike these new Apple kids,
businesses didn't have to worry about IBM going bankrupt and leaving
them with orphan products. That's a real advantage for a bank or a Wall
Street brokerage house--they can't take a chance on a new vendor. At
the time, the IBM PC wasn't all that cheap. But it had the famous IBM
name, and that's what Big Business had counted on for 50 years.
Bill Gates offered MS-DOS to IBM, on one condition: That Microsoft be
allowed to license it to other vendors. Since at the time, IBM made its
money from selling hardware, they didn't care who owned the OS. Bill
Gates realized that IBM would cut their own throats, and make him a
gazillionaire, with their open PC architecture, which would enable other
manufacturers to develop IBM compatibles running MS-DOS. IBM didn't
know that. But they would soon learn the hard way.
>> The only reason Mac survives, is that it made its peace with Microsoft
>> and runs Microsoft Office.
>
> Untrue. Microsoft Word and Excel both originated on the Mac and were only
> later made for the PC clones.
That's false.
Microsoft Excel was based on Multiplan, which was first released on
MS-DOS in 1982. In 1983, Microsoft Word was first released on Xenix,
Microsoft's own version of Unix.
The Mac didn't become available to the public until 1984 (remember the
famous "1984" commercial?). In 1983, Apple was selling the Lisa, the
immediate predecessor to the Mac. And it was running Apple's
proprietary apps: LisaDraw, LisaWrite, etc. The Lisa, of course, was a
total flop.
In April 1984, Microsoft ported Multiplan (NOT yet Excel) to the Mac. I
remember when Excel got ported to the Mac. It was in 1985--they showed
it at the summer MacWorld Expo in Boston that year. I was there.
PowerPoint didn't get ported to the Mac till 1987.
> Bill Gates knew (and still knows) the Mac is a
> much better computer, that's why he continually tries, and fails, to copy
> it.
Bill Gates is not in the computer hardware business, and cannot "copy"
the Mac architecture. The PC clone architecture advances by its vast
vendor base.
> In *some* ways, Microsoft wouldn't exist today if it hadn't been for
> Apple.
LOL!!!
Microsoft exists today because it has pushed IBM aside to take over
IBM's niche: The premier vendor of product to the Fortune 500. IBM has
been reduced to being a systems architect.
The Mac was failing badly in 1984-85. Businesses were laughing at its
slow speed and limited memory and connectivity. Sales were poor in the
business market. And without a big business market, vendors were
reluctant to spend time and effort to learn the new way of writing apps
for a GUI type interface.
What saved the Mac was an affordably priced laser printer and a
brilliant marketing strategy: Rebrand WYSIWYG document production on a
laser printer as "desktop publishing." Desktop publishing was the
killer app that saved the Mac.
WYSIWYG desktop publishing was the ONE thing that no IBM PC, no matter
how much you spent on software and hardware, could yet do back then.
For a while, Apple looked great.
Then Microsoft came out with Microsoft Windows 3.1, the first usable
GUI-based OS for the PC. (I had tried to use earlier versions of
Windows, but they sucked.) Now you could do WYSIWYG desktop publishing
on the PC. And that was the end of Apple's dominance of that niche.
--
Steven L.
Email: sdlitvin@earthlinkNOSPAM.net
Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.
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