Wow, There Are Comments
It’s true – the way to get comments on your blog is to mention Apple… I do something like one substantive post in three months, and then two apple posts in 48 hours, and bang! Four comments within a day. I’m surprised, not least because I really wasn’t sure anybody was out there.
Anyway, interesting points have been made, and I thought I’d pull them up to either agree, or whine defensively.
On the Win 95 post, Massive writes:
My observation at the time was that the ‘competitve analysis’ of the OS features and capabiltiies was basically bogus and totally irrelevant. I felt that Apple wasn’t whistling past the graveyard so much as completely lying to itself.
You say “tomato”, I say “tomahtoe”. There was a lot of denial in the air, that’s for sure.
Still Massive, about the impact of Win95 on end users:
You could already, with Windows 3.1, show demos rigged to look identical between Mac and the Windows apps. And people were sufficiently ignorant about computers at the time that they would actually buy Windows 3.1 and tell people that it was ‘just like the Mac’.
I can’t really disagree with that, but I still think the general point that Windows 95 brought the two platforms much, much closer together holds. I certainly remember that to be the theme of much of the Win95 press coverage. I also remember Apple’s slogan “Windows 95 = Macintosh 89”. Y’know, Apple’s marketing also kind of stunk in that period…
Massive also mentions that Apple had a poor relation with the dealer channel and that didn’t help. Also true. As far as I can tell, still kind of true.
On to the internet posting, a couple of people comment on some other facets of how Microsoft eventually took over after they decided to start competing in browsers. Right, but there was a time when it was not yet clear that they were going to be willing and able to do that.
One anonymous poster did bring up a long-buried memory:
Nonesense. Apple’s initial ‘internet strategy’ was CyberDog, which was a fantastic set of tools (web browser, mail client, etc ) unfortunately chained to the technological boat anchor that was OpenDoc.
Mike, is that you? Mike Pinkerton, who went on to create Camino, was the only person I knew who used CyberDog. I remember him as being very enthusiastic about it, but it was about 10 years ago, so I could easily be wrong. It did indeed look cool, but I recall the setup as being kind of daunting, and OpenDoc was kind of a pain in the neck. Also, CyberDog came out in 1996, and by then Microsoft had already moved in.
Thanks to the commenters – I like responding, and it’s a good way to get a post, so by all means, keep writing.