Re: Guru needed

[Phil Rose <pjrose@servtech.com>]

>Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 06:29:41 -0400
>From: Robert Myers <rmyers@inetone.net>
>Subject: Re: Guru needed
>
>At 12:22 AM 8/10/98 -0600, you wrote:
>>At 10:35 PM on 8/9/98, Robert Myers wrote:

>
>There is one small difference, though.  When you buy an Audi you are not
>totally locked into 100% Audi replacement parts.  Other suppliers produce
>parts which will work for most DIY repairs.  When you buy a Mac you become
>locked into the fortunes of Apple.  In particular, there seems to be very
>little software other than Apple produced software for the Mac.

Well, no argument from me that Apple has indulged in the "shoot self in
foot" pastime, however you're _completely_ off the mark in thinking that
any but a handful of the thousands of software titles available for the Mac
have much of anything to do with Apple Computer Co. And certainly not the
"serious" ones (business, scientific, etc). In fact Apple--except for
operating system software--has long been outstripped by 3rd parties as a
significant source of serious applications software for the Macintosh. By
"long" meaning since about mid '80s and the days of MacWrite and MacPaint.
Apple's Claris Software subsidiary was/is a significant player in the
integrated office-software market with their ClarisWorks package.

Some outfit called Microsoft makes one hell of a lot of profit _today_ on
the Mac software it sells. Word, Excel, MS Office...and more :)  Drives,
modems, accelerator cards, video, RAM, etc are amply supplied by outside
sources (although some not nearly in the variety available for Intel
boxes). Sadly, Apple killed off the highly successful Macintosh cloners,
which does "lock" us Mac-system users closer to the fortunes of Apple than
I'd like to be.

I'm not sure if there is appropriate analogy is between computers and cars
(especially Audi). I doubt that there is one--other than the trivial
minority vs. majority stuff. Anyway, would any of us admit to an obsolete
model of Audi made during the past 15 yrs? (maybe I shouldn'ta asked that)

Phil

Phil Rose		Rochester, NY
'89 100
'91 200q		pjrose@servtech.com