Sorry to disappoint, but I don't find your comments "hurtful". I just find your constant need to insult and belittle people to be childish and annoying. If your arguments are as superior as you believe them to be, they can stand on their own. There are a lot of different opinions on this list, but I don't see anybody else doing what you do. Just state your opinion and keep the snide comments to yourself.
In regards to how you have diagnosed Apple's problems, were you using Macs at that time? Working for Apple? If not, then I submit you don't know what issues the company had or the folks that used Apple's products had (and thefore what caused people to leave the platform). Personally, I have been using Macs (and PCs) for over 20 years, so I feel have some perspective. Apple was doing serious software development for what was to be "Copland" that included all the buzzword-friendly features of the time; the problem they had was in trying to make it backwards compatible. When Amelio brought in the software head from IBM (don't remember her name), she killed the project and set things in motion that would ultimately lead to Mac OS X. But you are completely incorrect that Mac OS X was what turned Apple around. Instead, it was the first iMac, which ran the "toy" OS. It was YEARS before Mac OS X shipped, let alone became usable (with 10.1)--long after Apple was back in the black. Nobody has said that third-party development tools makes features "go away". The point is that it is then up to the makers of those tools to support the new features. Apple is saying that, in their history, those makers are slow to adapt those new features or do not adapt them at all. If you make a cross-platform development tool, how many resources are you going to devote to implementing a feature that is only on one platform? If the feature is not available in the development environment, it cannot be incorporated into the resulting application. Therefore, it doesn't matter if the feature is available on the hardware/OS or not. -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:mailvor...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, April 30, 2010 12:23 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Steve Jobs on Flash On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Mayo, Bill <bem...@pittcountync.gov> wrote: > I will refrain from saying what I would like to say about your last > comment. I will not stoop to your typical level of verbal abuse. If you really found the "Reality Distortion Field" remark hurtful, I apologize, and withdraw it. However, I stand by the rest of my statements. > They are requiring that you use their development tools, based on the > past experience that cross-platform development aimed at the Mac > nearly destroyed the company. If you have followed the history, then > you would know that this is not fiction. I would call it fiction. The Mac fell behind was because they didn't do any significant software development for nearly a decade. While even freaking *Microsoft* was discovering security, preemptive multi-tasking, and memory protection, Apple was still trying to sell people their toy OS for a premium price. So the rest of the world was introduced to things like reliable multimedia and video games, while apps on the Mac struggled to keep up. That also meant app developers found it harder and harder to support the Mac, so fewer and fewer apps were available. Even *Linux* was making better inroads against Microsoft than Apple, and this was back when people still sometimes had to write X11 mode lines by hand. Apple turned around with the release of an OS that could keep up with modern usage, and started producing software that people actually wanted to use. It's not like third-party development tools aren't available for Mac OS X. It's a BSD Unix underneath the pretty GUI; you can install and run whatever you want. Heck, might it even ship with GCC? If third-party development tools are the cause of Apple's downfall, why are they succeeding like never before, now that it's actually *easier* to build *ugly old Unix apps* for the Mac platform? > I am not sure why it is hard to understand that there is a competitive > advantage in having more advanced features than the competition. Allowing third-party development tools (cross-platform *or not*) does not make those features go away. I find the idea that the use of third-party development tools would cause the iPhone's features to become unavailable absolutely ludicrous. If you think that means I'm calling you a moron, so be it. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
