Yes, Jobs killed a lot of things that were losing money - but that does not explain why Apple would not open-source Hypercard if it didn't want to support it. It was possible to stop the losses without killing the product, but he chose not to. There had to be a reason for that.
I recall calling on Cupertino back in the days before Jobs' return. There was an atmosphere of blissful unrealism about the whole place. They were caught in the mindset that somewhere there was a killer app which would be Mac only, which everyone would buy macs to get. Project after project was Mac only, project after project had the lock-in mindset at heart, the hidden assumption being that once people were hooked on this they would never be able to leave Apple. But of course, these were reasons, like the locked in hardware, why you would leave Apple not why you would stay. At some point you'd see where all this was going and decide to get out before it was too late. The pinnacle of this was e-World. They had still not abandoned the idea of an on-line service a la Compuserve at a time when it was obviously dead. I recall our team saying to them in a bemused way that of course it had to run on Windows, and of course it had to be Internet. When they closed they called us up and said ruefully that we had been right. Market share was a very strange topic during those days, and indeed for some years after. The party line was always that it was (a) of no importance (b) far higher than reported by the consultants. I recall the pinnacle of this being the claim that Apple actually had twice the share reported, because every sale was hardware and OS, so you should simply double the percentages. This was on Roughly Drafted. Apple's worst enemy at that time was its fanatical user base, and its greatest sin was the way it catered to ane encouraged them as the water level rose. I heard a number of different explanations of why they killed HC rather than open source it, the most plausible being that the code was unmaintainable. Don't know. I also seem to recall reading in Sculley's book how excited he was by Hypercard. Or is that a false memory? If its right, he would certainly have discussed it with Jobs, so the claim that on his return he didn't even know what it was must be mistaken. Peter -- View this message in context: http://runtime-revolution.278305.n4.nabble.com/OT-Hypercard-and-an-uneasy-read-tp4130135p4152535.html Sent from the Revolution - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
