decided to outsource the design as the mainframe design cycle was
far too long and they wanted to bring it to market quickly (once
Apple had developed the market).
an IBM VP brought in his Apple II+, opened it up and said that they
had to do that. It was likely that it was on its way to being a
closed system before that.
First I've heard of this. Where did you get this?
Standard IBM operating procedures...
You need to look at the mainframe market to see what they did.
They tried the same thing with the PC market (think Microchannel)
and lost control of the PC. No one wanted the microchannel (which
was just IBM trying to make the PC proprietary), so they bought
clones. IBM lost billions and today is just another clone maker.
I find it infinitely amusing. Too much greed kills. It nearly
killed Apple, it killed many of the early game makers, who wanted
massive bucks for anyone to write games for their machines, few
did, the competition (Nintendo) won out. Of course, Nintendo is
guilty of Japanese predatory capitalism, they would not sell
to any store that carried any other game machines or software.
By the time they lost in court there were no American game producers
left. You think IBM is bad, compare them to the Japanese, they
look very good in comparison.
Greg B.
Rich