[no subject]

Back in the late 70s Apple was doing very well with the Apple II, sales were
continuing to climb. Apple was also becoming a big business. Basic business
sense says you can't keep selling one product forever, someone will
eventually come out with a better product. Remember, back then the
microcomputer was still new. The way it worked was you released a computer,
sold it for a couple of years, then released a new computer. Not just an
upgraded model, but one that was likely incompatible with the old. This
didn't matter in the early days, because companies would only be selling a
few thousand of any one model, so the installed base and number of programs
was fairly small. A good example is the early Commodores. The various PET
models, the VIC20 and the Commodore 64 didn't even have the same BASIC in
ROM, let alone compatible hardware.

Apple made the decision, before even the Apple II+ came out, to create a new
computer aimed squarely at the high-end business market. This was were the
money was, rather than the hobbiest market, where most micros were sold. The
computer was going to be truely revolutionary, with a graphical user
interface and a bit-mapped screen. The Lisa turned out to be very expensive
and late, so Apple decided to make the Apple III, which would be a temporary
fill-in for the business market. It was released in 1980. The Apple III was
for various reasons a flop. There were not supposed to be any more Apple II
models, but since the Lisa was going to be so expensive, and since the Apple
II+ sales were still rising Apple decided to release the Apple IIe. The Lisa
and the IIe were both released at the start of 1983. The Lisa was an
incredible computer, but there was no market for it.

Meanwhile the Macintosh project at Apple had changed from Jeff Raskin's idea
of a small, cheap appliance into Steve Jobs' baby Lisa. By this time, 1984,
the IBM PC and clones were starting to capture a large share of the market.
If Apple had continued to just upgrade the Apple II, people would have had a
choice between a text-based command line interface computer and a text-based
CLI computer with a 16-bit processor and the IBM name on it. With the
Macintosh Apple had something different to offer, so they pushed the Mac
instead of the Apple II. The Mac was still too expensive, especially for the
education market, so the Apple IIgs was released which had the Mac
interface, but Apple II hardware and software. In 1990 the Mac LC was
released. It had a colour display and was cheap enough for schools to buy,
plus with the IIe card it could run Apple II software. It effectively
signalled the end of the Apple II line.

As Apple II users it sucked, from Apple Computer's point of view it was the
right business decision to make. In retrospect, the right thing for Apple to
have done was to never have released the Apple IIgs, but a Mac with Apple II
compatibility, like the Mac LC had, but in 1986, not 1990. This would have
enabled all the Apple II users to have an upgrade path to the Macintosh.
Alternatively, rather than releasing the Lisa/Mac as a new computer they
could have introduced the GUI using a souped-up Apple II, similar to the
IIgs.

--
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand

Apple II - Future Cop:LAPD - Warcraft II
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~rojaws
______________________________________________________________________

"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home."
Ken Olson, President of DEC, World Future Society Convention, 1977