Re: An interesting read on Apple, Microsoft, and what could have been

["John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.com>]

In article <09XRc.34355$wC3.13087@okepread07>,
 salfter@salfter.diespammersdie.dyndns.org (Scott Alfter) 
 wrote:

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> This link turned up on Slashdot:
> 
> http://daringfireball.net/2004/08/parlay
> 
> The Art of the Parlay, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Platform
> Licensing and Market Share
> 
> The article debunks the idea that Apple would necessarily have become the
> behemoth that Microsoft did become if it had made a few different decisions
> years ago--let other companies build Mac clones, evolve the Mac out of the
> Apple II instead of starting over from scratch, etc.  (The article makes no
> mention of the IIGS as the proposed evolutionary development, but then given
> what Apple did with it (or, more accurately, didn't do with it), maybe
> that's somewhat understandable.)

The author draws a contrast between the Mac (new, no legacy 
code) and DOS->Windows, offereing an incremental migration path 
with lots of backward compatibility. I took his use of Apple II 
as a reference to the whole series (][, ][+, //e, //c, IIgs, ?). 
The Apple II (series) also offered an incremental migration with 
lots of backward compatibility. It was just quietly murdered, 
like a rival collateral bloodline, despite a huge marketshare.

Good article; more discussion here:
 
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/08/09/2231212&tid=190
&tid=3&tid=218

John
----
jmatthews at wright dot edu
www dot wright dot edu/~john.matthews/