OT: Apple secrecy

riredale wrote on 6/28/2006, 9:16 AM

Can't find an online link to the article yet, but in today's Wall Street Journal there is a lengthy article about how Apple has gotten paranoid about product development secrecy. The article goes on to say that this represents a complete turnaround from the earlier Apple (before Jobs was fired), and that the paranoia has resulted in some major lost deals and a declining acceptance within the business community, which doesn't like surprises and needs roadmaps for future plans.

The article also mentions that Apple's worldwide penetration has gradually slid over time from a high of 9.4% in 1993 to a historic low of 2.3% today. Of course, to the artsy community this might be a symbol of pride--"We're different!"

Anyway, I guess because I'm an Old Fart I just can't understand the magnetic attraction the iPod has with my daughter's friends at school. Let's see... can't drag-and-drop files, can't listen to FM, can't record line-in, significantly overpriced, can't throw in cheapo AAA cells...

I worked for Apple from '82 to '86, and we were then fiercely proud of the trail that the Lisa and Mac were blazing when compared to the Neanderthal DOS-based IBM PC. I just don't see any rationale today for the same kind of blind devotion.

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Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 6/29/2006, 8:33 AM

Of ALL the PC programs ever written probably 98% of them will run on WinXP, now hat's the percentage of programs written for Macs that'll run under OSX?

I run dBase III+ every day on my XP computer. It was written in 1983, on DOS 3.x. I still haven't found anything even remotely close to it in terms of speed and simplicity (although you did have to learn the dBase language).

Coursedesign wrote on 6/29/2006, 8:40 AM

Why not dBase IV? Was that the crappy one that preceded its demise?

I think that's what's in my GoldMine 6.5 (the current version for those who don't want to switch to MS-SQL), and it's been rock solid for nearly 10 years now, with about 9,000 customer records and a lot of shuffling. Never lost a record or had data corrupted.

The flipside to this compatibility craze is reduced performance and reduced security though.

(...although with the latest rootkits already announced for Vista, I'm not sure how relevant that is.)

johnmeyer wrote on 6/29/2006, 9:22 AM

dBase III+ was the pinnacle of Ashton-Tate's development. dBase IV was its Waterloo.

farss wrote on 6/29/2006, 2:03 PM

Great to hear from another dBase III user although I ended up doing everything with Clipper, of course then Nantucket invented Visual Objects, yish, what a disaster. Only recently recovered a whole shelf in a bookcase when I threw out the manuals.

Bob.

Logan5 wrote on 6/29/2006, 2:22 PM

I do see redeeming qualities in OS9, but to point them out is futile.

I all so see redeeming things with the Latin language, but a dead language.
All though we do use a lot of Latin, even in the video/Broadcasting biz.
I.e. Servo (helping) Via (by way of)
Pre, Post, chroma, Prime and other words.

OS9 does have my all time favorite error message:
“Something is wrong” click OK

Something’s wrong, yet not sure what it is, just letting you know…LOL
It’s very rare error and after clicking OK the systems still functions great.