>on 05-08-2000 10:52, Peter Apockotos at g4@tampabay.rr.com wrote:
>
>> 2. Actually the R&D on the Newton was so high that, if they still sold the
>> unit's for the same price and quantity for the next 50 years they may have
>> broken even. It is more cost effective for them to reabsorb the technology,
>> than to sell it and most likely that is why the offering price was so steep,
>> to keep buyers away.
>
>Sorry to get in between the Peter vs. gopi ;-) but I think this isn't true
>either, Apple's R&D on the Newton was done, paid for, the reason it got
>axed is that Steve Jobs didn't like to keep the pet project from the guy
>that kicked him out in the first place.
There's more to it than that. It was, and it remains, a perfectly reasonable business strategy for Apple to want to narrow its' corporate focus to get a disorganized company moving in the right direction again. To ignore this, and insist that the discontinuation of Newton products was simply a matter of a personal disagreement, is ridiculous. (This makes about as much sense as the claims that Apple introduced the G4 Cube strictly because NeXT also produced a cube-shaped computer, and not because modern components made such a striking design possible and affordable.)
>As we all know the Newton could have made it quite easily with good
>marketing (as Apple's seems to understand nowadays)...
Given the amazing success of the Palm platform, I'm not entirely convinced that the MessagePad, as useful as it had become by the MP2100, would have been more than a marginal success. The PDA category has been moving towards smaller pocket products, and I suspect only a pocket-sized device would have been able to provide real competition of any sort. That would require new product development, which was a diversion of resources Apple management wanted to avoid at the time.
Make no mistake: I'm still using my MessagePad, and I expect I'll continue to do so for some time before anything that *begins* to resemble a replacement is available. We can disagree with the abandonment of the Newton platform, but let's not continue to insist that this wasn't a reasonable and sound business decision for Apple to make.
BRIAN/bpearce@cloud9.net
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