Re: [NTLK] Missed commercial opportunities

From: Lallang_at_aol.com
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 19:42:04 EDT


In a message dated Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:58:11 -1000, Paul Grothaus
<pgrothaus_at_mac.com> writes:

>Damn, how could Apple pass on an opportunity like that? They would have
>sold
>tens of thousands of units to the Navy alone. That would have likely
>increased when other military units saw what the Navy was doing.
>Furthermore, as the Navy officers moved on to civilian lives, they would
>have been able to further spread the news of Newton's superiority to their
>civilian employees. Think of what might have been.

One example of Steve Jobs having his head up his ass. Admittedly, he's done
a lot of good for Apple but his handling of the Newton was the mother of all
fiascos. Did you know they didn't even bother to advertise much in the Far
East? In all the time the Newton was out, people didn't know about the
Newton until they canned it. Now, it's a collector's item. Talk about
insipid marketing and sitting on laurels in the K-12 and graphic markets. To
this day, my mother prefers a Newton over her new pearl white iBook when
downloading faxes from a virtual fax server while travelling. If they had
bothered to keep the Newton alive and had developed a Newton equivalent of
MacLink Plus and Adobe Acrobat, I don't think she would've even bothered
getting an iBook. Nothing comes close to what a trusty old Newton can do for
the equivalent of mass and portability. I sincerely hope that Steve Jobs
will do something about reincarnating a PDA that has the NewtonOS and a
Newton's capabilities. Doing a Palm equivalent would suck big time. I seem
to recall him saying in an interview, "...we did not think the economic
environment was conducive for Apple to go into the PDA market YET..." or
something to that effect (I wish I remembered where I saw that interview) .
It was the "yet" that caused me to prick up my ears. Here's to hoping!!!

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