Hi.
Again, my point was that until there is a product on the market
everything is only talk as it can change and even be abandonded without
any paying customers being affected. Once a product is on the market,
there is a firm commitment and you know you can go out and buy it. Sure
products too get discontinued, but usually that happens only if either
there is something very wrong with the product or the company that makes
it or if the product has become obsolete.
And probably, Apple's history has been more dramatic than many other
companies' history. Therefore, I don't believe any talk about Apple
bringing a new PDA until I see it hitting shops and I can go and buy one.
Illustrating this "Caution - there may be lots of talk and lots of doing
about a new PDA at Apple but there may be no PDA in the end" was the
sole motivation for quoting Rhapsody. I didn't intend to stirr up a
flame war. In fact I don't care about Rhapsody at all. If Apple doesn't
use that name anymore then that means there is no Rhapsody product
available in the shops under that name and that means it is absolutely
of no significance to me. I do respect the property rights established
in market economies where the owner of a property can do with their
property whatever they want, including renaming, changing, destruction
or whatever else. If Apple says there is no Rhapsody than I have to
respect that.
On the other hand, if Apple was to say, there was never any Rhapsody,
then I would object to that.
You are most certainly right in your assessment that up to the time OSX
Server 1.0 was there Apple just went on to use the name for whatever
that new OS would turn out to be until the product was about to be
finished and a marketing strategy was to be developed for it. In that
regard it is more to be seen as a code name, with the difference that
Apple decided to abandon even that codename at some point perhaps
because they felt it wouldn't do justice to what happened on the way.
There might have been some political reasons for this, but if you would
say that the only reason was that -say- Steven Jobs didn't like the name
then I would say this is most certainly not just to the many marketing
folks who wil have undoubtedly worked very hard on the product placement
for OSX. Have you ever been part of a branding project ? Probably not.
Most techies (I used to be one myself) often belittle the work of
marketing people as if marketing was something that takes place without
any reasoning and without any methodology. Well, I can tell you from my
own experience that this is not the case. Putting a product out to a
worldwide market (which in fact is a myriad of markets) is a very tough
task and there is as much methodology and reasoning applied as when the
product was developed by the technical team.
So, if Apple has chosen to abandon Rhapsody, then there is far more
involved then just the APIs and libraries. Just one example, for most
users out there the most visible part of an OS is the user interface. A
total revamp of the user interface may therefore be perceived as an
entirely new system from a user perspective even though internally
everything remains the same (I understand that for the large part this
is what people say about Windoze XP). Therefore, while from the software
developer's viewpoint the system hasn't really changed much, from the
paying customer's viewpoint the product has completely changed. Now, the
marketing people apply various methodologies to measure the paying
customers view and take their perception into account as much as
possible in order to place the product successfully. Branding of a
product is about doing just that. So, what may look like a perfect
identity ("==") of what used to be called Rhapsody at some point in time
(but probably not all the time) and what is now branded as OSX, may be
two different entities from a broader angle.
Besides it is absolutely incorrect to use the symbol "==" to describe a
logical relation between the two for it means as much as "absolutely
identical", which clearly they are not even from a view technical
architecture point of view (quote: "slightly revised").
I'd like to suggest to take a broader view of the world than just
whatever ones specialty is. The example of Microsoft shows that mediocre
technology can be placed on the top spot by good marketing people. And
arguably Apple has only made a comeback because some of that has been
given a higher priority.
But as I said before, I don't really care. I go with whatever name Apple
calls their products. If Apple was to bring out a new PDA and they don't
call it Newton even though it is similar in some or even most aspects, I
don't go to the shop an try to convince them to sell me "one of those
new Newtons". No, I will go to the shop and ask for whatever Apple would
call the thing, even though I really like the name "Newton" perhaps even
better than the name "Macintosh" and certainly better than the name
"OSX" or Palm or iPAQ etc etc.
Perhaps, Rhapsody would have been a better name for OSX and perhaps it
would have had more longevity. i.e. what is Apple going to do with all
that brand building when MacOS reaches version 11 ? Is it going to be
OSXI ? Perhaps this will set a new trend in product naming, using roman
numerals. Perhaps it will flop at some point and there will be a new
name. I don't know, but I am sure that the folks at Apple haven't just
flipped a coin to reach their conclusions.
So, for now, if Apple says OSX is not Rhapsody, so be it.
That is not to say that I dispute overlap of technical architecture at
various points in time and I hope that this amicably closes this thread.
kind regards
BK
On Tuesday, November 27, 2001, at 04:29 , Benjamin wrote:
> Actually if you have earlier builds of the "next" generation Mac OS (aka
> Mac OS X server 1.0 beta), it was called Rhapsody, when you startup your
> Mac, you'll see "Rhapsody" then an apple logo under that. After that
> you'll get into the so called finder, You'll see that you are actually
> using Openstep with platinum skin on it.
>
> Is "Rhapsody" "OS X", Yes and No. when apple Call the next Gen OS
> Project "Rhapsody" they didn't have a clear concept of what Rhapsody
> will be like. So they just put on a platinum skin on NextStep and call
> it OS X Server 1.0. But soon after OS X server 1.0 they started to come
> up with word like Cocoa, Carbon, Classic, Quartz. And Carbon, Classic
> and Quartz are not part of Rhapsody, that's probably why they say
> "Rhapsody is not OS X"
>
> On $B_at_14|Fs(B, 11 27, 2001, at 01:49 , BK wrote:
>
>>
>> Two days ago I have just helped some Japanese chap to get OSX Server up
>> and running and we were going through all the Japanese TIL articles on
>> Apple Japan's web site.
>>
>> We found something that looked like an OSX mini-FAQ which was derived
>> from an English Apple document and it said ...
>>
>> "Q: Is MacOS X the same as Rhapsody ?
>>
>> A: No, MacOS X is not Rhapsody."
>>
>> That is Apple who said that.
>>
>> I tried to find the article again, but because we went through so many
>> articles, I simply can't recall exactly which one it was. I make no
>> promises but I will keep looking and if I find it I'll post the link.
>>
>> In any event pleas don't blame me for what Apple says. I am not an
>> Apple
>> employee.
>>
>> As far as your comments on the architecture go, there are some things
>> that look alright to me, but others raise suspicion. For example, I
>> remember to have read about Rhapsody, even with an architecture diagram
>> of it in a MacWorld or MacUser or MacSomethingElse magazine well
>> *before* Steven Jobs rejoined Apple and well before Apple even
>> considered to use OpenStep as a base. Before Apple decided they would
>> go
>> with OpenStep, they were in talks with Be to use BeOS as a base for the
>> new OS to come. So, clearly, Apple didn't always have OpenStep on their
>> mind, an impression one might get reading your comments. In reality,
>> Apple was running around like a headless chicken trying to come up with
>> something but even if they had good ideas they could never agree on a
>> direction. Steven Jobs changed that and it was only then that OpenStep
>> became the direction. Work on Rhapsody had been done long before that.
>>
>> I clearly remember that Jobs announced that Rhapsody was to be
>> abandoned
>> for something else. Sure, there will have been some level of publicity
>> stunt behind that, but I also seem to remember that it was also stated
>> that some work that had gone into Rhapsody was to be salvaged for OSX.
>>
>> Besides, it is Apple who owned whatever was Rhapsody and it is Apple
>> who
>> bought OpenStep. They are the owners of all this stuff and as such they
>> have the ultimate owenership rights which means it is up to them to say
>> what it is and what it not is. That's what the law in the US says
>> anyway.
>>
>> If Apple says Rhapsody is not OSX, I'll go with that.
>>
>> And I do realise that they would have used whatever they can from
>> previous work. I even expect them to have used some bits and pieces
>> from
>> their work on MkLinux, and if it was only the learning experience.
>>
>> In any event, this all only proofs my point. The point was that for as
>> long as there is no product on the market, there is lots of development
>> and lots of talk going on which ideally is not to be taken seriously.
>>
>> rgds
>> BK
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, November 27, 2001, at 12:26 , Sean Luke wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> [yeah yeah, off topic]
>>>
>>> On Monday, November 26, 2001, at 08:11 PM, newtontalk_at_newtontalk.net
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Apple talked about Rhapsody or whatever "the new OS" was called at
>>>> various points in time for how many years ? And eventually they
>>>> abandonded it altogether and did something very different.
>>>
>>> Well, they *did* abandon Copeland for Rhapsody/OSX. But I'm amazed at
>>> how many people don't realize that, Apple's marketroid proclamations
>>> aside, Rhapsody and OS X are basically one and the same. Here's the
>>> deal.
>>>
>>> With Rhapsody, Apple was designing an OS which had:
>>>
>>> 0. New driver architecture
>>> 1. Mach3/4.4BSD
>>> 2. Display PostScript window server
>>> 3. A new Finder and UI feel
>>> 4. NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP API
>>> 5. Old mac apps running in a protected environment
>>>
>>> But there were some problems.
>>>
>>> #2 Adobe wouldn't play ball. They didn't want to license DPS to
>>> Apple
>>> like they had to NeXT (Adobe wanted to get rid of DPS entirely,
>>> pushing
>>> for PDF).
>>>
>>> #4-5 Old mac developers (read: Microsoft) weren't happy with the
>>> devil's
>>> choice
>>> of running their apps in, as they called it, a "penalty box"; or
>>> rewriting
>>> them from scratch to adhere to OPENSTEP.
>>>
>>> To deal with #2, Apple basically told Adobe, to heck with you, we'll
>>> just write our own dang DPS-equivalent window server. Which they did.
>>> It's called Quartz. Apple will tell you it's based on PDF, but that's
>>> just marketspeak. Quartz is an API based on the PostScript3.0/DPS
>>> graphics model, but without the rarely-used interpreter commands.
>>> That
>>> it did PDF was just gravy. Basically, Quartz allowed Apple to replace
>>> DPS without paying the DPS royalties.
>>>
>>> To deal with #4-5, Apple added another UNIX library, called Carbon,
>>> against which old Mac apps could be recompiled. A library does not an
>>> operating system make.
>>>
>>> So now the OS looks like this:
>>>
>>> 0. New driver architecture
>>> 1. Mach3/4.4BSD
>>> 2. Display PostScript <equivalent> window server (now called "Quartz")
>>> 3. A new Finder and UI feel
>>> 4. NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP API (now renamed "Cocoa")
>>> 5. Old mac apps running in a protected environment (now renamed
>>> "Classic")
>>> 6. Carbon libraries
>>>
>>> Apple then renamed the slightly-revised Rhapsody to "OS X". And
>>> people
>>> bought it hook line and sinker!
>>>
>>> Sean
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
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