Re: [NTLK] [NTLK][OT] macworld 04 pix

From: David M. Ensteness (denstene_at_mac.com)
Date: Fri Jan 09 2004 - 11:26:18 PST


> Personally I think a much bigger problem with Apple's current strategy
> is that they are undermining third party developers by taking away
> whole product categories.

This I feel is grossly over played.

Opera was considering dropping Mac support prior to Apple's release of
Safari, but they didn't talk about it with the press until after and
then cited Safari as their point of concern. Opera did not drop support
but it contributed to this belief that Apple is screwing 3rd parties.

MS had not provided a feature update to Internet Explorer for Macintosh
since 1999 when they released IE 5. Three to four years later MS
decided to cancel IE for Mac because of Safari? Seems to me that MS had
already stopped providing Mac OS updates of the software.

Adobe complains that Apple pushed Adobe Premiere out of the Mac video
market. However, it seems that Adobe didn't care when Apple put out
iMovie, nor did they care when Apple put out Final Cut Pro. When Adobe
cancelled Premiere stating they couldn't compete with Apple's Final Cut
Pro and Final Cut Express, Avid [the makers of the Avid line of video
production and post production tools] put out an announcement that they
did not understand Adobe's problem, in fact Avid went so far as to say
that they had no problem competing with Apple and perhaps if Adobe had
a better product they might fair better competing ...

I think Avid's statement is very accurate. Apple has not cut the legs
out from under good products thus far [with a notable exception].
Everyone said iPhoto would kill low end photo editors but Graphic
Converter and Adobe Photo Elements have lived on doing well.

Opera claims that since KHTML will now be the core rendering engine for
Macs and Windows uses IE's rendering engine that Opera is doomed. Well,
they claimed that until they scored a deal with Macromedia ... then
they stopped complaining. Looks like they did have other market
opportunities. Also, we should examine the browser market.

Before Safari we had IE, Opera, Camino, iCab, Mozilla, Firebird,
Omniweb, and Netscape. The industry press and the Mac news message
boards were full of discontent, no one liked the 3-4 year old IE but it
seemed to be the most fleshed out. Camino was fast but it was not as
compatible, the same with Firebird. Omniweb was incredible in its
interface but slow, Netscape and Mozilla were also slow. iCab had its
fair of unfinished areas too.

Both Opera and the Mozilla/Netscape teams were upset that Apple chose
KHTML, in e-mails and interviews members of both teams did not say they
were upset Apple released a browser, they said they were mad that Apple
did not choose their rendering engine to base it on. That is very
telling. Apple did not choose the rendering engine of any Mac browser
maker, they chose one that was independent. It seems like a good
diplomatic choice, but the makers of Mozilla and Opera didn't feel that
way.

Should Apple have not provided Mac users a better experience in an area
they were desperately lacking? Should Apple shy away from adding
software value to its platform? Its not often that someone does not
provide a solution, but the quality of that solution is also important.

The exception I feel was Watson. In that case it seems that Apple did
harm a developer, at least on the surface. I have not been able to find
any stats on how many registered copies of Watson there were before the
update to Sherlock that brought largely the same features. I also do
not know what affect the newer Sherlock version had on the rate of
purchase and registration. Without that info it is nearly impossible to
determine how much harm was done.

> It would seem good for Apple to give ilife updates to .mac members as
> part of there membership though...

This I think would be very neat.

David

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