RE: PICKY CRABB
RE: PICKY CRABB
Sent: 6/11/96; 8:37:06 AM
From: chanson@mcs.com (Chris Hanson)
Here's one for your website - a real, live dissenting point of view!
You talk about respect. You want Apple to show respect for its developers. I think this is good, and I think it's good that you want Apple's developers to respect it as well. Your idea of "respect" confuses me though. Do you want Apple to leave you in charge of its direction with whatever technology you're working on, or do you want Apple to acknowledge you as a worthy competitor and point users towards you when its solutions fall short? I take the latter view, personally, but you seem to take the former.
Remember On Location? Apple used to use it to index the developer CDs. In fact, I think Apple probably decided against trying to develop any sort of full-content search tools as part of System 7 because such a product already existed. A few years later, Apple is developing full-content search tools *because the people they were relying on for those tools bailed out*.
What would've happened if Apple had said "Oh, Dave, you're doing Frontier! Well, isn't that grand! We *were* working on AppleScript, and were capitalizing on some of our massive R&D investment with things like automatic translation of source code into other 'dialects' for non-English-speaking users and the creation of object hierarchies that mimic the way a user perceives applications, but we'll leave scripting up to you now! Thanks for your support!" *and you didn't sell any more copies of Frontier than you did in this reality*?
Or what if you decided that you weren't making enough money selling Frontier to continue supporting it, and someone like Symantec bought it and subsequently killed it? Apple might just *now* be trying to work out the AppleEvent Object Model, and the Open Scripting Architecture, and trying to drum up developer support... Instead, multiple interoperable scripting solutions existed and slowly but surely the market developed.
Sometimes you should try taking the longer, less self-centered view. Instead of thinking in terms of "Me! Me! Me! Apple's problem is that it doesn't respect me!" try and think of how you want to use your computer in 10 years, imagine what sort of architecture -- both application- and system-level -- that would require, and try to figure out who should provide each component of that architecture. Developers definitely have to provide the application-level architecture (though Apple might wish to provide some support here as well to show developers that it's serious about its technologies); however, I think (as does Apple) that it's in Apple's best long-term interest that it be at least *one* of the providers of system-level components.
The sooner you realize that, the sooner you realize that if you're operating at the system level (and personal Internet clients and servers are pretty much considered system level now, at least if one wishes them to be pervasive, just as with scripting and mutliuser-enabled preferences systems) that Apple *will have to* compete with you if it wishes to keep at least some contol of its platform.
- Chris Hanson
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