Jack Russo Comments
From Jack Russo, jrusso@computerlaw.com, in response to The Story of Frontier.Jack Russo Comments
Some additional ideas that should be slotted in:
In 1988, it was clear to everyone that Windows was overtaking the Mac but Dave felt a strong personal commitment to the Macintosh and Userland was started with that commitment in mind.
The initial Board of Directors of Userland was Dave, Jack, and Jean-Louis Gassee. We talked, in detail, about whether this commitment to the Macintosh was right, from a pure business point of view, and the judgment was that what became Frontier could well turn the tide in favor of the Macintosh. In a way, we probably all still believed that was true even as Apple took steps to defeat that destiny. (Think about what might have happened had we built Frontier for Windows first.)
We had (and still have) some very major customers for Frontier using it with the Macintosh to do some very major things. We all remember one "integrator" who built a "yellow pages" type publishing system using about $500 worth of Frontier, $1000 worth of Quark, and a little time to automate what might otherwise have been $100,000+ of human effort. As board members, we all thought out loud about how amazing it was that $1500 of software was bringing that kind of productivity to the world.
The same may be said with respect to the current product: we should expect to see some very major www management stories come of this where $500 worth of software is going to do (and keep doing and keep doing and keep doing) what might have otherwise taken tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of time and effort.
We should add some of these points to the story because we all saw the power of Frontier and the fact that Apple failed to embrace it at a time that could have made a huge differernce to the Macintosh as a business productivity, publishing and web publishing platform.
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