On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 09:22:14 -0800, "J" wrote:

Apple even created the position of "Evangelist" and sent their evangelist
out to recruit 3rd party software people. If not for Adobe the mac would
have died. You may be right about HW and OS, but this is definitely not true
about SW.

You are correct as far as application software is concerned. The
reason there wasn't a lot of Mac software out for a long time was that
it was beastly hard to program for. It used the first object-oriented
OS, but there weren't any OO tools for development. The SDK for the
Mac cost thousands ($5K-10K) and was incredibly poorly written. One of
my co-workers was in charge of creating a Mac version of our product
when it first came out. The cost and effort almost sunk the company.
It was easily 10 times the work to write Mac software as DOS stuff -
even if you were doing Window 3.1 (the competition in the early Mac
days). Apple was very bad at helping developers and I think it really
hurt them. Add to that the fact that they didn't support color until
long after everyone else on earth was into hi-res and you pretty much
have their recipe for failure.

Tim Douglass

http://www.DouglassClan.com