4 ms·

> My impression is that Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people, and the Mac was founded to bring great software experience, which I appreciate

• turndown 3y ago
  From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn’t a priority at all to Apple, even on the Mac team. The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red flag, I’d be interested to hear why Bryan Stearns decided to leave(I feel the author is saying a lot by not touching on this more) I think the idea that Microsoft or Apple were founded for any reason but money is pretty much a joke. Every action and reaction in the story revolves around money and how to get it.
  • GeekyBear 3y ago
    > From that story is sounds like MacBasic wasn’t a priority at all to Apple Did you miss the part about Microsoft threatening the hardware line that produced the vast majority of Apple's profits at the time? It sounds to me more like the priority was not having their profitability decimated. They killed a Mac native version of Basic that had been completed because Microsoft forced their hand. >The fact they let MacBasic slip from the launch window is a pretty big red flag, As mentioned in the article, they needed to wait for the system APIs to stabilize. > Basic still had a hard time getting traction, especially since the system was evolving rapidly beneath it.
    • turndown 3y ago
      >Did you miss the part Did you miss the part where I said what everyone did here was motivated by money? >It sounds to me more like the priority was not having their profitability decimated. See above. >They killed a Mac native version of Basic that had been completed because Microsoft forced their hand See above. >As mentioned in the article, they needed to wait for the system APIs to stabilize See above. Did you miss that part?
      • Nevermark 3y ago
        So I guess you did? You did miss that part?? — Sorry for seeing humor in your non-response repeating refrain, and then adding my own poor attempt at humor. But, what you wrote was obviously read. And responded to directly with a good point that you seem to have missed twice now.
  • hakfoo 3y ago
    I suspect it might have been a timing/market positioning thing. By 1984, "boots to BASIC" was reserved for low-end kit: C64, Atari XL, and increasingly Apple II. The IBM PC and clones were rapidly defining what a high-end personal computer was, and for them, the BASIC was an useless appendix (Casette BASIC on IBM kit) or a bullet point at the back of the pack-in software list (BASICA/GWBASIC)-- it might be there, but commercial boxed software was the primary selling point.
• fulladder 3y ago
  It seems like you're reacting to the phrase "bring programming to the people" occurring in the same sentence as Microsoft. I don't think GP was trying to present Bill Gates as having been on some kind of altruistic moral crusade. I think the point GP was making is that Microsoft was founded on compilers for hobbyists, whereas Apple was thinking about end user experience. Maybe the phrase "to the people" is confusing things because it suggests some kind of noble, high-minded motivations on the part of Gates. That wasn't how Gates (or Jobs) thought. Actually, the whole idea of a company having some social responsibility mission was not something that existed at that time. These guys wanted to sell a product that people would pay money for, that's all. In that era, this was perfectly socially acceptable and completely normal. The statement "Microsoft was founded to bring programming to the people" is true, but it may be a little unclear if people are reading it as suggesting something other than the profit motive. However, for a long time, Microsoft really did view its own success as dependent on providing customers ways to write and sell their own software. That is in fact empowering to the customer. I'm pretty sure Gates did care about this because it was what was driving sales of his products.
  • GeekyBear 3y ago
    There is also the popular conspiracy theory that Apple was somehow opposed to allowing users to program the Mac. They created a Mac native Basic at launch, and only Microsoft's anticompetitive arm twisting kept if from being released.
    • Nevermark 3y ago
      > They created a Mac native Basic at launch, and only Microsoft's anticompetitive arm twisting kept if from being released. Wow, that almost makes me want to cry. I discovered personal computers when the computer basically felt like a programming language. I might be wrong, but if a friendly language installed on every computer out of the box had held, the evolution of “people’s” languages might have been a huge thing to this day.
    • flomo 3y ago
      Not disagreeing with your point about MS, but it's not a conspiracy theory that Macintosh dev tools were nonexistent. Apple's solution was "buy a Lisa". (well, maybe they considered this a 3rd party opportunity.) No indication they even wanted homegrown BASIC type stuff.
• ndiddy 3y ago
  A more complete explanation, from more of a management perspective (source: https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-6-look-and-feel/ https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-part-6-look-and... ): > Gates and others at Microsoft had gone on the record repeatedly saying they intended for Windows and the Macintosh to be sufficiently similar that they and other software developers would be able to port applications in short order between the two. Few prospects could have sounded less appealing to Sculley. Apple, whose products then as now enjoyed the highest profit margins in the industry thanks to their allure as computing's hippest luxury brand, could see their whole business model undone by the appearance of cheap commodity clones that had been transformed by the addition of Windows into Mac-alikes. Of course, one look at Windows as it actually existed in 1985 could have disabused Sculley of the notion that it was likely to win any converts among people who had so much as glanced at MacOS. Still, he wasn't happy about the idea of the Macintosh losing its status, now or in the future, as the only GUI environment that could serve as a true, comprehensive solution to all of one's computing needs. So, within weeks of Jobs's departure, feeling his oats after having so thoroughly cowed Digital Research, he threatened to sue Microsoft as well for copying the "look and feel" of the Macintosh in Windows. > He really ought to have thought things through a bit more before doing so. Threatening Bill Gates was always a dangerous game to play, and it was sheer folly when Gates had the upper hand, as he largely did now. Apple was at their lowest ebb of the 1980s when they tried to tell Microsoft that Windows would have to be cancelled or radically redesigned to excise any and all similarities to the Macintosh. Sales of the Mac had fallen to some 20,000 units per month, about one-fifth of Apple's pre-launch projections for this point. The stream of early adopters with sufficient disposable income to afford the pricey gadget had ebbed away, and other potential buyers had started asking what you could really do with a Macintosh that justified paying two or three times as much for it as for an equivalent MS-DOS-based computer. Aldus PageMaker, the first desktop-publishing package for the Mac, had been released the previous summer, and would eventually go down in history as the product that, when combined with the Apple LaserWriter printer, saved the platform by providing a usage scenario that ugly old MS-DOS clearly, obviously couldn't duplicate. But the desktop-publishing revolution would take time to show its full import. In the meantime, Apple was hard-pressed, and needed Microsoft -- one of the few major publishers of business software actively supporting the Mac -- far too badly to go around issuing threats to them. > Gates responded to Sculley's threat with several of his own. If Sculley followed through with a lawsuit, Gates said, he'd stop all work at Microsoft on applications for the Macintosh and withdraw those that were already on store shelves, treating business computing henceforward as exactly the zero-sum game which he had never believed it to be in the past. This was a particularly potent threat in light of Microsoft's new Excel spreadsheet, which had just been released to rave reviews and already looked likely to join PageMaker as the leading light among the second generation of Mac applications. In light of the machine's marketplace travails, Apple was in no position to toss aside a sales driver like that one, the first piece of everyday Mac business software that was not just as good as but in many ways quite clearly better than equivalent offerings for MS-DOS. Yet Gates wouldn't stop there. He would also, he said, refuse to renew Apple's license to use Microsoft's BASIC on their Apple II line of computers. This was a serious threat indeed, given that the aged Apple II line was the only thing keeping Apple as a whole afloat as the newer, sexier Macintosh foundered. Duly chastised, Apple backed down quickly -- whereupon Gates, smelling blood in the water, pressed his advantage relentlessly, determined to see what else he could get out of finishing the fight Sculley had so foolishly begun. > One ongoing source of frustration between the two companies, dating back well into the days of Steve Jobs's power and glory, was the version of BASIC for the Mac which Microsoft had made available for purchase on the day the machine first shipped. In the eyes of Apple and most of their customers, the mere fact of its existence on a platform that wasn't replete with accessible programming environments was its only virtue. In practice, it didn't work all that differently from Microsoft's Apple II BASIC, offering almost no access to the very things which made the Macintosh the Macintosh, like menus, windows, and dialogs. A second release a year later had improved matters somewhat, but nowhere near enough in most people's view. So, Apple had started work on a BASIC of their own, to be called simply MacBASIC, to supersede Microsoft's. Microsoft BASIC for the Macintosh was hardly a major pillar of his company's finances, but Bill Gates was nevertheless bothered inordinately by the prospect of it being cast aside. "Essentially, since Microsoft started their company with BASIC, they felt proprietary towards it," speculates Andy Hertzfeld, one of the most important of the Macintosh software engineers. "They felt threatened by Apple's BASIC, which was a considerably better implementation than theirs." Gates said that Apple would have to kill their own version of BASIC and -- just to add salt to the wound -- sign over the name "MacBASIC" to Microsoft if they wished to retain the latter's services as a Mac application developer and retain Microsoft BASIC on the Apple II. > And that wasn't even the worst form taken by Gates's escalation. Apple would also have to sign what amounted to a surrender document, granting Microsoft the right to create "derivative works of the visual displays generated by Apple's Lisa and Macintosh graphic-user-interface programs." The specific "derivative works" covered by the agreement were the user interfaces already found in Microsoft Windows for MS-DOS and five Microsoft applications for the Macintosh, including Word and Excel. The agreement provided Microsoft with nothing less than a "non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, non-transferable license to use those derivative works in present and future software programs, and to license them to and through third parties for use in their software programs." In return, Microsoft would promise only to support Word and Excel on the Mac until October 1, 1986 -- something they would certainly have done anyway. Gates was making another of those deviously brilliant tactical moves that were already establishing his reputation as the computer industry's most infamous villain. Rather than denying that a "visual display" could fall under the domain of copyright, as many might have been tempted to do, he would rather affirm the possibility while getting Apple to grant Microsoft an explicit exception to being bound by it. Thus Apple -- or, for that matter, Microsoft -- could continue to sue MacOS's -- and potentially Windows's -- competitors out of existence while Windows trundled on unmolested. > Sculley called together his management team to discuss what to do about this Apple threat against Microsoft that had suddenly boomeranged into a Microsoft threat against Apple. Most at the meeting insisted that Gates had to be bluffing, that he would never cut off several extant revenue streams just to spite Apple and support this long-overdue Windows product of his which had been an industry laughingstock for so long. But Sculley wasn't sure; he kept coming back to the fact that Microsoft could undoubtedly survive without Apple, but Apple might not be able to survive without Microsoft -- at least not right now, given the Mac's current travails.