Re: I get it
> so.. you're saying that Lotus didn't fuck up Jazz and didn't kill Modern Jazz, eh? That they didn't wait
> until the 1990s to try to move 1-2-3?
> Right. It's all MS's fault. Sure it is.
So you obviously were not there at the time. In the business. You sound like a casual user not someone in the ISV dev business trenches. Modern Jazz was a MacOS product and MacOS was less than 3% of the spreadsheet market (by revenue at the time). Late 80's. A rounding error. End of story. Talking to the Mac team at the time I never got the impression it was anything other than revenue and potential revenue return on investment. The Mac was a bad bet at the time for business productivity software revenue. All the good R.O.I segments were creative content creation and educational. And a few verticals. No one else made real money on the Mac.
The Win 3.x port I was referring to was of a codebase that had been ported to OS/2 in 1987/1988 and I saw running on a pre-release Win 3.0 dev machine in spring 1989. At the time the product still outsold the MS product 2 to 1. There was a Win 2.0 version kicking around internally but Win 2.x was such a joke it was never ever considered for release. The guys in Cambridge, MA were doing exactly the same sort of stuff at the time with their product lines. I think their first OS/2 release came out in '89. But there again we did not have to deal with the guys in Redmond very deliberately adding code to the Win 3.0 codebase to crash our products. Much easier to do with spreadsheets.
Yeah, there was some hubris with some of the MS competitors but if you were in the business and followed closely the Anti-Trust case an all the other MS lawsuits over the decades (there are hundreds) you would know that MS would stop at nothing to destroy anyone they perceived as even the smallest potential competitor. As Jerry Kaplan at Go and Jean Louis Gasse at BeOS (to name but two) learned the hard way as they completely underestimated the criminals depths MS would stoop to in order to destroy anyone and everyone they perceived as competition. No matter how minor or peripheral.
MS was little better than an organized crime outfit in how it operated.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
