Tick-Tock, Tick-Tock

April 19

Quicken and Starship Titanic from Douglas Adams. Two software titles that won't be happening on the Mac for the near future according to trade press surrounding the former, and software specs following the later. They are interresting on several fronts. With Intuit, you've basically have a software publishing maker that is big enough to be a household word suddenly wake up and smell the Apple. Once they noticed sales of around the 130,000 unit range - compared to multimillion numbers for PC sales - they did what any sane developer would do with the Mac. They dropped it like a not-so-hot potato. But like any other pop-product - wait, there's more! Did everyone forget that the head of Intuit sits on Apple's current board of directors? What? You did? Well while you're pondering the not so secret plug-pulling that Intuit has been doing with the Mac, one almost giggles in wonderment - because after all - if the person who heads Intuit is doing all the plug pulling, what does he know about Apple that some of the few remaining pole-sitters in the Mac development camp don't? A little inside info goes a long way, and developer conferences aside, you can't get juicier dirt than a member of the board, than if you were married to Steve Jobs. Well it looks like the honeymoon is over for this couple. It will be even more interresting to hear Steve's impending dammage control for a member of his own ranks that has given up the ship. Speaking of ships, now shipping is Douglas Adams' Titanic - a game based on the work of the same title from Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. They're doing everything hypewise possible for both titles including a book tour that will blow into Denver later this week. If you notice the platform specs for this game you'll find - like most of the other games and popular consumer oriented software titles out there - that this one isn't going to be happening on the Mac. The soot from this one can be found in the eye of the closest Mac freak to you - because Douggie boy has been a pundit for Apple for more than a decade. I guess when your royalties are on the line, favortism can only go market-deep. And when the market you favor, shows up bigger than an iceberg in catostrophic magnitudes, sinking faster than the title of your own product, you have to stop bellyaching and get down to brass-tacks and reality. Reality at this time dictates that with the software market for Macs plummiting - you either have to continue to support a market base that favors you - as goes the logic for some remaining desktop-publishing vendors - or you blow it off entirely outside of some late-term release/portation if the profit margins can subsidize it. Of course, in the later of the two titles in question - you're going to have Mac people going apeshit with claims that they don't buy Macs to play games on - while they make asses of themselves crowing about also rans like Myst and Quake being ported over too little and too late for anyone to care how hypocritical they're behavoir is. For Quicken users though - it's the last straw - with only Microsoft products supporting a feeble user base for pop-consumer software that is priced below the $300 mark. I guess when the market for software for your "popular" computer now sits squarely in the$1000 zone as it does for Adobe and Quark's toys, you're really are being subsidized by a pity play of politics all reaching for your wallet. As opposed to real developers who thrive on the Windows side of life and continue to manage a healthy profit with lower prices. But then I nearly forgot the bigger question for all this - which is - with Apple devs folding, leaving high-priced apps as the core of your toolbase for your OS, how does this make yours cheaper in the long run compared to those "horrible" Wintel boxes that are cheaper to buy, support, and get software for? Answer? Macs haven't been cheaper to maintain since 1995, and they're not getting any cheaper. The problem? How is Apple going to add value to these price-tags when there's nothing redeaming available on the store shelves anymore? You can ask that one to yourself next time you're on the phone ordering overpriced still-yet available software through the mail for your Mac.

April 20
Apple continues to piss in the mouths that feed them sales through the few remaining markets they have. One of them that has had it's fill is the Video market - which I pointed out months ago - is now abandoning the Mac almost in it's entirety as the NAB rolls around. With a backdrop of fully-loaded, custom-configured NT boxes taking most of the stage up, one wonders why in the hell Steve Jobs was even speaking at the damn show. Apple had NOTHING other than a cheesy quicktime demo which means squat for pro-vid heads who use custom compression schemes from their vendors of choice to crank serious (not 320x480 rez VHSboy) video through steroid induced hardware. That hardware no longer is dominated with Apple logos as it was for the first generation of Avids. The people stealing the show this year, like the last, was Compaq and Intergraph showing off cheap but well oiled machines while Avid and Media Pro continue to work the bugs out of their G3 systems for the indeterminate future while showing how their systems work on SGI and NT hardware in the meantime. The fact is, outside of multimedia money loosing enterprises making CDroms, no one doing digital video would touch Quicktime with a 10 foot cattle prod outside of crappy imports for cheapo commercials. Seeing that Apple had nothing else to show apart from this, makes for a lousy broadcast to potential customers - and makes for a fool's play when presenting yourself as "serious" to your market that already has moved on to bigger and cheaper things. Unless Apple does something quick, this last act of Steve on stage will be nothing but a curtain call.

April 21

Looking back at the Quicken fiasco, the numbers for personal finance software sales in broader terms boiled Apple down to 6.6% of the market - down from 8.2%. With numbers like this in the single digits for a crowd that puts high-value on accounting and balancing the books, it's obvious that the market has decided that Apple just doesn't add up. While Apple has never been a fave of the business world - EVER - it's interresting to note how far they've continued to fall from what meager hieghts they may have been able to sustain when they were an 11 billion dollar a year enterprise. Now that they've succeded in lopping off at least 40% plus of that equity, the rest of the market has responded by moving on to get serious accounting and household finances in order elsewhere. The fact that there are still spots on the internet where MacCommies crow about corporate success stories, I would just like to point to the above figures and ask them how they arrived at such calculations behind their efforts? Probably the same accounting that made for below 50 million dollar profit margins that reek suspiciously like that one profitable 40 million dollar quarter Gil Amelio had under his watch - just before they got nailed for more than 1.7 billion dollars during the rest of his tenure. There's no real upshot apart from two constants for Apple. One they've fiddled with numbers enough to get the ire of the SEC going a few times. Two, it's becoming obvious that either the market isn't buying Macs to crunch numbers on - and Apple's stopped trying to sell CPAs on the idea of thinking different.

April 22

MacWeek points out more bad news for developers - as they indicate that Apple's cutbacks have hobbled the momentum for the developer market in-totum. According to Jim Rea, president of ProVue "Apple laid off every evangelist I know, and I'm back to square one again". Two plus two or deja vu? When they dropped the bomb on their developer support group, sacked the evangelists, and blew away most of the programs still intact and rolling along at Microsoft - one wondered how they were going to avoid the painful question - of how developers were going to give the Mac the time of day. Either they decided that these enterrpises were luxuries, or that they were going to focus their support with those that were intent on staying with Apple rather than those that would consider giving them one last try. Perhaps now that move by Intuit has a whole new perspective attached doens't it? I mean here's a question: What do you do when it costs more to make software for a platform that is undersupported, and sells less seats vs continuing to develop for an OS that sells most of your product, and is rabidly supported by Gates' staff and costs less to build? You stop returning Apple's phone calls - perhaps - but then, what if the phone never rang since those Evangelists went away? At this point, it probably would never cross your mind to develop for anything other than Windows in the first place. This is known as cutting off your nose to save face. Since no one has any reason to even look at Apple anymore, I assume that the end-result of such radical surgery must be pretty ugly to look at.

April 23

More on Quicken - will the stories never end? Not according to Dave Farina of WBC fame - quote - "If you look at Quicken sales for the Mac they have been disasterous". The upshot from Apple is that Steve Jobs is going to perhaps bundle a "lite" version of Quicken - or sibsidize future versions. Well there's a new twist on the market! If you can't make any money selling software for the Mac, Apple will PAY YOU to do it anyway! After all - rampant subsidies have worked so well for the Brittish people, why not the Mac userbase as well! Holy smokes did that just give me an idea! Hey, I can propose this really neat software product for Windows and MacOS to Apple and then claim that I'll loose revenue splitting my developer talent pool developing for a looser in the marketplace. Apple can then forward me funds to subsidise my programming team, and I can then use that capital to secure venture funds to get the Windows team into shape and release the product into both markets - then drop Apple later after a year of poor sales showing for the Mac. Then I can complain further and secure additional capital to offset the losses on the Macintosh side, and pay off the investors! God with Apple inspired logic like this, anyone can go into the software business! Just get Steve and Apple to poney up for a guranteed sales loss! Brilliant! So who'se with me on this? Anyone? Hello out there?

April 24

Just when you thought Apple "might" consider keeping it's greedy hands off a sure fire thing, Steve has to go in and destablize their equity with Quicktime - much in the same way he fucked things up for Mac-clone builders. With the current rewritting of contracts for Quicktime licenses, they are now getting feedback in the spit-and-bile column even at their shareholder meetings. According to MacWeek, one developer had this to say - quote - "Apple has a list of developers about to be screwed" - endquote. Not only is this probably an obvious probablility without the Quicktime train-wreck in progress, it's just a sad fact that Apple always manages to redirect focus just enough to kill something that has managed to be an asset with it's user and developer base. Now they've converted an asset into a liability. Whether it remains a political one, or a financial one is to be determined. What blows my mind and gives it the time of day is the fact that Apple excels at this, and with the situation already tenouis for developers, the way things are now, they're not helping their cause already. In otherwords, I guess Steve's current tact with Apple developers is, if we can't support you - we can surely screw you. Of course that was the same story with NeXT and Apple's early days, so I guess in some respects I shouldn't be surprised at all this. Why the developers act suprised is anyone's guess.

April 25

Summer dreams for Apple. As Microsoft get the last on-stage screwups and bugs out of it's next sales-story hit - Windows 98, Apple is attempting to counter all the ga-ga press with Microsoft making 1.3 billion dollars profit before 98 even gets released, with it's own teaser about what to expect from Apple to counter the next tidal wave from Redmond. Well golly-gosh! it's Allegro! Otherwise known as OS 8.2! now with even MORE native code for Power PC's! Strange, I thought they would have gotten most of it native by now? Ah well, never mind that, there's more! Better quasi-memory protection without the benefit of a kernal, and better diagnostic tools to help diagnose your hard disk after your system (certainly, and enevitably) blows it's mind in lockup fashion. All of this belies the fact that if the MacCommerades are so in love with a "perfect" OS, why the hell all the diagnostic tools, the patches, the first-aid, and the crash maintenanceware? I thought it was the end-all be-all of operating systems. You mean - gasp - it ISN'T? It's not yet running native code to handle the PPC which has been around for nearly 4 years? Gosh! Perhaps - THAT's WHY Macs have been crash prone, and sluggish and in dire need of that G3 power! With large chunks of your OS still running in emulation - in a silicon valley version of the catalytic converter - you really do need all that juicy faster than a MMX in some instances speed after all! Inspiring news from Apple which I'm sure will easily steal Microsoft's thunder for the summer. Uh, huh! Get out the tanning butter, because it's a bright future for Apple! So bright, it almost resembles a 3 megaton nuclear device popping off.