>> This is probably no big surprise to you but sometimes business >> decisions are not made for rational reasons. > >Show me an irrational business decision made by a company that survived >the decision, and I'll show you an urban legend.
Um... Apple. And Apple's decision not to license the Mac OS early on. Apple's decision that the early Macs should be totally sealed and non upgradable (at a time when one of the greatest things about the Apple II and the IBM PC was the random expansion you could do with custom cards). That's just the obvious bad decisions that were made mostly for reasons of arrogance. Large companies make decisions like that ALL the time. Some are hurt worse then others for it. But many do weather thru it and move on. Just look up the history of the Ford Edsel. >> Jobs liked/wanted Mail.app, and as Chris notes, that was that. Jobs >> may also have spurned Emailer as a way of making a clean break with >> pre-OS X software. > >Nonsense, butter and dough. Emailer was end-of-lifed long before Mac OS >X was sufficiently formed to be a factor in any thinking. Any decision >process behind that was *strictly* rational. Just because that process >wasn't visible to those of us who weren't sitting around the conference >room table at the time, doesn't make it any less rational. Yes, I'm sure there were good business reasons to let Emailer die (along with all the other Claris apps that were killed)... but don't discount the Jobs factor. Much like the Newton's death, it wasn't all business and no personal influence (although Emailer was probably more business then personal then the Newton was... at least Emailer wasn't the child of the guy that helped run Jobs off in the first place). Factors that I believe helped Emailer die (in no particular order): -Jobs bringing in NeXTStep and Mail.app -Costs, Costs, Costs -Token butt kiss to MS -Headache of updating it (not all of Emailer's source belonged to Apple, so parts had to go thru other groups like AOL, that were unlikely to continue to be overly helpful, if they still existed at all). -Misplacing of the source code during the Great Claris Purge -Loss of development team during the Great Claris Purge -Costs, Costs, Costs (remember, it was killed at a time that Apple was showing quarterly losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars... so it if didn't have a strong outlook of profit, it was killed off. Jobs was determined to save Apple, and that meant what wasn't bolted down, got thrown over board, and some of what was bolted down was pried up and tossed over) -chris <http://www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
