On Mon, May 19, 2014 at 11:08 AM, < [email protected]> wrote:
> > Yep. Can there be any other reason for them dropping Mac and Unix support > other than them not wanting apps for non-Windows systems (to keep the > Windows dominance)? > "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." Believing your enemy (or opponent, or vendor) is just pure evil incarnate puts you at the disadvantage. And I don't really think incompetence was the issue, either, it's just such a pithy quote. The corporation that created the largest number of millionaires ever had some things going for it. But their motivations were likely far different from ours or from the Fox Software folks. I think that sales of VFP Mac were abysmal. The 3.0 version of the product was painfully slow and buggy, too. I don't have any idea what the sales of the UNIX product were, but I'll bet the Windows-centric MS had a lot of concerns about marketing and supporting a Unix product. I know there was an effort to move VFP from its existing C compiler to the MS compiler. Porting three platforms isn't three times harder; it's likely more like nine or twenty-seven times harder. You couldn't optimize in x86 assembler, since Mac's were 68k based at the time, and Unix ran on all sorts of scary things like PowerPC and MIPs CPUs. There had to be all sorts of issues with memory-management, video compatibility, etc. This is a huge software engineering task, and MS had to look at this in a cost-justifying business case. Why would they want to do this? I don't think the math was that hard. As I've said before, MS bought Fox for some very specific reasons, which they are unlikely to ever blatently state in public, but it's very likely those motives involved competition, Borland, Ashton-Tate, and talent acquisition far more than whether or not VFP ran on the latest Macintosh.. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/CACW6n4sh=sz0c6lg6vnarfalamqsitjhb8zxe1pyr4+yjqm...@mail.gmail.com ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
