Well I think the departure of Jean-Louis Gassee had something to do
with it!
The French still buy French (or at least European) rather than
Chinese but having a loud Frenchie in a high position helped... <g>
An example of that was Orangina - the best selling soft drink in
France, until bought by Coca-Cola-Schweppes, then everyone stopped
drinking it and CCS are off loading it.
Plus the fact that people don't write native software (the magazine
cover CDs still have difficulty finding more than about half a dozen
French localised apps a month) which is a bit ridiculous given the
ease with which OS X can do localisation. Despite the fact that there
are more French speakers than Japanese in the world, I guess Apple
thought not too many Africans were gonna buy $7,000 Apples, and they
were right.
As for Minitels, they still sell them, and they're very useful for
paying bills. The UK had a similar thing called Prestel, but due to
the incompetence of British Telecomm failed to market it properly, as
they've done with ADSL, such that the UK is now pretty much behind
every other European country except possibly Latvia.
Tony Spencer
St Rémy de Provence (13) France
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://tonyspencer.blogspot.com/
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