Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Stephen, Jean-Louis Gasse as with the original HC, Apple management didn't get it...with one exception: the person who preceeded Jobs' second coming. It's been too long for me to remember his name Gil Amillio (?; sp?) I'm pretty sure it wasn't Gasse. Did Amillio (sp?) preceed Job's third comming? Rob Cozens CCW Serendipity Software Company And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee. from The Triple Foole by John Donne (1572-1631) ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Jack, Bill, et al: Can anybody pick it up when hypercard went back to apple and we were supposed to have version 3.0? [snip] I guess I assumed the leadership at Apple controlled the robustness and goals of the teams involved in product development, even at Claris. The HyperCard team apparently lacked in both areas. With all due respect for the view of insiders at Claris, don't blame the HyperCard team(s) for it's failure--look directly to Steve Jobs for that. When HC came back to Apple, the team proposed and created proof-of-concept demos for HyperCard v3, or QuickTime Interactive. QTI melded QuickTime and HyperCard by storing HC stacks as QuickTime movies. The potential was tremendous: HC acquires color, eliminates the field script text limits, and becomes cross-platform; but, as with the original HC, Apple management didn't get it...with one exception: the person who preceeded Jobs' second coming. It's been too long for me to remember his name (Jean ??); but when Kevin C. demoed QTI for him, his response was This is what Apple is really all about, isn't it? Apparently the Board of Directors decided Apple was really about colorized hardware and eye candy, and put Jobs back in charge. For much of my career, the holy grail of programming was a tool that would allow non-programmers to create software. In the mid-seventies the City of Oakland spent many $ acquiring an IBM report generator, DYL-260, and training people from every City department how to use it...just to generate reports from existing data files. In the end, only one other person outside the DP Department besides moi ever produced anything meaningful. HyperCard was that holy grail; but Apple didn't understand it the first or second time around. Nor did the software reviewers, I might add. Rob Cozens CCW Serendipity Software Company And I, which was two fooles, do so grow three; Who are a little wise, the best fooles bee. from The Triple Foole by John Donne (1572-1631) ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
as with the original HC, Apple management didn't get it...with one exception: the person who preceeded Jobs' second coming. It's been too long for me to remember his name Gil Amillio (?; sp?) Rob Cozens, CCW Serendipity Software Company Vive R Revolution! ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Jean-Louis Gasse as with the original HC, Apple management didn't get it...with one exception: the person who preceeded Jobs' second coming. It's been too long for me to remember his name Gil Amillio (?; sp?) Rob Cozens, CCW Serendipity Software Company Vive R Revolution! -- stephen barncard s a n f r a n c i s c o - - - - - - - - - - - - ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Bill, Thank you for the fresh, insider perspective. I've used HC since it came out in 1987, believe I've read every book on the subject, and never heard it put this way. Thank you again for sharing it with us. Paul Looney -Original Message- From: Bill Marriott [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Sent: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 21:13:05 -0500 Subject: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?'] Well, I had the good fortune to be at Claris during the HyperCard transition. I knew the development team and the product managers well. I don't think it was anything so deliberate/nefarious as you surmise. - Claris didn't know how to make money on a program that had been given away for free. The demotion of the free HyperCard to a player and starting to charge for the full version ended up upsetting/alienating a lot of customers. - In those days, there was free, unlimited, red carpet technical support. You could call in with just about any question and the support group would go to the ends of the earth to solve it for you. (This included writing scripts and debugging stacks.) With everyone from commercial developers to 11th graders calling in, HyperCard became one of the most expensive products to support, surpassing even FileMaker Pro. - Key members of the Apple team that built HyperCard declined to move to Claris and the product just wasn't upgraded quickly enough or smartly enough. It took forever to get their act together under the reorganization chaos. Not enough features were added, and the ones that were often were not done in a way that pleased customers. - No one knew how to position it within the Claris product line. FileMaker was also the chief moneymaker, and there was some question why someone would use FileMaker if HyperCard was able to do the same things (easy reports, for example). There was actually a lot of contention for a while whether to use HyperCard or FileMaker as the engine for the technical knowledgebase (FileMaker won). - As a producer of software primarily targeted at consumers and small businesses, Claris didn't have the depth of experience to create a developer-oriented tool. - The HyperCard team tended not to integrate well with the rest of the company. They didn't eat lunch at the same tables. :) I think this prevented a lot of discussion, crossover ideas, and innovative thinking from occurring. - HyperCard was not making a profit; there were therefore no substantial funds for marketing it. Combined with all the other factors above, other companies (like SuperCard) stepped in and started to compete for the HyperCard audience. Market share of HyperCard fell dramatically. After HyperCard went back to Apple there may have been some additional machinations that I'm not aware of. However, 1) The Claris spinout was the beginning of the end for HyperCard as far as I'm concerned. It's not that Claris was a bad company (quite the opposite); it's just that insufficient strategic consideration was given to how it would grow there, and it probably should never have left Apple anyway. 2) I never once at Claris heard the notion that HyperCard stacks reflected poorly on the image of the Macintosh. Quite the opposite. 3) No one -- except a few crazies no one listened to -- saw the potential for HyperCard to impact the Web (and vice versa). So close yet so far. (sigh.) HyperCard's paradigm was mired in floppy-disk distribution of stacks... a bandwidth-friendly, streaming, component-ized, multi-user, client-server world was simply not envisioned. By 1993/1994 the Web was clearly the next big thing and HyperCard missed the boat. Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] I think they were ok with HyperCard staying a fun toy for amateurs, but they didn't want to blur the line by giving it full-blown professional UI potential. Then their platform would have been populated by half-baked applications that worked poorly but which could have appeared superficially to have been produced by professionals and would have helped define the Mac experience as amateurish. That would have been bad for business and their reputation. DTP programs used the computer to produce docs, for good or bad, but they weren't the computer in the same way a Hypercard stack became the computer while it was in use. Same for web pages, later on. They were documents, not applications. Mark On Dec 9, 2005, at 3:03 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: You mean, like how they abandoned desktop publishing because of all the horrid newsletters that sprung into existence? And how the web never took off because of all the ugly sites? :) Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] HC's rep was so tarnished by all the unsightly crap put out there by the rest of us that they didn't want it associated in any
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Thanks for that clear discourse. I think the true story behind the demise of Hypercard is very interesting. I'd like to see it fleshed-out a little more to a full story especially with some of the interesting facts such as the fast indexing code story and other history. In fact such a story (the rise and fall of a program no one could classify) has a lot of potential. On 12/9/05 10:13 PM, Bill Marriott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, I had the good fortune to be at Claris during the HyperCard transition. I knew the development team and the product managers well. I don't think it was anything so deliberate/nefarious as you surmise. - Claris didn't know how to make money on a program that had been given away for free. The demotion of the free HyperCard to a player and starting to charge for the full version ended up upsetting/alienating a lot of customers. - In those days, there was free, unlimited, red carpet technical support. You could call in with just about any question and the support group would go to the ends of the earth to solve it for you. (This included writing scripts and debugging stacks.) With everyone from commercial developers to 11th graders calling in, HyperCard became one of the most expensive products to support, surpassing even FileMaker Pro. - Key members of the Apple team that built HyperCard declined to move to Claris and the product just wasn't upgraded quickly enough or smartly enough. It took forever to get their act together under the reorganization chaos. Not enough features were added, and the ones that were often were not done in a way that pleased customers. - No one knew how to position it within the Claris product line. FileMaker was also the chief moneymaker, and there was some question why someone would use FileMaker if HyperCard was able to do the same things (easy reports, for example). There was actually a lot of contention for a while whether to use HyperCard or FileMaker as the engine for the technical knowledgebase (FileMaker won). - As a producer of software primarily targeted at consumers and small businesses, Claris didn't have the depth of experience to create a developer-oriented tool. - The HyperCard team tended not to integrate well with the rest of the company. They didn't eat lunch at the same tables. :) I think this prevented a lot of discussion, crossover ideas, and innovative thinking from occurring. - HyperCard was not making a profit; there were therefore no substantial funds for marketing it. Combined with all the other factors above, other companies (like SuperCard) stepped in and started to compete for the HyperCard audience. Market share of HyperCard fell dramatically. After HyperCard went back to Apple there may have been some additional machinations that I'm not aware of. However, 1) The Claris spinout was the beginning of the end for HyperCard as far as I'm concerned. It's not that Claris was a bad company (quite the opposite); it's just that insufficient strategic consideration was given to how it would grow there, and it probably should never have left Apple anyway. 2) I never once at Claris heard the notion that HyperCard stacks reflected poorly on the image of the Macintosh. Quite the opposite. 3) No one -- except a few crazies no one listened to -- saw the potential for HyperCard to impact the Web (and vice versa). So close yet so far. (sigh.) HyperCard's paradigm was mired in floppy-disk distribution of stacks... a bandwidth-friendly, streaming, component-ized, multi-user, client-server world was simply not envisioned. By 1993/1994 the Web was clearly the next big thing and HyperCard missed the boat. Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] I think they were ok with HyperCard staying a fun toy for amateurs, but they didn't want to blur the line by giving it full-blown professional UI potential. Then their platform would have been populated by half-baked applications that worked poorly but which could have appeared superficially to have been produced by professionals and would have helped define the Mac experience as amateurish. That would have been bad for business and their reputation. DTP programs used the computer to produce docs, for good or bad, but they weren't the computer in the same way a Hypercard stack became the computer while it was in use. Same for web pages, later on. They were documents, not applications. Mark On Dec 9, 2005, at 3:03 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: You mean, like how they abandoned desktop publishing because of all the horrid newsletters that sprung into existence? And how the web never took off because of all the ugly sites? :) Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] HC's rep was so tarnished by all the unsightly crap put out there by the rest of us that they didn't want it associated in any professional context with
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Bill, Thank you for the fresh insider perspective! Perhaps I can finally put to rest my conspiracy theories. (I hate it when that happens.) I guess I assumed the leadership at Apple controlled the robustness and goals of the teams involved in product development, even at Claris. The HyperCard team apparently lacked in both areas. Thanks for the perspective. Mark On Dec 9, 2005, at 6:13 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: Well, I had the good fortune to be at Claris during the HyperCard transition. I knew the development team and the product managers well. I don't think it was anything so deliberate/nefarious as you surmise. - Claris didn't know how to make money on a program that had been given away for free. The demotion of the free HyperCard to a player and starting to charge for the full version ended up upsetting/alienating a lot of customers. - In those days, there was free, unlimited, red carpet technical support. You could call in with just about any question and the support group would go to the ends of the earth to solve it for you. (This included writing scripts and debugging stacks.) With everyone from commercial developers to 11th graders calling in, HyperCard became one of the most expensive products to support, surpassing even FileMaker Pro. - Key members of the Apple team that built HyperCard declined to move to Claris and the product just wasn't upgraded quickly enough or smartly enough. It took forever to get their act together under the reorganization chaos. Not enough features were added, and the ones that were often were not done in a way that pleased customers. - No one knew how to position it within the Claris product line. FileMaker was also the chief moneymaker, and there was some question why someone would use FileMaker if HyperCard was able to do the same things (easy reports, for example). There was actually a lot of contention for a while whether to use HyperCard or FileMaker as the engine for the technical knowledgebase (FileMaker won). - As a producer of software primarily targeted at consumers and small businesses, Claris didn't have the depth of experience to create a developer-oriented tool. - The HyperCard team tended not to integrate well with the rest of the company. They didn't eat lunch at the same tables. :) I think this prevented a lot of discussion, crossover ideas, and innovative thinking from occurring. - HyperCard was not making a profit; there were therefore no substantial funds for marketing it. Combined with all the other factors above, other companies (like SuperCard) stepped in and started to compete for the HyperCard audience. Market share of HyperCard fell dramatically. After HyperCard went back to Apple there may have been some additional machinations that I'm not aware of. However, 1) The Claris spinout was the beginning of the end for HyperCard as far as I'm concerned. It's not that Claris was a bad company (quite the opposite); it's just that insufficient strategic consideration was given to how it would grow there, and it probably should never have left Apple anyway. 2) I never once at Claris heard the notion that HyperCard stacks reflected poorly on the image of the Macintosh. Quite the opposite. 3) No one -- except a few crazies no one listened to -- saw the potential for HyperCard to impact the Web (and vice versa). So close yet so far. (sigh.) HyperCard's paradigm was mired in floppy-disk distribution of stacks... a bandwidth-friendly, streaming, component-ized, multi-user, client-server world was simply not envisioned. By 1993/1994 the Web was clearly the next big thing and HyperCard missed the boat. Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] I think they were ok with HyperCard staying a fun toy for amateurs, but they didn't want to blur the line by giving it full-blown professional UI potential. Then their platform would have been populated by half- baked applications that worked poorly but which could have appeared superficially to have been produced by professionals and would have helped define the Mac experience as amateurish. That would have been bad for business and their reputation. DTP programs used the computer to produce docs, for good or bad, but they weren't the computer in the same way a Hypercard stack became the computer while it was in use. Same for web pages, later on. They were documents, not applications. Mark On Dec 9, 2005, at 3:03 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: You mean, like how they abandoned desktop publishing because of all the horrid newsletters that sprung into existence? And how the web never took off because of all the ugly sites? :) Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] HC's rep was so tarnished by all the unsightly crap put out there by the rest of us that they didn't want it associated in any professional context with
Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
This reminds me of Srila Bhagavan Goswami Gurudeva - Woops, letting too much out about my murky past - strike that. When a 'church'/movement/revolution goes rotten it is normally because its founder members have become disillusioned and left because they feel that the original vision has been lost. [Thinking about that Garga Muni dasa might be more apposite]. Now, I've said this before - possibly in a more facetious fashion - the 'Guru' (Atkinson) is 'Out There' in the cold (I remember he has some slightly sad website of landscape photographs) - the way to get the 'church' (and this post could spawn endless messages about whether we should view SuperCard as the Protestants, MetaCard as the Orthodox, and RR as the Catholics / Hypercard as Sunni, SC as Ibadi, RR as Shi'ia / HC as Vedantists, SC as Ramanujaite Vaisnavas, RR as Caitanyaite Vaisnavas - Oh, Cripes) back on the doctrinal path (well, at least in touch with the original vision) might be to open a channel of communication with Bill Atkinson - the man deserves it, dammit, he started all this! HyperCard withered because the founder had become cheesed-off / had been cast aside. Seen this a thousand times - and the historical parallels are there for all but the really turpitudinous to see. sincerely, Richmond __ See Mathewson's software at: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html ___ --- The Think Different Store http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/ For All Your Mac Gear --- ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
I really enjoyed that insider look also. Can anybody pick it up when hypercard went back to apple and we were supposed to have version 3.0? Jack -Original Message- From: Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: How to use Revolution use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Sent: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:35:59 -0800 Subject: Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?'] Bill, Thank you for the fresh insider perspective! Perhaps I can finally put to rest my conspiracy theories. (I hate it when that happens.) e I guess I assumed the leadership at Apple controlled the robustness and goals of the teams involved in product development, even at Claris. The HyperCard team apparently lacked in both areas. Thanks for the perspective. Mark On Dec 9, 2005, at 6:13 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: Well, I had the good fortune to be at Claris during the HyperCard transition. I knew the development team and the product managers well. I don't think it was anything so deliberate/nefarious as you surmise. - Claris didn't know how to make money on a program that had been given away for free. The demotion of the free HyperCard to a player and starting to charge for the full version ended up upsetting/alienating a lot of customers. - In those days, there was free, unlimited, red carpet technical support. You could call in with just about any question and the support group would go to the ends of the earth to solve it for you. (This included writing scripts and debugging stacks.) With everyone from commercial developers to 11th graders calling in, HyperCard became one of the most expensive products to support, surpassing even FileMaker Pro. - Key members of the Apple team that built HyperCard declined to move to Claris and the product just wasn't upgraded quickly enough or smartly enough. It took forever to get their act together under the reorganization chaos. Not enough features were added, and the ones that were often were not done in a way that pleased customers. - No one knew how to position it within the Claris product line. FileMaker was also the chief moneymaker, and there was some question why someone would use FileMaker if HyperCard was able to do the same things (easy reports, for example). There was actually a lot of contention for a while whether to use HyperCard or FileMaker as the engine for the technical knowledgebase (FileMaker won). - As a producer of software primarily targeted at consumers and small businesses, Claris didn't have the depth of experience to create a developer-oriented tool. - The HyperCard team tended not to integrate well with the rest of the company. They didn't eat lunch at the same tables. :) I think this prevented a lot of discussion, crossover ideas, and innovative thinking from occurring. - HyperCard was not making a profit; there were therefore no substantial funds for marketing it. Combined with all the other factors above, other companies (like SuperCard) stepped in and started to compete for the HyperCard audience. Market share of HyperCard fell dramatically. After HyperCard went back to Apple there may have been some additional machinations that I'm not aware of. However, 1) The Claris spinout was the beginning of the end for HyperCard as far as I'm concerned. It's not that Claris was a bad company (quite the opposite); it's just that insufficient strategic consideration was given to how it would grow there, and it probably should never have left Apple anyway. 2) I never once at Claris heard the notion that HyperCard stacks reflected poorly on the image of the Macintosh. Quite the opposite. 3) No one -- except a few crazies no one listened to -- saw the potential for HyperCard to impact the Web (and vice versa). So close yet so far. (sigh.) HyperCard's paradigm was mired in floppy-disk distribution of stacks... a bandwidth-friendly, streaming, component-ized, multi-user, client-server world was simply not envisioned. By 1993/1994 the Web was clearly the next big thing and HyperCard missed the boat. Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] I think they were ok with HyperCard staying a fun toy for amateurs, but they didn't want to blur the line by giving it full-blown professional UI potential. Then their platform would have been populated by half- baked applications that worked poorly but which could have appeared superficially to have been produced by professionals and would have helped define the Mac experience as amateurish. That would have been bad for business and their reputation. DTP programs used the computer to produce docs, for good or bad, but they weren't the computer in the same way a Hypercard stack became
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
FWIW, I think Bill is neither cheesed off nor outcast. He always had a passion for photography (and he's damned good at it) and he wrangled with technology long enough to have enough success to pay for his habit. I haven't talked to him for quite a while, but I'd be surprised if he's involved in any way in development these days. On 12/10/05, Mathewson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now, I've said this before - possibly in a more facetious fashion - the 'Guru' (Atkinson) is 'Out There' in the cold (I remember he has some slightly sad website of landscape photographs) - the way to get the 'church' snip back on the doctrinal path (well, at least in touch with the original vision) might be to open a channel of communication with Bill Atkinson - the man deserves it, dammit, he started all this! HyperCard withered because the founder had become cheesed-off / had been cast aside. Seen this a thousand times - and the historical parallels are there for all but the really turpitudinous to see. ~~ Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author http://www.shafermedia.com Get my book, Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Bill. Wow. Thanks for that wonderful stroll down memory lane. I remember being shown a prototype of a Windows version of HC at Claris at some point. I wonder if you were one of the folks in the room. i think Danny G and I were in the same NDA briefing. BTW, the HC evangelist at Apple, pre-Claris (I think his name was Bob Fernandez; he was a former criminal defense attorney and a hell of a scripter) had the idea of embedding HC and a TCP stack in the Mac ROM really early. He was shouted down. On 12/9/05, Bill Marriott [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: By 1993/1994 the Web was clearly the next big thing and HyperCard missed the boat. -- ~~ Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author http://www.shafermedia.com Get my book, Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Dan- Saturday, December 10, 2005, 1:35:26 PM, you wrote: BTW, the HC evangelist at Apple, pre-Claris (I think his name was Bob Fernandez; he was a former criminal defense attorney and a hell of a scripter) had the idea of embedding HC and a TCP stack in the Mac ROM really early. He was shouted down. Are you referring to Bill Fernandez? IIRC (don't count on it) Bill was the one who pushed to have multiple background groups available in a stack. -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Re: Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Nope, it was Bob Perez. I just looked it up. On 12/10/05, Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dan- Saturday, December 10, 2005, 1:35:26 PM, you wrote: BTW, the HC evangelist at Apple, pre-Claris (I think his name was Bob Fernandez; he was a former criminal defense attorney and a hell of a scripter) had the idea of embedding HC and a TCP stack in the Mac ROM really early. He was shouted down. Are you referring to Bill Fernandez? IIRC (don't count on it) Bill was the one who pushed to have multiple background groups available in a stack. -- -Mark Wieder [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution -- ~~ Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author http://www.shafermedia.com Get my book, Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
Why did HyperCard wither away? [was: Re: Why is Konfabulator 'Pretty?']
Well, I had the good fortune to be at Claris during the HyperCard transition. I knew the development team and the product managers well. I don't think it was anything so deliberate/nefarious as you surmise. - Claris didn't know how to make money on a program that had been given away for free. The demotion of the free HyperCard to a player and starting to charge for the full version ended up upsetting/alienating a lot of customers. - In those days, there was free, unlimited, red carpet technical support. You could call in with just about any question and the support group would go to the ends of the earth to solve it for you. (This included writing scripts and debugging stacks.) With everyone from commercial developers to 11th graders calling in, HyperCard became one of the most expensive products to support, surpassing even FileMaker Pro. - Key members of the Apple team that built HyperCard declined to move to Claris and the product just wasn't upgraded quickly enough or smartly enough. It took forever to get their act together under the reorganization chaos. Not enough features were added, and the ones that were often were not done in a way that pleased customers. - No one knew how to position it within the Claris product line. FileMaker was also the chief moneymaker, and there was some question why someone would use FileMaker if HyperCard was able to do the same things (easy reports, for example). There was actually a lot of contention for a while whether to use HyperCard or FileMaker as the engine for the technical knowledgebase (FileMaker won). - As a producer of software primarily targeted at consumers and small businesses, Claris didn't have the depth of experience to create a developer-oriented tool. - The HyperCard team tended not to integrate well with the rest of the company. They didn't eat lunch at the same tables. :) I think this prevented a lot of discussion, crossover ideas, and innovative thinking from occurring. - HyperCard was not making a profit; there were therefore no substantial funds for marketing it. Combined with all the other factors above, other companies (like SuperCard) stepped in and started to compete for the HyperCard audience. Market share of HyperCard fell dramatically. After HyperCard went back to Apple there may have been some additional machinations that I'm not aware of. However, 1) The Claris spinout was the beginning of the end for HyperCard as far as I'm concerned. It's not that Claris was a bad company (quite the opposite); it's just that insufficient strategic consideration was given to how it would grow there, and it probably should never have left Apple anyway. 2) I never once at Claris heard the notion that HyperCard stacks reflected poorly on the image of the Macintosh. Quite the opposite. 3) No one -- except a few crazies no one listened to -- saw the potential for HyperCard to impact the Web (and vice versa). So close yet so far. (sigh.) HyperCard's paradigm was mired in floppy-disk distribution of stacks... a bandwidth-friendly, streaming, component-ized, multi-user, client-server world was simply not envisioned. By 1993/1994 the Web was clearly the next big thing and HyperCard missed the boat. Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] I think they were ok with HyperCard staying a fun toy for amateurs, but they didn't want to blur the line by giving it full-blown professional UI potential. Then their platform would have been populated by half-baked applications that worked poorly but which could have appeared superficially to have been produced by professionals and would have helped define the Mac experience as amateurish. That would have been bad for business and their reputation. DTP programs used the computer to produce docs, for good or bad, but they weren't the computer in the same way a Hypercard stack became the computer while it was in use. Same for web pages, later on. They were documents, not applications. Mark On Dec 9, 2005, at 3:03 PM, Bill Marriott wrote: You mean, like how they abandoned desktop publishing because of all the horrid newsletters that sprung into existence? And how the web never took off because of all the ugly sites? :) Bill Mark Swindell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] HC's rep was so tarnished by all the unsightly crap put out there by the rest of us that they didn't want it associated in any professional context with their upscale brand identity. Sure, there were nuggets of gold among the piles of HyperCard coal, but even they were covered in black (and white) dust and hard to find. -Mark ___ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
