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 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
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