[SunRescue] ANybody elses desktop look like this

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 15 Jan 2001, Mike Hebel wrote:

> You'd think a company that thinks differently would recognize abandonware
> issues and capitalize on them to increase their market share.  I'd love to

You're assuming that MAE was allowed to fade away gently.  This is not the
case.  It was deliberately killed at almost the exact instant that Jobs
returned to Apple in a managing role. 

Apple's situation is in many ways similar to Sun's.  Both make their
profits off of (usually well designed) hardware and customer loyalty.
People are usually attracted to both systems more because of software than
hardware, though the hardware plays a part.  Any situation which allows
people to run their software without paying a hefty licensing fee can lead
to an erosion of their market share.

This explains the perceived failure of Solaris x86 to some degree.  Sun
wants it to succeed well enough to attract new Solaris users, but not
enough to eat into SPARC sales.  Hit and miss hardware compatibility is
one way to accomplish this.

-James [cynic]