Why Microsoft Should Fear Intel Macs" 545

Of course, Edwin is wrong. Edwin is always, perenially wrong about everything. Jobs end the clones because they were eating into Apple's sales, and not growing the platform. He did in a very simple way. He denied the clone manufacturers access to the OS by jumping from System 7.6 (IIRC) directly to System 8. The cloners' contract with Apple to supply the OS extended only to the end of System 7's lifespan. By jumping to System 8 directly, Jobs essentially cut the cloners off at the knees. They couldn't sell their systems with no OS, so they quit. Be's part in all of this? Why, nothing at all. Be's buttociation with Macs ended the day that Jobs came came back to Apple as part of the NeXT deal. I believe that Gbuttee had already ported BeOS to X86 hardware by the time Jobs end the clones in 1998. But several PC manufacturers DID offer Be as an alternative to Windows until Gates & Company informed them that by so doing they were in jeprody of losing their M$ license. Be later came out with a free version that could run under Windows (to get people interested) but the fact is that the industry could only support two major platforms (which is still largely true today) so very little interest was generated. Be was finally sold to Palm and R5 was the last official release. It is now pretty moribund.

And by the way, there was even less software for Be than there was for Linux either before or after the OS was ported to X86. And while Be certainly was a nice OS and certainly better than the old Mac OS, it looked downright old fashioned next to OSX.

As usual, never pay any attention to anything Edwin writes. He's 100% wrong 100% of the time. I guess its good to be consistent about something.

-- George Graves The health of our society is a direct result of the men and women we choose to admire.