Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Apple as a server company

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:5/1/1999; 6:36:27 AM
Topic:Linux' wide open spaces
Msg #:5505 (In response to 5496)
Prev/Next:5504 / 5506

Instead of making broad unsupported claims about our business, tell us about yourself. I went to your profile page but couldn't get thru to your site. How do you use Frontier? That's what really counts. If a lot of our users are moving one way and it's easy for us to move with them, of course we will move. But our situation is far more complex than your tea-leave-reading can reveal. I can't say more because we are a company with competitors and some of them read this DG.

About charging for a Linux version, look at the prices of our competitors. Unix versions of high powered application development environments get a lot more money than we do. We want that money. It's really that simple. A lot of rich companies are betting on Linux. If we can deliver them an edge that helps them move faster than their competition, that's worth a lot of money.

That's why we invested so much in Frontier over 11 years. The plan was to make a lot of money from the investment. The people we are selling to are moving to Unixes because they believe NT doesn't scale up to serve the market they're serving. Anything called "Mac" makes these people run away, when they're thinking about servers. That's Apple's problem, help them if you can, but it is not our problem. "Mac people" can deny this, blame me for saying it, but that doesn't change things.

(Which raises a question, if developers are ambivalent about investing in Apple software, why are you willing to invest your career in Apple software? Just a question, one which I wonder about all the time. Have you actually used the new version of the "Mac OS" that Apple is talking about? How about some reviews? Sell us. Please..)

On the other hand, the Mac/Windows platform has something to offer for the workstation and certainly for the client. Understand that the market is segmented this way and you'll have a good picture of the market environment we are targeting.

Also, I'd prefer if people ask questions here, and not confrontational "Are you really a bad guy?" type questions. It's more fun that way. I think this stuff thru, there's a long-term plan being executed. Look at the track record -- we've said in advance that we were going to Windows, going commercial, developing the server, but often people respond to what they think we're doing rather than what we've said we're doing. But we usually telegraph pretty accurately where we're going.

Right now the priorities are:

  1. Services, things like My.UserLand.Com, MailToTheFuture.Com and NewsSearch.UserLand.Com, and others that we haven't announced yet.

  2. The Workstation Product.

  3. Servers on Unix.

Pretty simple. Along with that we will keep our customers running. We're on Mac OS and Win32. What else would you like to know?

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