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

Re: Apple's failure to link to UserLand

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:10/30/1999; 10:03:21 AM
Topic:Today's scriptingNews Outline
Msg #:12547 (In response to 12546)
Prev/Next:12546 / 12548

We spent virtually all of 1993 recoding Frontier to build off the Apple Event Object Model, for naught, Apple didn't deliver on their end of the deal, which was including Frontier in the marketing for Mac scripting.

A lot of the arguing we got from Apple was about why we were doing it differently from them. That usually happened the instant they had a spec, even if they didn't have an implementation. We saw Apple people as being incompetent whiners, unrealistic and unappreciative. Maybe you didn't know everyone involved Paul, you certainly weren't in many of the meetings I had with Apple people.

Remember Roger Heinen? And there was another guy, a total suit, who tossed hand grenades into my company any time he pleased. He once even tried to get me fired. (I owned the company, what an idiot.) I think his first name was Steve.

A lot of dark souls. One guy was bad-mouthing Frontier's C heritage, and at the same time promoting his "plug in" C syntax for AppleScript. I feel somewhat gratified in that their plug-ins never shipped, and in the end AppleScript is the odd-man-out. Surprise, JavaScript and Python look a lot more like our syntax. Perl and Tcl are from even stranger planets.

And then there was the jerk who got up in a meeting in front of a dozen Apple people and said "But we aren't trying to crush UserLand!" You should have seen the execs scurry from the room like rats. Zoooom. I laughed. "Gotcha!," I thought to myself.

Funny story -- I got a call from Steve Jobs shortly after he took over at Apple. He said something like "These people are all bozos." I was taken aback by the statement. Of course I agreed. They were total bozos. But for some reason I didn't like hearing him say that, so I kept my mouth shut.

Now I know it's OK. They were bozos. The worst, most incompetent excuse for a software company this planet has ever known.

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