The Logic Off Topic list

--- In logic-ot@yahoogroups.com, "Oblivian | Bacteria AS" wrote:
> 
> Sorry, I don't agree with you. Even though an OS vendor 
> develops other software doesn't mean that the software 
> they develop is inferior to the competition. 

Well, it /often/ does, because they can get away with more.
Of course, sometimes the in-house programs are so bad that they never 
make it to market at all. I don't know if you ever saw the early 
betas of MSNetwork (which Gates had told the developers was going to 
eliminate the internet). It was, quite literally, the worst piece of 
software I've ever, ever seen, but the in-house hype that it 
was "great" meant that it was demoed to developers as the Next Big 
Thing. A small focused development team would never have done that.  

And there was Apple's promised raft of killer multimedia apps, when 
they releanched their multimedia division years ago (which at the 
time was what stopped me from developing for the Mac). Ever see any 
of those apps? :-) Or there was the previous press launch, years 
before that, where they flew a guy to London to eagerly show a bunch 
of unimpressed music shop people a buggy demo of a half-working 
arpeggiator utility. At the time I had a 96-MIDI-channel Notator 
system at home, so their incredible demo didn't exactly knock me out.

How good were Apple's own in-house attempts at writing video editing 
or music composition apps? Well, if they'd been any good, would they 
have had to buy in logic and FC from outside?


> M$ is a prime 
> example of that. I can think of no other software
> that substitutes MS Office. 

MS pretty much destroyed the opposition with their tactics. They 
leveraged Office, the OS, development tools and the apps to get 
competitive advantage for whichever component was considered to be 
least competitive at the time, and deliberately engineered 
incompatibilities between their OS subsystems and competing office 
apps. As a developer, I had to buy Word in order to construct 
helpfiles. Word had some nice features, but had (/has?) some 
outrageous bugs and mistakes which didn't get fixed for years. 
Some parts of Windows/Office were very impressive, but those tended 
to be parts that MS had bought in, rather than developing them 
themselves. I was really impressed by the MS Equation Editor, but 
that was apparently designed by an independent one-man software 
company. 


I do think that Internet Explorer is very good (they bought in the 
core code instead of developing it themselves, but I like part of 
what they've since done with it).  


> Yes, there are alternatives, but they aren't
> "better". Before MS Word it was Word Perfect for DOS ... 

Remember the Atari-based wordprocessors? Calamus on the Atari had 
outline vector fonts, Word didn't catch up with that until ... 
Word97? 
And if you tried writing a book or a technical documentation on Word, 
its internal structure couldn't cope. MS claimed to have produced 
their own manuals using Word, but I was at a conference where someone 
asked how to get Word to produce a certain layout effect used in the 
manuals, and they had to awkwardly admit that, yes, they'd actually 
used Something Else (probably Adobe). 

> IE vs Netscape? We all know Netscape sucked. 

Yep, Netscape sucked.

> It isn't even around anymore since AOL simply dropped further 
> development. 

Yeah, well, AOL aren't exactly a good example of a little independent 
software team with no corporate issues, are they? 
(/perhaps/ Netscape could have bee saved if development had been 
given to a hungry motivated team with clear ideas about what they 
wanted to achieve with it, dunno ... or perhaps MS's obvious plan to 
give away IE for the major platforms simply made it not worth while 
putting in the resources needed to bring Netscape up to scratch) 

I thought that Compuserve used to be rather good, but then they 
committed to having MS redesign their system, that idea broke down, 
and then they got made part of AOL Time Warner. 
Now the corporate strategy regarding Compuserve seems to try to shut 
it down, after getting existng members to switch to AOL. It's a 
captive userbase, that's all.
 
But maybe (overall) IE counts a a success story. 
"Outside talent+ corporate muscle" sometimes does prduce nice things 
(the Pixar hookup with The Evil Disney Corp seemed to work very 
well), but only when the corporation doesn't start fiddling around 
and interfering with the product to make it fit their corporate plans 
better.

Who here thinks that logic is now a better suite for losing Windows 
support? And for not supporting OSX VST? And for losing the option of 
supporting UNIX?
Are emagic a more open and up-front and friendly company since being 
taken over by Apple? How far do you trust them to be able to deliver 
on a development roadmap now? Hell, they probably aren't even allowed 
to tell us what the roadmap is (assuming that it exists).


> Same with Premiere vs Final Cut. 

Well, I understood that FC is largely composed of bits that Apple 
acquired by taking over and cannibalising other companies.
I'm not saying that that's always a bad thing, but in order for that 
strategy to work, you have to have those little companies out there 
in the first place, thinking that they can actually make some money 
in the market with their nice nice apps and components. 

Once Apple have the market stitched up, where does the next 
generation of innovation come from?


> Final Cut is commonly regarded the better choice. The problem 
> is that it is developed by Apple, and Apple is an OS vendor. 


> What puzzles me and what should disturb you is that if there's 
> any company that has made Apple what it is today, it's Adobe. 

Yep, Adobe are persistent innovators (even if their product marketing 
is sometimes a little odd). Didn't Adobe also develop the TrueType 
font-handling subsystem system for Microsoft, for Windows? 

> And when Adobe starts looking elsewhere it is
> not a good sign I'm afraid. And it's Apple's own fault. 
> What if Steinberg feels the same way after the aquisition 
> of Emagic. Maybe in a year or two we're stuck with Logic 
> on Mac. 

Well, Steinberg were kinda bludgeoned into making an early public 
decision on whether to continue with Apple support or not (even 
though Apple were now deliberately not supporting Steinberg's OSX VST 
format for tactical reasons), and under pressure, they said they'd 
continue with OSX. 
But that doesn't mean that they are not now going to make Windows 
their priority. Especially now that they've been bought out by 
Pinnacle.

> Terrible... Opera is "thinking loud" about
> discontinuing development for Mac, M$ has stopped further 
> development for IE on Mac. Windows Media Player 9.0 wont 
> ever be released for Mac, and that is
> a BIG problem since WMA and WMV is regarded the second 
> largest format after MP3 and MPEG, followed by Real and QT. 
> They wont even release the codec.

Well, Apple do seem to be throwing down the gauntlet in a number of 
media sectors and effectively saying that they can go it alone. 

I don't know exactly what happened between Apple and Sony, but Sony's 
NetMD software doesn't work with the Mac, so you can probably add 
ATRAC to your list of unsupported formats. 
Of course, perhaps Apple think that the iPod cupled with their MP3 
business will obliterate everything else, and who knows, maybe they 
migth even be right. But I've seen lots of kids on the tube playing 
with their minidisc players, and haven't yet seen an iPod outside a 
retail shop. Maybe iPod uptake is much higher in the US, dunno.


> What Apple doesn't seem to understand is that Mac is a niche 
> computer and Apple isn't M$. M$ is one of the largest and most 
> influential companies in the world. They can pull of things 
> like that and get away with it. Apple can't, they're to small. 
> They just don't seem to get it, I'm afraid...

Yep, MS made the good business decision early not to get into 
building the computers themselves. They let IBM make a loss on their 
original PC range breaking in the market, and they let Taiwanese 
manufacturers happily cut each others throats for profit margins, 
while they just sell these little CD packs. 
Apple got too greedy and decided that they wanted the whole pie for 
themselves, and then suffered for years with manufacturing 
difficulties and inventory issues. MS just let other people worry 
about building expensive obsolescent hardware and just creamed off a 
profit on each machine based on what those manufavcturers had 
installed on their harddrives.     

iPod is a very different product for Apple, the critical software and 
hardware technologies behind it are third-party, and Apple just 
supply the design flair and marketing. And its supposed ot be rather 
successful. Instead of getting themselves into a tizzy over R&D and 
manufacturing for the next generation of hard drives for the next-
generation iPod, they can just sit back and let the PC HD 
manufacturers fight amongst themselves to bring down 2.5" HD prices 
and increased capacity ... and when the time is right, Apple just 
have to buy some of the new 2.5" HD models, plug em in, and they've 
got a brand new improved iPod. 

Some people at Apple must be thinking .. why the hell don't we go 
further along this path with the computer processors too?
Just assemble a damned good PC from the cream of the readily-
available computer hardware, have a version of OSX that only runs 
with an Apple-authorised chip, and if we ever decide to get out of 
the desktop market, we still have the res tof the business intact.

I mean, the way things are currently going, it looks like in a few 
years, the only critical apps that would need to be rewritten to run 
on a G6 will basically be Apple's own apps anyway ...


> My initial post stands. Apple shouldn't develop Final Cut, 
> Final Cut Pro, Safari, Logic or any other "auxillery" software. 


> Neither should M$, but
> since they are so much bigger than little Apple, they are more 
likely to get
> away with it.
> 
> Anyway, I find it strange that some of you tend to compare 
> Apple and M$. It is two completely different companies and 
> different rules apply to them.
> Apple wont ever be prosecuted under anti-Trust laws/violations 
> because they wont ever be in a position to do so. M$ is because 
> they have a world-monopoly. That doesn't mean that M$ is worse 
> than Apple businesswise since M$ has been accused and Apple not. 

> And it certainly doesn't mean that they are better either. Had  
> Apple been as big as M$, I am certain they have
> had exactly the same "problems".

I think that one of the main reasons that some people liked Apple was 
that they weren't Microsoft. Now that they seem to be aspiring 
to /be/ Microsoft, some of us are wondering whether we'd actually 
miss them if they went under. Maybe a more friendly company would 
take their place.
It'd be a shame to lose further logic development, but since there 
are no public commitments form apple/emagic that there's going to be 
significant further logic development anyway ...