Re: How viable is Cocoa development?

FROM : Bob Savage
DATE : Sat Jan 26 04:48:37 2002

on 1/25/02 8:09 PM, Gregory Weston at <email_removed> wrote:
>
> I know of one commercial GX product that shipped. It came out simultaneously
> with a Classic QD version of the same program.

I owned two commercial GX products. Both were excellent and had features
(due to their GX adoption) that *NO* other program could match. I sorely
miss both of them, but the fact that I was able to do things with GX that
I'll likely never be able to do again is not the sad part about its passing
away.

> A pertinent question, which noone who complains about GX and OD seems willing
> to answer, is exactly how long a company is expected to put their resources
> and credibility into products that aren't seeing enough adoption to pay for
> the people supporting them.

Apple can do anything they feel is necessary to save the company -- that is
what was on the table at the time. However, their right to kill the
technologies doesn't mean that it is not sad, or that the computing world
would not have been better if 3rd party developers had adopted those
technologies.

Specifically, GX had the opportunity to enable people in parts of the world
(e.g. Ethiopia) where text systems designed for English are just not
applicable, to participate in the digital revolution. This is not a business
case for keeping GX alive, but its a damned shame that the human race
couldn't pull it off. The technology was there. It could have really helped
to bridge the digital divide. But it won't.

It is sad, but the right solution does not always make it in the market
place. That being said, the problem with GX, as Gregory mentions above, was
not that GX was lousy technology, it was that developers didn't adopt the
new technology. That is what killed GX.

Bob