>>>"Apple was hurt by MS's outright theft of Apple's GUI design,...
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>>>Jerry,
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>>>This statement always tends to amuse me. "...Apple's GUI design..."?? Where did Apple get that from? Xerox, that's who. Apple paid Xerox nothing. Further, Microsoft wasn't even the first to utilize the GUI after Apple introduced Lisa. Commodore did it, and so did Atari.
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>>The account by the person (a women whose name escapes me at the present) at the Palo Alto labs of Xerox indicated she was pleased when Jobs and his crew visited their lab and saw their pioneering work, but stunned when Xerox let Jobs have the technology because they didn't see a hugh market in desktop computers that would be useful in a business environment. No vision at the top.
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>>Your point about Commodore and Atari is correct, but Apple didn't hire either Commodore or Atari to write their GUI desktop, they hired Microsoft. Commodore and Atari did not have insider information on Apple GUI code. Gates did.
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>I believe that the "insider information" that MS had came from developing software for the Apple rather from being hired to design the interface. Further, even if MS did participate in the design, you're talking about two extremely different hardware platforms. Lisa (and later the Mac) had the advantage of chipsets designed for a graphical interface. Very little of what could be designed for the Apple would apply to the Intel x86 and compatibles platform
>
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>>>Fact of the matter is that Apple was hurt more by Apple's own actions than by Microsoft's so-called theft.
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>>It's probably true that Jobs did as much damage to Apple by the introduction of such a poor PC as the Lisa (I had my own computer store at the time and had to keep four in stock to support each one in the field. Poorest PC ever made, IMO. That klutzy heat sink on the back was not in good thermal contact with the motherboard.) "So-called" theft is another matter. If you were hired by a company to work on their propritary code, which you then 'exported' to your own office modified it for your business and then began marketing it in competition to the company that originally hired you... would you call your actions "so called" theft? In todays 'IP' environment you'd be in jail awaiting a court date.
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>The Lisa preceeded the Mac, so any damage that Jobs did with Lisa was largely eradicated. The problem was a proprietary platform, nothing more nothing less. IBM did the same thing later with the micro-channel.


The biggest damage he did by releasing such a poor machine as Lisa was to encourage a lot of retailers, like myself, to look at other platforms. Specifically the IBM PC, when it came out. It took only seconds to make the decision to drop Apple PCs and go to IBM PCs and clones.


>It should also be pointed out that one of the "angels" in the entire Apple saga is Microsoft. Apple might not be in business to-day if not for the partership that Jobs and Gates struck a couple of years ago.

That's a euphamistic to look at the situation. Others might think of it as a cheap way to manufacture 'competition' at a time when the DOJ was making the point that there was no competition. I guess we agree to disagree.


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>>>Next thing people will try to tell me is that Microsoft's SQL Server was stolen from Sybase.
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>>No need for exaggeration. It is common knowledge that Sybase sold it to Microsoft.
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>Not quite. Prior to the release of SQL Server 6.0, Sybase and Microsoft had a business agreement under which Microsoft licensed and marketed the product from Sybase. Prior to 1991, Microsoft had no rights to even view the source code. The agreement was amended in 1991, giving Microsoft read-only rights to the code. This was for the purpose of support. Prior to this agreement, Microsoft support could only report bugs to Sybase, and then have to sit around and wait for Sybase to fix the problem. Once they had read-only access, when a bug was reported, they not only determined was the cause was, but gave Sybase the code to fix the problem. This resulted in the problems being resolved much more quickly.
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>The Sybase design abstracts the operating system for the purpose of multi-platform support. The Microsoft design since SQL Server 6.0 does not. It's written specifically for the Win32 platform. The fact the SQL Server outperforms Sybase's has little to do with the knowledge that was gained by viewing the Sybase code, and more to do with this fact.

I think I said that, in fewer words. :)