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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JP Sullivan who wrote (25543)	7/16/1999 9:58:00 PM
From: Mark Palmberg	Respond to of 213186

...but my point is that if Apple is really serious about making WebObjects a big success, it needs to get out there and make the product available to everyone at an affordable price. Too true, Winston, too true. With all of the great stuff that's come out (and not come out) of Apple over the years, one gets the impression that Steve-o wants his insanely great products doled out only to those folks who know just how insanely great those products are. The iMac has changed this a little bit, and i think it's OK for Steve to finally say, "hey, maybe we should let everyone have a shot at all this stuff." I think Steve has seen the kind of whoring that MSFT has engaged in over the years (as incredibly profitable as it's been) and has seen a company lose its soul. I would really, REALLY like to sit in on a meeting between Fred Anderson and Steve. Can you imagine? I mean, here's the guy responsible for putting the numbers on the street, talking to the guy who hangs over the designers' shoulders as they tweak the software and hardware to within an inch of its life. Fred's the only guy at Apple I can see Steve giving in to. Mark

To: JP Sullivan who wrote (25543)	7/19/1999 3:01:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213186

About a year ago, I considered using WebObjects to build a site we're now working on now. I visited Apple's Web site and tried to dig up as much info as I could about the product. I found that it was expensive (started at $5K although now it is bundled with MacOS X Server, I think, but I'm still unclear on the licensing policy), and what was worse was that I came away with the impression that the product was elitist, ie reserved for the privileged few. To purchase I had to send an e-mail requesting that an Apple representative contact me (no one did, btw). In this day and age of click-and-order, it seemed to me that Apple was not too keen on selling to the masses. Contrast this to MS whose FrontPage and VB programming tools are available almost everywhere. Some will argue that we're not talking about quite the same league here, but my point is that if Apple is really serious about making WebObjects a big success, it needs to get out there and make the product available to everyone at an affordable price. Apple snobbery has no place in today's business environment. I love Apple (the first in the office with a Tangerine iMac :) and am saddened to see that some of its old habits are still around. Adam was right when he spoke about faith. One really needs a LOT of faith and patience to stick with Apple. Winston WebObjects is not in the same product category as FrontPage and VB. Not at all. WebObjects is designed to help manage sites that operate with thousands if not millions of user sessions. It's a largely a development framework and architecture. It's what you use to set up the backend of the Disney Online store, not the frontend of a small business site. It's not snobbery, it's just a different market. It is not snobbery that prices a supercomputer in the millions. It's just a different market with different tolerances for paying for different features. The database management architecture underlying WebObjects is extremely advanced, and the application management is excellent. With WebObjects 4, you can successfully deploy "applications" that run off normal applications, web-sites, and 100%-pure Java applets and applications, all feeding off the same backend. Webobjects is not designed to be "the app server for the rest of us". As for WebObjects/Filemaker fusion, while I think it would be possible to use Filemaker as a backend for WebObjects, that seems unlikely to ever be used in practice.