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

To: X-Ray Man who wrote (7918)	1/22/1998 12:16:00 PM
From: Sowbug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Hello X-Ray Man, I understand your concern that, under my plan, Apple might abandon FM Pro and adopt Access, which you consider inferior. If that happened, I agree to some extent that it would upset many loyal FM Pro users who rely on that application for personal and business uses. I think the key in my original post is "hedge." You must admit that it doesn't take a genius to come up with FM Pro. Sure, it's easy to use, and it's nice to be able to create new fields and just hit return a few times instead of clicking buttons all over the screen, but the simplicity of that application comes at a serious price -- no compiler, no SQL support, no standalone applications (especially no freely distributable runtimes), no plugins or hooks for custom functions, and (as I said a few days ago) not even a phone number format (as of 3.0). I really doubt that Oracle would have trouble maintaining an application like that, which a team of one or two programmers could handle. Further, an entire industry is built around Access. I have friends who make livings -- good livings -- developing custom applications in Access for businesses. Much like other Microsoft applications, the Access format has achieved a kind of immortality in computers, making it totally justifiable and defensible for a company to drop $25,000 to pay someone to develop a custom Access application. You know that if that guy dies you'll find someone else, and you know Access isn't going to disappear. But FM Pro? Try selling custom FM Pro work to a business, and they'll say (1) what's FileMaker Pro? (2) isn't that ClarisWorks, that free software that came bundled with my daughter's Performa? (3) Apple makes that? Aren't they going out of business? Like it or not, the Microsoft name lends tremendous credibility to ISVs, and that kind of almost grass-roots support ensures that the platform and format will survive. I agree with your final paragraph -- let ISVs develop products, profit from them, and grow the Apple software industry. To that end, though, how could it be better NOT to adopt the industry standard? Again, I understand where you're coming from -- you're lamenting the possible demise of FM Pro, and not necessarily saying that Access is bad for Apple -- but it seems like you're following the "Not Invented Here" antipathy that drove Apple into the ground.