Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Friday, April 26, 2002
10:54 - The Ghost of Technology Past	(top)
Lance used to work for a company called WorldTalk. Back in the mid-90s, WorldTalk had a killer app: an e-mail gateway server package that could translate between just about any of the dozens of proprietary e-mail formats that were in use at the time, in the pre-Web, pre-online-desktop Internet. Companies using cc:Mail could talk to companies using Lotus Notes could talk to companies using SMTP could talk to companies using MS Exchange. All you had to do was buy the WorldTalk gateway, which cost $70,000 and ran on an HP-UX machine which the company preconfigured for you and included in the deal. It was ingenious, and it worked great. The software included translators for each of the mail systems that would preserve the maximum common formatting that both the sender and the recipient could handle, and it would translate everything in a bidirectional way so that nobody would ever know there was a middleman. To a cc:Mail sender, WorldTalk looked like a cc:Mail server. To an Exchange client, it looked like an Exchange server. They sold all kinds of copies and were making a killing. Of course, this was in the days before good ol' SMTP mail grew to account for slightly over 100% of Internet e-mail traffic. This consolidation killed off cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, and all the little proprietary competitors one by one. And obviously WorldTalk's market was going to go away eventually. But whether or not this consolidation would have ever really caused the destruction of WorldTalk through the complete deflation of their business plan is a side issue and now a moot point. Because, you see, the WorldTalk execs made an odd decision back in about 1996: They figured, hey-- there's this new platform called Windows NT. It's cheap, it runs on any PC-- why don't we produce a cut-rate version of our software that runs on NT, includes only the most popular translators, and costs only $700? That's only one-hundredth the cost of the full standalone HP-UX package we sell right now. Sure, we'll lose some HP-UX customers, but the NT market will explode! So they did. They sold an NT version of their gateway software that cost $700. And by God, they sold ten times as many copies. WorldTalk was dead within a year. This story is what I think of whenever anyone comes up with the brilliant suggestion that Apple should port Mac OS X to the off-the-shelf Intel platform. Hey, they say-- it already compiles for Intel. It wouldn't cost you anything, and it would increase your market share! Yeah, well, that's just what WorldTalk thought. The instant they started selling the NT version, people stopped buying the $70,000 platform, which is where all their margins came from. Their profits went from astronomical to zero in months flat. Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's smart to do it. One of Microsoft's biggest unsung triumphs in Windows, one of the superhuman achievements that few people trumpet, is that it includes drivers and support for practically every piece of hardware in the world. Throw together any kind of running PC, and Windows will probably run on it. This is not an accident, and it's not because all PC hardware is inherently compatible. Nothing could be further from the truth (well, few things could, anyway). The Windows driver code structure is one of the hugest, most complex, and most rickety structures ever seen-- and the fact that Windows works as well as it does is a marvel. Microsoft doesn't even have to bother putting anything on the Windows box about what kind of hardware it's compatible with. It's an astonishing feat on their part. Can you imagine what Apple would be letting themselves in for if they took on the task of building in support for all these thousands of vaguely-spec-compliant pieces of hardware? Because that's what they would have to do. And not only that, they would have to devote their primary share of effort to it-- because in a choice between buying a Mac, priced to please shareholders who expect Apple to make 30% margins in an industry where Dell only makes 8%... or buying or building a cheap PC clone and a copy of Mac OS X to run on it-- which would you choose? Apple would never sell a Mac again. Totally aside from any application-compatibility questions, this is the biggest reason why Steve Jobs has repeatedly and bluntly told people (as in the Apple shareholders' meeting yesterday) that he has no plans to bring Mac OS X to the Intel platform. It sounds like a good idea to people who don't understand how the money flows and where the effort goes-- but once you see that "selling more copies" is not the only axis that determines whether a product is successful, it's clear that such a move would be suicide for Apple. They're profitable right now; they're healthier than Gateway and selling more computers. They have no reason to gamble it all on a make-or-break land-grab whose success is anything but assured. Apple's best hopes are in staying the course. They've got a winning formula right here, and they'd be wise not to tamper with it.