| Re: RSI CEO Open Letter To Our Macintosh Customers [message #27293 is a reply to message #27226] |
Wed, 17 October 2001 00:26   |
Randall Skelton
Messages: 169
Registered: October 2000
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Senior Member |
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On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Matthew Powell wrote:
> RSI CEO Open Letter To Our Macintosh Customers
> October 16, 2001
[snip]
> Despite our best intentions and commitment, the hard facts of our revenue
> from the Mac platform combined with the high cost of supporting OS X with a
> separate code base led to the decision that going forward with the Mac OS X
> release would not only be unprofitable for RSI, it would jeopardize the
> quality of support for our core platforms. As much as we would like to
> provide this release to our customers we would not be acting in a
> responsible manner of sustaining a viable business for our customers and
> shareholders.
This leaves me weary about the support for other OS's... What are the
'hard facts of revenue' for some of the other *nix platforms? Admittedly,
support for Linux, IRIX, Solaris, HPUX, and AIX, doesn't require as
significant a re-development as Mac OS X (aqua) does. Nevertheless, I
wonder if all the other OSs are truly profitable. Will we all be
expected to migrate to WindowsXP over the next 2 years? At the bottom of
this letter, a number of myths were dispelled... the one which was left
out was whether RSI will be dropping other 'unprofitable' platforms in
the near future...
> We are currently evaluating the possibility of providing support in IDL for
> both a Mac Classic format (OS 9 running on OS X) and/or a native
> Unix/X-Windows implementation on Mac OS X. Once we have determined the
> feasibility of each of these options we will let you know what we can do
> going forward.
A classic version of IDL will not do it for me... I want to be able to use
*nix features and *nix shared libraries. Tying IDL to applescript on OS X
would be a bad idea. In Mr. Cooke's letter he commented on using a
commercial Xwindows library to port to OS X. This is fine by me but I do
hope they are also testing with the XFree libraries.
Last week IDL for the Mac looked to be dead while now it merely looks
uncertain-- I don't really know which is better.
Cheers,
Randall
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