 |
Business | Industries | Finance | Tax |
| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 ] Next Last |
During the early days of the Macintosh computer, Apple shipped the machines with two basic programs, MacWrite and MacPaint, so that users would have a working machine "out of the box". However this resulted in complaints from third party developers, who felt that these programs were good enough for so many users that there was little reason to buy something better. Apple decided to allow the programs to "wither", so that the third party developers would have a market to sell it.
Unfortunately, this never really happened, and it was some time before truly capable replacements came along. In the meantime users complained about the lack of upgrades, while developers complained about any possibility of an upgrade.
Eventually Apple decided the only solution was to spin off the products to a third party of their own creation, forming Claris in 1987. Claris was also given the rights to several less well-known Apple products such as MacProject , MacDraw and MacWorks . In 1988 Claris purchased Nashoba Systems to gain access to their product, FileMaker. After a number of upgrades they re-launched it into the marketA market is a mechanism which allows people to trade, normally governed by the theory of supply and demand. Both general and specialised markets, where only one commodity is traded, exist. Markets work by placing many interested sellers in one place, thus as FileMaker II, and had their first major "hit".
At first Claris seemed to have the same problems as Apple with the products. Upgrades were trivial, limited to simply making the program continue to run on newer versions of the Macintosh operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, t. However in the later 1980sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 Events and trends they started a major upgrade effort, including a more modern and common user interface across the products, based on FileMaker. The result was the "pro" series, MacPaint Pro, MacDraw Pro, MacWrite Pro and FileMaker Pro. In order to provide a complete office suite they also purchased the rights to the Informix WingZ spreadsheetA spreadsheet is a rectangular table (or grid) of information, often financial information. It is, therefore, a kind of matrix. The word came from "spread" in its sense of a newspaper or magazine item (text and/or graphics) that covers two facing pages, e on the Mac, re- brandThis article is about brands in marketing. For other uses, see Brand (disambiguation McDonald's, represented by the Golden Arches, is one of the world's most famous brands A brand takes the form of a symbolic construct created by a marketer to represent aing it as Claris Resolve , and added the new presentation programA presentation program is a computer software package used to give presentations, normally in the form of a " slide show". They typically include three major functions, the slide show system to display content in a linear fashion, an editor that allows te Claris Impact .
The series was release piecemeal over a period of about two years, during which period MicrosoftMicrosoft Corporation , headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, is the world's largest software company (with over 50,000 employees in various countries, as of May 2004). Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses and supports a wide range of software had basically taken over the majority of the market with Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. While the packages were arguably much more "approachable" the first versions lacked some features of the now more mature MS suite, leaving them lacking in "checkbox features". Their value was further eroded by agressive bundling deals from Microsoft that could allow Word, Excel and PowerPoint to be purchased for a cost not much higher than MacWrite alone, a bundle that Claris did not match. Claris did offer ClarisWorks, an all-in-one package, and while the price was right it was very limited and could not compete in the business market.
About this time Apple upper management decided that all software should be released through Claris, forcing them to take on HyperCard and the distribution of the Mac OS itself. This proved to be a disaster, the OS was soon returned to Apple, and HyperCard was destroyed in the process.
In 1995 Claris purchased and released Claris Homepage , considered by many to be the best web site creation package on the market. It was perhaps the only truly GUI-based what-you-see-is-what-you-get HTML editor, with all of the other products then available either being glorified text editors or placing tags in the editor that made it non- WYSIWYG. Other products added to the line included Claris Em@iler and Claris Organizer . These products were part of a new effort to diversify Claris and no longer chase the "office" market, which by this point was considered a lost cause.
It was around this time that the management decided that FileMaker was the only product worth keeping, and put all of the rest of the products on indefinite hold—no changes were made to them at all, not even to keep them working on newer versions of the Mac OS. By 1997 the transition was complete and the company renamed itself as FileMaker Inc., and their only other major product, ClarisWorks, was sold back to Apple to become AppleWorks.
The rise and fall of Claris was seen by many as indicative of problems at that time within Apple as a whole. Unable to understand the marketplace, products were allowed to languish. When management finally realized they were sitting on what could be a goldmine, they started an upgrade series that resulted in products making it to market too late to be interesting any longer.
| Politics | Business | Finance |
 |
 |
 |
|