What would Adobe do?

Michael Reichmann is brewing a storm in a teacup about Hasselblad's decision to make their latest body only take Hasselblad digital backs. It has sparked quite a fuss in the site's forum, and one poster has ejaculated:

"It looks like they (Hasselblad) are simply trying to knock down the competition while locking in their customer base. Nothing new in that; sort of reminds you of Microsoft and Adobe."

Apple would never do such a thing, would they? Of course it's just the usual brand religious nonsense, but it set me thinking. What would be the impact if Apple decided to make their Mac-only Aperture available for the PC? And with a trial version?

John

Hi John,

quick answer - smaller storm in bigger tea cup.

It is easier to make more money from software than hardware. In a few years time a 'mac' will be like a 'dell'. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em and so on. There are only a few cpu manufacturers now, compared to when Mac/ibm pc started, and I don't think the size of the mac market is significant to get a 'non -intel family device' designed and built. If Mac want to play in the soho/corporate pc arena, then the only way they can do that and compete on price is by using mass market components for hardware. So, if Mac think aperture, any of their software, will sell on a pc platform, then that is the way it will go.

fwiw, Avid, who were a mac based video editing software co., a few years ago went pc. Got into bed with IBM.

Best wishes,

Ray

Gosh, nerds are funny. Why shouldn't Hasselblad develop bodies that only accept their own parts?

Dierk

Well on that logic why shouldn't Hasselblad have commissioned film stock in its own size, patented that size, and made the only backs suitable for it?

Putting the line of thought to Apple. People have asked why shouldn't they develop software that's limited to their brand? Hence my thought about what would happen if they released it on the PC. I wonder if they will.

John




ps Another post from that thread:

"Apple had a superior operating system with a genius user interface (the mouse) that was poised to dominate the market and wipe out Microsoft's DOS, but they decided to dedicate that system to their not-so-great hardware. As other hardware manufacturers came out with better and cheaper computers and laptops, consumers opted for choice and out of the Macintosh operating system. By the time Apple got its act together, Microsoft had managed to copy its user interface, and the mistake could never be reversed. The whole world paid for that one.

Now, Hasselblad has done the same thing with its camera: made it hostage to its uncompetitive digital backs. It has gambled that it can force the consumer to choose its hardware. But this is even worse than Apple's gamble because the H camera system is not a genius idea ahead of its time; it's just a decent camera made for film but adapted to digital."

I don't doubt that from the consumer's perspective the higher flexibility of any system looks desirable [I doubt it really is] but what's the point for Hasselblad?

Technically there is a big difference between an electronic sensor - which is a proprietary system - and film. Originally everybody built his own body, lens and photosensitive material. Then only body and film, then film. It was not before the motion picture industry became influential that we got a few standardised film systems.

All the formats we now acknowledge as standardised - 6x6, 6x4.5, 6x9, 35 mm - haven't been that standardised originally. Let's stay with MF: could you work Rollei 6x6 in a Hasselblad 6x4.5? Why is it impossible to put a Leaf back unto my D2x, or my G2? Will Leica M8 take Hasselblad backs? And believe me, I don't make it sound absurd, it's just restating the case.

If people want Hasselblad to change their policy so the camera bodies can take whatever back the consumer prefers, there's two simple things to do, tell them and don't buy them [the change of reference here is intentional]. Oh, and don't forget to also buy the alternative backs. And tell Hasselblad how to make money from accessories sold by their competition ...


PS: I am currently thinking about an article on flexibility (always asked for, never used).

history lesson

Hi John,
My take on Apple is slightly different.

iirc, the mass market for computers at that time was going to be corporate. Every one was waiting to see what IBM would do. They were under a lot of pressure to do something. Corporates wanted distributed processing, take some load off mainframes, etc., but knew it had to be ibm. They bought in a pretty iffy design from Japan, then looked around for an os. They decided to keep the hardware open, not wanting to really get their hands dirty at the low cost, bottom end of the market - big objects have high inertia... They choose M$, the competition missed the plane, well so urban legend has Gary Kidal?, (the cpm guy) flying his plane instead of meeting with IBM. Everybody, including IBM completely underestimated the speed at which this would take off, or the size of the market. Bill Gates was a pretty lucky guy, but you have to make luck happen, sometimes. IBM put the industry back about four years, there being far better designed pc's back then, compared to the rubbish they chose. Heathkit (Zenith) for example had some good stuff.

Apple has done well to last as long as they have, their stuff is not that good, just product loyality/brand image keeps them going, and fud about folk going to 'the dark side'. It hasn't got to be that good, to be ahead of some of the other junk out there now, however.

I have an early article in 'Byte', written by the couple of guys doing the bios development in a garden shed somewhere, for the ibm pc. They developed a coloured monitor way before Apple, as they said - mainly green text, but brown smoke.

Best wishes,

Ray

Interesting that no-one's chosen to take my bait - what if Apple made Aperture available for the PC? Would there be demand? What would be the impact on Lightroom?

John

Lightroom isn't a product yet, hence there cannot be an impact upon it. Since Adobe Lightroom - regardless of contrary claims from them - is a direct answer to Aperture the impact already happened in development: Let's make the same only better.

While the idea behind both applications is still a very good one I don't see that either of them goes somewhere, although Aperture may be a little farther down the road. Listening between the sounds at photokina last week let's me think that a few applications already available may make Lightroom superfluous.

Since Microsoft has a tiny bit of might behind them [dollars and marketing] I hope they will incorporate RAW conversion into iView MediaPro, change the included image editor a little bit [bigger working area, clone tool], improve mightily on interfacing with other programs. MP->LZ->MP->QImage is all I need. If Capture NX [or a general U-Point image editor] gets a better UI and becomes speedier ...

Monopolies must play by different rules

There are plenty of examples (both with good outcomes and bad) of various vendors playing the 'lock-in' game. What I didn't see in the above discussion (I might have missed it) is the what-if: "What if Hassey is considered a dominant (or even monopolistic) player in their market?"

If that might be the case, then Hassey's move might be seen in a more, shall we say, litigious light?

In a lot of countries, a company that is dominant in their market segment is usually enjoined from the kinds of attemped lock-ins that the rest of the herd can usually participate in (that is, by themselves -- a joint lock-in effort would be called "restraint of trade"). That's why Apple (and even Adobe, for the time being) can get away with certain bundlings that Microsoft can't. The difference is that Microsoft has been found to be (at least in US courts) a monopoly in their market. Once a company has acheived that status, they must step much more carefully, lest they incur the wrath of the market regulators of the countries they do business in.

A number of folks consider Hassey to be pretty dominant in medium format, although I'm not sure that they could be monikered with 'monopoly', yet. Nevertheless, as a big fish in a small pond, it would behoove them to step more carefully.

I think the Hassey move screws their current/future customers more than the marketplace. But then again, no one who bought a Nikon 2Dx, has screamed because it cannot take a canon Back (sensor).

I think what MR missed is that the DSLR moniker that Hassey used is to tell people that this is a complete camera, film (sensor) + body. The fact it cannot use lenses from previous hasseys is where the customer gets screwed IMO.

OT -- the original PC/Apple divide

Ray West said:

Every one was waiting to see what IBM would do. They were under a lot of pressure to do something. Corporates wanted distributed processing, take some load off mainframes, etc., but knew it had to be ibm. They bought in a pretty iffy design from Japan, then looked around for an os. They decided to keep the hardware open, not wanting to really get their hands dirty at the low cost, bottom end of the market - big objects have high inertia... They choose M$, the competition missed the plane, well so urban legend has Gary Kidal?, (the cpm guy) flying his plane instead of meeting with IBM. Everybody, including IBM completely underestimated the speed at which this would take off, or the size of the market. Bill Gates was a pretty lucky guy, but you have to make luck happen, sometimes.

I have an early article in 'Byte', written by the couple of guys doing the bios development in a garden shed somewhere, for the ibm pc. They developed a coloured monitor way before Apple, as they said - mainly green text, but brown smoke.

Best wishes,

Ray

Click to expand...

Since I worked at IBM (in Research, but collaborated with Dave Bradley and the rest of the original PC team from the mid 1980s), let me straighten some of this out. Bradley was the lead BIOS programmer, and a career IBM employee. He selected "ctl-alt-delete." There were at first only ten guys working on the project, and they found some offices in Delray Beach FL where nobody else in IBM could find them so that they could move fast. They were protected by the CEO (Frank Cary) and a senior VP, Bill Lowe. It helped that there was an existing design, the "DataMaster" fondly called the DataTurkey, which was probably done in Lexington KY or Austin TX (typewriter/word processor development labs) which they could steal from and reduce the amount of hard to procure special parts. The Datamaster did get to market, but only after the PC was released, and it died quietly. I don't believe the Japanese were involved, as at that time they did printers and Far Eastern versions of products. The choice of the 8088 instead of the 8086 or the Motorola 68000 was simply a matter of 6-12 months' difference in the dates at which manufacturing volumes would be available.

The Kildall story, as told by IBM people, is that a rented car with four big guys in blue suits, white shirts, and black shoes drew upto the house where CP-M was developed. Kildall's wife met them on the front porch. They said, "We want to talk to you, but we can't tell you why or who we are until you sign this..." She told them to buzz off, and we'll never know whether Gary was flying somewhere for pleasure (as MS folks love to tell the story) or for business, or simply inside getting some work done.

scott

Scott,

Great to hear the truth from the horses mouth, so to speak. Thanks for your insightful post!

Must have been Austin, TX (for the DataMaster) because I was at IBM Lexington Information Systems Division at the time (1979-1982), in Product Test & Assurance, and I don't recall a project like that there.

One of my tasks at the time was working on the electronic keyboard (firmware, particulate/contaminate, and 'touch curve' tests), which was originally based in part on the 3270/3278 terminal keyboards from Raleigh, NC, but with a greatly simplified key action -- a simple piece of spring metal attached to a capacitive fly plate. That design was slated for (and ended up in) our electronic typewriters Models 50/60/75, but we had some folks from Boca nosing around at the time.

IBM was tight enough that I didn't know anything about the upcoming PC project except its code name, and the fact that the folks from Boca were very interested in our keyboard design. There were a number of innovative (read patentable) features, which I won't bother to go into here, but that design is what ended up in the PC electronic keyboard.

After the PC was introduced, I got a job offer from an old school chum in Ann Arbor that had started up a business making add-on cards and software for the Apple II, and wanted to break into the PC add-on business. I spent the next ten years working for various PC peripheral companies in SE Mich, writing video BIOSes, TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident code), and things like LIM/EEMS spec drivers for those big bank-switched memory boards that were in vogue before the advent of the 286/386 and the attendant protected-mode OSes that made gobs of main memory feasible.

Dave New said:

One of my tasks at the time was working on the electronic keyboard (firmware, particulate/contaminate, and 'touch curve' tests), which was originally based in part on the 3270/3278 terminal keyboards from Raleigh,

Click to expand...

The KB was the best feature of the original PC imo. I grew up pounding teletypes and later 3270's and never liked the soft touch kb's that later became vogue. When Lexmark discontinued their $150 "clacky" I bought a half dozen at $10 each at clearance auction and still use them on all my PC's.

I spent the next ten years working for various PC peripheral companies in SE Mich, writing video BIOSes, TSRs (Terminate and Stay Resident code), and things like LIM/EEMS spec drivers for those big bank-switched memory boards that were in vogue before the advent of the 286/386 and the attendant protected-mode OSes that made gobs of main memory feasible.

Click to expand...

In the early 80's when still an IBM mainframe programmer I started moonlighting to learn PC's. When DR came out with "banked" CPM to handle 128k of ram, I wrote a BIOS hook driver to make Corvus external drives work on the Vector Graphic S100 systems. Had to reverse engineer the banked bios because Vector Graphic wouldn't supply source.

- DL

One more point to make while we hijack this thread

IBM gets a lot of ridicule for "losing control of the PC," to Intel, to Microsoft, and they did indeed allow sufficiently loose deals that MS ended up driving everyone else out of the PC-OS business, even IBM (remember OS2 which was briefly well ahead of Windows 95 on technical grounds?). Intel succeeded by moving faster than their competitors, I believe, but MS's success was trickier. Eventually in each PC, whether made by IBM or made by a clone, the largest $ amount went to MS for the operating system, followed by either the price of the Intel cpu or, in the clones, the royalties that IBM collected for use of the PC patents, which were freely licensed but were definitely not free. Since it doesn't cost that much to collect a royalty, the most consistently profitable part of the PC business was probably the patent royalties. Over 17 years of collecting for "ctl-alt-delete" and the rest, IBM was quite grateful to Bradley (who became an IBM Fellow) and the rest of the early team.

One place where IBM failed to succeed with this model was when, in the 286-386 timeframe, they introduced the Microchannel, and asked a handsome royalty for it. (I was on the losing side of the debate -- thought it didn't offer nearly as much as could be done at the time.) So the industry ignored it until Intel pushed through the PCI bus, which we are still using.

scott

keyboards

Don Lashier said:

The KB was the best feature of the original PC imo.

- DL

Click to expand...

Remember the wretched PC Jr. "chiclet" keyboard, which was awful by any standard? That product disappeared so fast that it is probably extremely valuable as a collector's item today.

scott

Yeah, a couple of years ago, I finally did a basement-cleaning, and took a complete PC Jr., with monitor and chiclet keyboard to the recyclers. Even had the BASIC cartridge, and sidecar serial port extension.

Also a stack of old, original 16-64K PCs with cassette port and green screen monitor that someone had donated to me. Thought I'd recycle them as packet radio terminals, but never got around to it (hard to find these days, those round tuits).

Oh yeah, a bunch of Televideo 950 'glass CRT' terminals (remember those?).

Even still had a Xitan S-100 bus CP/M system, with double-sided/double-density 8 inch floppies, and complete collection of CP/M-based software, including all the volumes of the CPMUG (CP/M Users Group).

It all went in the dumpster...

I did hold onto my homebrew wire-wrapped Z-80 CP/M system, though, just for old times' sake. Some prototype PC add-on boards, though, I finally took some nice pictures of, and then dumped.

Now, all I've got to do is figure out when to dump all my 5 1/4" media (and soon after, most of the 3 1/2" diskettes), since modern systems don't even sport a floppy drive anymore. At least I can re-use the 5 1/4" media cabinets to store CDs/DVDs in.

And I did manage to decide to dump an entire box of Irwin backup tapes, but I've not been able to find a good way to dispose of them. The recyclers don't want them.

It's amazing how much junk you accumulate from 30+ years of computer work. In particular, being a ham radio operator, and taking pride in a well-stocked 'junque' box, means being a confirmed pack rat.

Hmm. Any offers on the first year of 'Dr. Dobbs', 'Kilobbyte/Kilobaud', or 'Byte'?

Dave New said:

It all went in the dumpster...

Click to expand...

You should have donated to a computer museum or sold on ebay. I dumped a bunch of teletypes and a televideo 950. Still have a DEC PDP-8 with mag core ram - mentioned it on a forum once and was offered $1000 by someone.

- DL

The snag is, some things don't sell too well on ebay - magazines, for example, and even though the buyer pays for delivery/packing, its often not worth the trouble of finding boxes, etc, or going to the post office, for low priced items. Of course, it depends where you are, how easy to get packaging etc.

wrt computer bits, the local shop lays out all his spare parts on the floor, takes a photo, sells as 'maybe not working', or whatever, and usually gets around 50 pounds or so for each job lot, and its not too difficult to send - bubble wrap, etc, since he has plenty of packaging/boxes etc.

Best wishes,

Ray