On (05 Jan 97) Kolja Brix wrote to Anne Page...
Hi Kolja...
 AP> Did any of you watch A&E's Biography of Bill Gates on the 
 AP> evening of January 2? I did. One segment included an interview 
 AP> of "Gordon Mayer of Geoworks" by Tom Brokaw and what Mayer said 
 AP> went a long way in explaining to me very succinctly exactly why 
 AP> Geoworks abandoned the desktop. Very interesting.
 KB> Sorry, but I could not watch this report in Germany. Could you 
 KB> please explain in short why they did not continue developing 
 KB> the desktop GEOS?
Basically, GeoWorks blamed Bill Gates for having most if not all of 
the vendors sign an agreement to purchase a MS OS with the computer 
even if it ended up being sold with another OS (GeoWorks could have 
really nailed Windows from the start by giving away the GEOS OS and 
just charged extra for those GEOS applications). Thus GeoWorks 
excuse was that it couldn't find enough vendors who was willing to 
purchase MS OS plus the GEOS OS. Well my personal feeling is that 
while this didn't help GeoWorks, I still blame GeoWorks for not 
acting in a timely matter for such mistakes like not releasing it's 
developers kit in time. This merely delayed third party support and 
allowed Windows to take over the market. And what's worse, when 
Germany Geo-hackers started writing GEOS applications, GeoWorks paid 
them off to make them stop (so claims a guy named Tommy Usher claims 
in the DR_DEBUG echo).
As you can tell, while I still love GEOS (both PC and Commodore 
versions), I don't think GeoWorks is very smart in marketing their 
product. As I believe they had done some of the stupidest things to 
kill GEOS. I guess GeoWorks was also spoiled by the Commodore crowd. 
As they could do and ask whatever price they wanted and still 
Commodore users kept coming back and begging for more. And even when 
GeoWorks had broken their many promises, we still continued to 
looked up to them. But who could blame us, as GeoWorks was the soul 
source for any GUI OS for the Commodores.
Here is what my Commodore experience was like. First GeoWorks came 
out with a buggy GEOS for the C64. But we bought them anyway. Next 
they fixed most of the bugs, but still ask us to pay for the newer 
less buggy versions. Then they released the C128 version, which I 
had to buy because I was running on a C128 of course. And all of 
those Commodore GEOS (64/128) applications always would cost extra.
Later GeoWorks came out with GEOS v2. Of course, the C64 version 
came out first and of course and I had to buy it. Later, they came 
out with the C128 v2. Of course, I had to buy that one with some of 
the newer C128 applications that they also upgraded. So GeoWorks 
probably got around $1000 out of me for all of the Commodore GEOS 
stuff that I bought. I also bet that I wasn't alone in all of this 
buying either. And even to this day, I still have all of it.
And what was nice about us Commodore GEOS users, was I bet we paid 
for all of the development cost for PC-GEOS. And that is when 
GeoWorks really put the screws to us. They didn't upgrade Commodore 
GEOS anymore and acted like they didn't care about us anymore.
Well I was a bit more leery when I went into GEOS for the PC. As I 
totally skipped GEOS v1.x. and waited for GEOS Ensemble v2. And I'll 
admit, GeoWorks was much nicer to the PC crowd. As all of the 
applications that we Commodore GEOS users had to buy all separately, 
GeoWorks included them all just for one small price. But once again, 
like they had turned their backs on the Commodore GEOS crowd, they 
started doing the same darn thing to the PC GEOS crowd. I guess they 
just don't understand that you just don't bite the hand that feeds 
you and not end up paying dearly for it later. No wonder Windows 
just ran away with the grand prize. Thank you GeoWorks! We could of 
been king of the heap if you weren't so narrow minded! Well that's 
my 2› worth anyway. Does that sound about right to you?
--- PPoint 2.00
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