bass@dmsd.UUCP (John Bass) (02/12/86)
One of our dealers told me several interesting rumors today .... ----------- Some well known internal drive vendor using AP clips attempted to assert that they had an exclusive market agreement on the clip in order to shut out newer competition. The story goes on that AP was reciently aquired by some larger company (3M??) and the managment of the new company suspended shipment of 64 pin clips until the problem could be resolved in court. ----------- If this is true I hope that memory/disk upgrade guys have a lot of inventory .... does anyone have any insight on if this is REALLY TRUE?? Or more about the whole story?? and the story goes on ... ----------- Another well known leading external drive company arrived at the show last month to see their first MacPlus's in several NEW competitors booths with newly announced competitive products. The president of the company was more than %*&^%(*^ about supporting the Apple product family the way they have and have the product seeding group bypass his firm. The story goes on to assert that he was so tired of the prefered treatment that a few firms have gotten to send a registered bitch to Apple management team starting at the top. It seems that this is shaking up an established "old boy" network of ex-Apple employees and friends that has allowed certain vendors prefered access Apple engineering and to information that the rest of us can't get from Tech Support with an endless amount of tring. ------------ If this is true ... I hope things are getting better for the rest of us. I personally exhasted nearly every avenue in apple to find the doc to implement a remote/external filesystem to build a low cost fileserver last spring. Tech Support was less than helpful (not that I blame them, they get tons of calls and how many people want to do fileservers anyway?). I tried to ask for the same information disclosures as was given General Computer -- fat chance I was told off the record that they spent several weeks inside with Apple engineering to make the product work. More reciently I needed to know how to do auto boot on a 512k for an internal drive product ala the General Computer product -- fat chance, no one would say how other than the diagnostic hook to branch to $F80000 during rom startup. I and my staff have spent a fair amount of time poking to General Computers roms to see what the magic was ... presto we discovered that they had included the whole test and initialization sequence from the Apple roms into their code ... we called Apple to license the same code -- fat chance. To quote an very defensive and less than helpful Mac Evangelist "just because they did it wrong is no reason you can do the same thing". It is sobbering to wonder why you are tring to support a vendors product line with little support when the competition is to market with their products because their engineering has direct access to friends and buddies in Apple engineering and support. I thought the anti-competitive court battles in the 60's ended this BS. John Bass