Cassedy & Greene (aka, the author of Mac Night Owl is a hack)
You know, I don't really read Mac news sites by and large. They're often run by people who love Apple products, but for the most part don't really know anything... hence the sites & forums of those sites often turn into narcisistic, apologetic and uninformed circle-jerks. There are much better places to get good, reliable info.
So, I miss a lot of the really stupid articles... but I've had this one forwarded onto me from two people and it's annoying the hell out of me. I rarely would refer to anyone as a reason-challenged hack, but Mr. Steinberg gets the honor. The only saving grace seems to be that not many people really know who he is or read his site... hence, he seems to post really nonsensical stuff with misleading headlines hoping to get linked to from other mac news sites, and hence push up his ad impressions.
This "article" is a very good example, the title is barely applicable to the article, just a bit sensationalistic over, well, nothing. Bygones, actual news sites usually do that sort of thing too... but the "article" itself is barely coherent in that it contradicts itself several times which you can see by just giving it a quick overview.
However, these two paragraphs struck me particularly vile:
The demise of C&G doesn't auger well for small software companies. It's hard enough for any small business to survive in an uncertain economic climate. And finding a niche that won't be usurped by a larger company, even Apple itself, is doubly difficult.
The point being in that somehow Apple is pushing out smaller software companies by including new "features" in their OS, such as font management, reminiscent of what some people think happened with Watson (a whole other story, which I think Watson's creator milked a lil too much considering his entire app was based on calls Apple put into the system saying "this is what you can do").
Anyone who does print work using a mac uses some sort of font management tool. Macs have an extremely high marketshare in the print market... hence, it's a feature many people need/want. It just makes sense, and should have been in 10.1. There isn't a whole lot in OSX that really makes a print designer go "oOoooOo that would help me", but this feature is one of them. Good for adoption, good for users, good all around.
Being a small software developer (or small anything) is about identifying and exploiting niche markets. If the one you're currently exploiting is going the way of the do-do, you either have to identify a new niche. If that isn't possible, or you can't compete, you close up shop.
For example, you could claim that by including Apache in a stock OSX config that Apple has completely stolen the mac web serving market from the likes of webstar. Or that by including mySQL they'd be doing the same to filemaker (which is an Apple subsidiary), or by including a spell checker at the OS level they've doomed the market for 3rd party spell checkers, or by including anti-aliasing of text they'd killed that market off...
...or that by including an integrated TCP/IP stack they've killed the market for 3rd party TCP/IP stacks. Sounds kinda stupid, doesn't it?
But how has Mac OS X hurt Casady & Greene? Well, let's face it, the need for Conflict Catcher, probably one of the showpieces in the company's line, has all but been eliminated. Yes, it still runs in the Classic environment, but as more and more Mac users move full time to Mac OS X, even that becomes irrelevant.
This one is just so blatently stupid... the market for their product simply went away because it was tied to a product that also went away. It happened to be their main livelihood, so their company went away. The gist goes something like this:
OS9 and below used 'patches' to the operating system at boot time called extensions, which allowed companies to extend what the OS did, or even to change it's functionality.
Often times these extensions would "conflict" with each other, and to track down the problem you were in for a lot of grunt work: disabling an extension, restarting and seeing if the problem still occurred. If it didn't, you knew you were on the right track. Conflict catcher simplified the process immensely. It wasn't necessary, you could do it all by brute forcing it very easily, but conflict catcher did simplify things greatly... hence it had a pretty brisk business. With OSX, the whole underlying OS changed dramatically, hence there isn't a need for conflict catcher anymore.
To give Apple any guff over this is, well, stupid. Looking at the rest of Casady & Greene's product line... there just isn't anything there really relavant anymore. There's nothing that anyone really wants.
Looking at OSX... it's immature. There are all sorts of things users do want, which other companies have identified and are selling... and hence, making some $$$. This particular company chose not to compete, and hence is gone... it's sad, but that is just how it works... no company (including Apple) is immune.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJuly 01, 2003, at 08:51 PM
Strange that nobody considered your article important enough to bring to my attention and I ran across it, after all this time, purely by accident.
Typical of your lack of accuracy is this comment: "The only saving grace seems to be that not many people really know who he is or read his site."
Yes, that's why we get over half a million hits every month! And let's not forget the hundreds of thousands of people who bought all those books I've written over the years.
The rest of your article is just as accurate, and maybe the fact that it remained invisible for two years is a saving grace.
Gene Steinberg