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From: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.COM (Scott E. Preece)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: OPEN LOOK announced first (was: Re: Motif/Openlook, is there a trend?
Message-ID: <9102151636.AA06572@etude.urbana.mcd.mot.com>
Date: 15 Feb 91 16:36:19 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 50

From: jcb@frisbee.eng.sun.com (Jim Becker)
|    In article <1991Feb12.172735.5137@alphalpha.com>, nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:
|    > I've said it before, I'll say it again.  >Personal Workstation< is lying.
|    > *reviewed* new Motif applications.
|
|         To their credit, PW only reports shipping apps. ...
|
|Well, they also claim to factor out the applications that  aren't  for
|end users. So those don't make it into the list. This includes all the
|developers tools and such.
|
|If  you look at their new list for Windows 3.0, there are only about a
|hundred  applications.  There are reported to be over 800 applications
|available however. Grains of salt the size of manatees, if you ask me.
---
Not counting development tools makes a lot of sense from the point of
view they are trying to serve.  The availability of development tools
*may* mean that *someday* there will be end-user applications, but if
I'm shopping for a workstation for anything but software development
(and development is the tail that is having less and less market impact
on the delivered dog), I could care less about what *may* be available
*someday*.
---
|
|By this metric Unix in general would probably score with a count  done
|on two hands.. :-)
|
---
As an end-user environment, UNIX by itself deserves a count done on two
hands.  The people who are buying UNIX today do not care about and will
never see or use the tools that make UNIX dear to us.  They will use
WINZ or Framemaker or UNIPLEX or whatever, and will never, ever see a
shell prompt, let alone invoke a tool.  The tools themselves, of course,
are old and rusty and weren't state of the art when they were new,
anyway, and no company in the UNIX market is spending dollar one to
upgrade them, so they never will be...

I have no idea whether the PW list is an accurate reflection of the
collection of applications that are available and shipping, but if you
want to verify it, they ran the actual list, as well as the numbers, and
you can intersect it with the set of things you know are shipping...

I'd be a little surprised if there were 800 applications available today
for Windows 3.0, just from what I've seen around, but that's just an
impression, not a measured fact.

--
scott preece
motorola/mcd urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
uucp:	uunet!uiucuxc!udc!preece,	 arpa:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com