Longtime Fan Laments It Isn’t the Apple of His Eye
Doug Burgum, the 39-year-old founder and chief executive of Great Plains Software, counts himself among Apple Computer Inc.’s die-hard supporters. While many software developers have abandoned Apple, Great Plains, which has sold an accounting package for the Macintosh since 1984, has stuck by the Cupertino, Calif., computer maker through good times and bad.
But Apple hasn’t done much to repay his loyalty, paying little attention either to Great Plains or the small-business people who are its customers.
A soft-spoken North Dakotan, Burgum is reluctant to criticize. “Large corporations spend the big dollars, so I guess Apple felt it needed to go after them,” he says. But his patience is running thin. “Apple can’t just say, ‘Hey, write software for us,’ without supporting the developers helping us promote [our products].”
Great Plains will be one of 4,000 software firms in attendance at Apple’s worldwide developers conference being held this week in San Jose. Apple’s new chairman and chief executive, Gilbert Amelio, will offer a few more details on his plans for revitalizing the ailing company--but he’ll face a tough audience of software developers jaded by a string of broken promises.
The gathering opens just a couple of weeks after Apple announced that Copland, a critically important new version of the Macintosh software operating system, is again being delayed. Developers, who must write their applications to the operating system, had expected to get their hands on Copland this week. But with the final release date pushed back to mid-1997, they’re now unlikely to receive advance copies until early next year.
Developers are concerned that Copland is suffering from “feature creep,” a term for packing a piece of software with a lot of unnecessary features.
“There’s a lot about it that has been over-engineered,” says Norm Meyrowitz, senior vice president of engineering for Macromedia, a multimedia software firm.
Some of Amelio’s initiative should go down well with developers. Retailers say Apple will pare down its three product lines from as many as a dozen models to between three and five. And Amelio intends to focus Apple’s efforts on markets where it has a strong following and can command a premium--such as education, publishing and graphic design--while encouraging clone vendors to fill in the gaps.
Like every computer company, Apple is feverishly trying to develop a strategy for the Internet. Chief scientist Larry Tesler has been charged with heading that effort, and the general plan is to offer transparent access to the Internet not only from the operating system, but from individual software applications.
At the very least, say some developers, Apple finally seems to be shedding its legendary arrogance and taking their concerns into account. Recently a dozen key software developers aired their complaints at a daylong meeting at company headquarters. “Apple really listened,” says John Warnock, chairman of Adobe Systems. “That was a real difference.”
Julie Pitta (pittaj@aol.com) and Greg Miller (Greg.Miller@latimes.com) contributed to this
