FileMaker going back "in-house" @ Apple?

[TriggerCat]

I love rumors as much as the next guy, but this one hits kinda close to home. Ran accross this tidbit this morning that FileMaker was being moved back in-house at Apple.

http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=115

Seems kind of far-fetched, but with all the buzz about changes @ Apple and what the WWDC will bring @ the end of this month I wondered if anyone else has heard anything recently about this? Seems to me there was a "Microsoft is buying FileMaker!" scare not so long ago. Not that this would be a bad thing, and I definately don't want to fan any fires, just thought it would make for interesting DevCon conversation this year at Pheonix.

thanks

[danjacoby]

Excuse me, but if MS were to buy FM it would be a very bad thing.

You want evidence? Try finding FoxPro.

[Anatoli]

IMHO, FoxPro was horrible. I do not miss that much

FileMaker is different cup of tea.

But sure, as first MS will change the FM interface to be more Access like, then VB will be everywhere and so on...

[danjacoby]

Not to mention what they'll do to queries, requiring codes, etc.

No thanks. I've gotten a nice amount of business from people who are sick of Access; the last thing we need is MS ruining FM.

[TriggerCat]

Just re-read my post...I didn't mean to indicate that Microsoft buying FM would be a good thing...YIKES! MS screws up everything it gets it's hands on! (example: whats going to happen to VirtualPC now that MS has it?! You can bet it will either dry up and disappear or become "bloatware"!)

What I meant to say was "There could be worse things if FM went back in-house at Apple."

[CobaltSky]

Whether FileMaker Inc will at any point get swallowed up by the big Apple (or re-swallowed, one might say) is a moot point, but I wouldn't place much store in the article in question.

For one thing, it reads like c-grade fiction. And for another, it claims that the sources it cites were 3-parts inebriated drongos - hardly the kind of conversation that'd be worth the bother of eavesdropping on - much less posting to the net, one would think.

[falkaholic]

I'm with Ray, its fiction.

I also think it was ment as a joke.

[Bob White]

Regarding a few comments back about MS buying FoxPro. As I recall, at the time, what MS really wanted was the at-that-time new-superquick "engine" (Stockton?) that made FoxPro so lightning quick (for that era). As of a couple years ago, that "engine" was alive and well -- driving the corporate version of Outlook! (That was related to me by an Outlook tech engineer in either 1999 or 2000, so I don't know if this is still the case.) Point is that companies don't always buy other companies for their whole product line. Lots of times they buy to get the "missing piece" to finish their own product development.

My guess would be that if Apple is supersizing Appleworks to compete with MS Office, then it would be interested in selling a real database (as opposed to the very limited database function in Appleworks). They certainly wouldn't be interested in it for its lightning quick speed!

[Anatoli]

I never understand Apple Inc. and their policies and marketing.

When they have brilliant idea or product somehow is killed before taking off and then years later MS is capitalizing on it.

But I remember very well their Apple Writer word-processor on IIe. It was one of best word-processors I've ever seen on any OS.

It had 4 variables and one can really program that WP to be much more intelligent, than to be just WP.

I was using it for filling British Railway forms.

It asked me for filling delivery address, then for unlimited number of products, which where sitting in text database, then crunched for second or two with 5.25" floppies and automatically filled in the description of goods.

It saved me an hour every day!

[CobaltSky]

Anatoli said:

I never understand Apple Inc. and their policies and marketing.

When they have brilliant idea or product somehow is killed before taking off and then years later MS is capitalizing on it.

But I remember very well their Apple Writer word-processor on IIe. It was one of best word-processors I've ever seen on any OS.

It had 4 variables and one can really program that WP to be much more intelligent, than to be just WP.

I was using it for filling British Railway forms.

It asked me for filling delivery address, then for unlimited number of products, which where sitting in text database, then crunched for second or two with 5.25" floppies and automatically filled in the description of goods.

It saved me an hour every day!

Interesting...!

A related example perhaps is the first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, which came out on the Apple II around 1979. If AppleWriter provided some of the inspiration for products such as M$ Word, you'd have to say VisiCalc (which was published by Software Arts Inc but later sold to Lotus and became Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC around '83) provided *all* of the inspiration for products like Excel. For those who remember it, it was brilliantly conceived and way ahead of its time, but because it happened to have been published before software was made patentable, 'highly ethical' companies like M$ were able to copy it unchallenged.

For all the bells and whistles, the fundamentals of current versions of Excel are still recognisable as 1979 VisiCalc with a make-over!

[Anatoli]

Yeah,

and those products where running quite fast on 1-2 MHz machines and need only 32-64 k memory