It certainly wan't intended to be cynical - they made a business case for Phoebe and it was built. Unfortunately, it didn't work first time and the timing was bad, so the division closed.It sounds like a gradual withdrawal from Acorn's traditional markets, although there was the whole enthusiast marketing initiative, which seems a bit cynical now if you think about it. Some Web-related technologies did float across to the traditional audience, but it would have needed a concerted effort to integrate something like Taos into Acorn's platform strategy, and I guess that there wasn't the business case for it.
Java floated across, though was never as polished as I would have liked. I believe the source licence that Acorn had to pay was in the order of £1m, in late 90s money, plus several man years of development (Oracle did fund the initial development, though their Java licence was theirs for the NC). I haven't a clue how many were sold, but it wouldn't have made a dent in the costs.
I also don't recall any RO engineers ever being interested in replacing RO on desktops. It was a big enough pain getting apps upgraded to be SA compatible, so anything else would mean no apps.
Statistics: Posted by piersw — Fri Mar 15, 2024 1:12 pm