From: johnfi Tue Jul 17 17:27:20 1990 To: billg, bradsi, cameron, davidcol, joachimk, philba, richardf, russw, steveb Cc: richab Subject: GeoDOS / John Gordon Date: Tue Jul 17 17:23:35 1990 Yestrday, Rich Abel and I had lunch with John Gordon, a well-traveled sales exec who has been with Phoenix, founded GSS, etc. We discussed his views on GeoDOS from Berkley Softworks. We have not examined the product, as it is not shipping yet, so this mail is based entirly on his opinion of the June 22 Soft.letter and the attached email. GeoDOS is a Windows competitor that runs very wel on XT-class machines and "screams" on 386s. It's features include: - occupies less than 209k - has threads and true, pre-emptive multi-tasking - "event-driven" - nested, overlapped, etc. windows - some OOP - nice apps that are included Berkley is 60+ people with "30 engineers" and has recently received enough VC to permit marketing and expansion. The principals are Brian Doughrty (hands-on) and Clive Switch (on the board). They haven't agressively pursued either OEMs or ISVs in a big way, but Gordon said deals are brewing with Laser, Exerex and others. He also said Lotus was very inteested and is working with the product. Much of this is discussed in the Soft.Letter (the library has copies or let me know and I'll get them to you.) Gordon said that Berkley would be very suspect of any intrent on our part (naturally) and would probably be opposed to any deals. However, if we took a very subtle approach, we certainly could feal them out for technology and opputrunity. With Cameron/Nathan's background, they could probably shed some light on attitudes and approach strategy. Whatever the method, it's clear we should take some action prior to the espansion of their ISV/OEM program and certanly prior to full end user beta or product release. Comments? Other Data? John From: peterbra Mon Jul 16 17:32:32 1990 Subject: GeoWorks Date: Mon Jul 16 17:38:51 1990 Berkley was started to do applications for the Amiga, and they started convereting their software to the PC 2 years ago, because of the lack of sucess of Amiga. There are about 30 people in the company. I talked to Mike Segroves, who had talked to these guys. GeoWorks wanted SystemSoft to be their partner for oem business, in terms of licensing to oems and doing oem addaptations. Berkley has been looking for a partner for the oem business while Berkley concentrates on the retail business. They want to make their real money by selling apps for the GeoView Windowsing environment. The product is targeted to XTs and ATs sold in the mass market channel. In terms of the oem product, it includes the GeoView environment, a flat file system, a bit map package, a comm package and Write type of word processing. They are tyying to sell if for a royalty of $7.50 - $10.00 Mike felt that our friend Jon Gordon was the last person who had the oem marketing rights to it; as of Spring Comdex. Mike feels that Jon will not anything with because he has other priorities. Their weaknesses are they don't have: 1. porting tools to their environment and conflict of interest with their own apps development. 2. not known in the dos world. http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/5000/PX05140.pdf From: richab Tue Jul 24 08:04:44 1990 To: donnag, johnj, marche Subject: GEOVIEW Date: Tue Jul 24 08:04:43 1990 we can meet. Thursday afternoon or Friday is best for me. Some ideas for you: First there are the whole set of questions you can ask which raise a bit of fud in the customers eys for going to a non-industry standard product / company. As a MS Works competitor, we are pretty much stuck with comparing the feature sets of the geo stuff with works. We have a mature product and a high level of commitment to it. Berkley did work for the amiga and is an unknown in the intel world. so are their apps. what about support, company capabilities, etc. As a competitor to windows, we need to focus on the position that windows has and, most importantly the application and developer support that we have. As I understand it there are no toolkits for the geo stuff and development is done on a spacr station. My guess is that berkley gives you commented source and truns you loose. Not fun, not likely to get much isv support and a bitch to support / maintain. Geo has threads and premptive multitasking (so did mondrian, for that matter). What goos is this stuff if you can't efficiently develop an application that exploits the features. Hope this is helpful. let me know if you want to meet. rich http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/5000/PX05144.pdf From: bobo Thu Jul 26 09:30:11 1990 To: donnag, richab Subject: RE: geo whatever Date: Thu Jul 26 09:26:10 1990 Below are some random ideas from several people that might help with this. ... http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/5000/PX051146.pdf -- court documents in the case of Comes v Microsoft.