> Raskin conceived the Macintosh as a computer that was easy to use for ordinary people yet also incorporated the means for ordinary people to program the machine. Something that was added as an afterthought to Jobs' re-envisioned Macintosh with Bill Atkinson's Hypercard.
Apple created an in-house Macintosh version of Basic that was intended to ship with the Mac, but Microsoft threatened to yank Apple's license for Microsoft Basic on the Apple II if Apple released MacBasic for the Mac.
Andy Hertzfeld shared the story of how this all played out:
> We decided we should write [Basic] ourselves, instead of relying on a third party, because it was important for the Basic programs to be able to take advantage of the Macintosh UI, and we didn't trust a third party to "get it" enough to do it right...
Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt.
After Microsoft forced Apple to kill MacBasic, they shipped Microsoft Basic for Mac, and it was indeed absolutely terrible when it came to creating programs that took advantage of the Mac UI.
It wasn't until HyperCard shipped a couple of years later that truly user friendly GUI based programming landed on the Mac.
(a) MS expected to make money on the Mac, and did for many years with Word and Excel (well before they were bundled into Office), among others. The best versions of Excel and Word were on the Mac for a long time.
(b) Microsoft eventually released a QuickBasic for the Mac that was capable of producing apps with a real Mac UI. IIRC, the IDE wasn’t very good, but it was capable enough at the time.
Killing the ability for users to easily create GUI based programs certainly counts as platform sabotage in my book.
There was no Windows yet on PC, and Microsoft Basic for Mac gave you almost no ability to create programs that took advantage of the Mac UI. You were limited to creating text based programs on a system that was all about having acess to a graphical user interface.
It's pretty easy to see why Microsoft didn't want Basic programmers on the Mac to be able to do more advanced things than Basic programmers could do on DOS based computers.
Apple created an in-house Macintosh version of Basic that was intended to ship with the Mac, but Microsoft threatened to yank Apple's license for Microsoft Basic on the Apple II if Apple released MacBasic for the Mac.
Andy Hertzfeld shared the story of how this all played out:
> We decided we should write [Basic] ourselves, instead of relying on a third party, because it was important for the Basic programs to be able to take advantage of the Macintosh UI, and we didn't trust a third party to "get it" enough to do it right...
Apple's original deal with Microsoft for licensing Applesoft Basic had a term of eight years, and it was due to expire in September 1985. Apple still depended on the Apple II for the lion's share of its revenues, and it would be difficult to replace Microsoft Basic without fragmenting the software base. Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt.
https://folklore.org/MacBasic.html
After Microsoft forced Apple to kill MacBasic, they shipped Microsoft Basic for Mac, and it was indeed absolutely terrible when it came to creating programs that took advantage of the Mac UI.
It wasn't until HyperCard shipped a couple of years later that truly user friendly GUI based programming landed on the Mac.