Newspapers.Com is Becoming My Second Search

I keep thinking I'm going to cancel Newspapers.Com but I can't bring myself to do it, despite the $19.90 monthly cost. It's becoming the second place I look for information after Google and the clipping feature makes it easy to share stories on the web.

Here's an example. I saw a mention online that Apple was extremely eager to license Mac OS to IBM and other PC makers in 1994 and Jim Carlton had covered this for the Wall Street Journal.

Carlton's story didn't turn up in search engines but it was on Newspapers.Com in the Santa Cruz Sentinel. I clicked the clipping button, drew a box around the story and shared this link:

Apple Flubbed First Shot at Software Sale

One day in 1989, John Sculley had a contract in hand that needed only his signature to broadly transform his company, Apple Computer Inc.

The contract would have put in force a plan by Sculley, then Apple's chief executive officer, to let rivals use Apple's greatest asset, the easy-to-use software that makes its personal computers so attractive. ...

Sculley didn't sign. His successors at Apple wish he had.

The story is reported as if everyone inside Apple strongly favored the deal to license the OS. Everyone quoted thinks it is a fantastic idea. Even Carlton seems gung-ho.

It wasn't a fantastic idea. By 1996 Apple executives thought high-end clones were eating into sales of their most expensive and most profitable systems. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 he brought licensing to a screeching halt.

Newspapers · Search · Apple · 2021/04/08 · 0 COMMENTS · Link