A Brief History of ClarisWorks. Claris(Apple)Works is still my favorite “productivity suite”. It was one of the cleanest and most stable set of applications I think I ever used.
Years later I realized that this feeling had led to a certain blindness to the pace at which the rest of the industry was moving. In its effort to produce slick, bug-free software, Claris was neglecting the hard reality that sheer number of features sells, independent of elegance of design. Some products, such as MacWrite Pro, were delayed so long by stringent quality assurance requirements that they lost their effectiveness in the market.
Shame to hear first hand how quality is not rewarded in the software marketplace.
Apple and Gobe did indeed discuss possibilities at various points in Gobe’s history; however, I am not at liberty to go into details. Apple did not in the end acquire Gobe as such, but three of its founders, Scott Holdaway, Scott Lindsey, and Carl Grice, did rejoin Apple as employees when Gobe failed. They won’t tell me what they are up to (even off the record!), but whatever it is, it does not involve the Gobe Productive codebase. Nor, I am reasonably sure, does it involve the ClarisWorks / AppleWorks codebase.
Hmm, intresting, more fule to the iOffice rumors floating around.