White Pine beta (was Re: sound or no sound?)

David Fridley (dgfasn@dante.lbl.gov)
Thu, 8 Feb 1996 15:57:30 -0800 (PST)

Sue, it's a very simple consideration: White Pine is a commercial
for-profit company and the Wintel platform is 80% of the market compared
to 8% for Macintosh; I'm sure the Mac platform will come, but it doesn't
matter as much to their bottom line. Cornell is a not-for-profit group
that recognized the original superiority of the Apple platform for what
they wanted to accomplish. That White Pine is promoting the Windows
version heavily is thus natural and rational, especially since they are
now angling for the business LAN market as well. I'm sure if you were in
charge of their R&D budget and responsible for a bottom line, you'd have
made the same choice.

On Thu, 8 Feb 1996, Sue Fawcett wrote:

> White Pine certainly is promoting the new beta release of CU-SeeMe for
> Windows and downplaying the availability of CU-SeeMe for the Macintosh -
> the only mention of the existence of the Macintosh version is a
> one-sentence link at the bottom of White Pine's home page. This is
> ironic, in view of the fact that CU-SeeMe was originally developed for
> the Macintosh environment.
>
> Ever since the foreboding announcements of the possibility of Apple
> Computer's demise, it seems I've witnessed more emphasis on Windows
> products. Since the idea of the disappearance of the Macintosh is
> premature at best, are we Macintosh enthusiasts relegated to begging for
> inclusion of Macintosh-platform products? I still say, God forbid the
> limitation to a single product/platform, particularly Windows.
>
>
> On Thu, 8 Feb 1996 Jim.Leverso@gsa.gov wrote:
>
> > We have been using both Cornell versions of CUSeeMe and the beta from
> > White Pine for the last few weeks, with great success. Yesterday, we
> > particiated in a video conference, complete with audio from our
> > offices in Boston to an elementary school in Minnesota. Video and
> > audio quality was quite satisfactory, especially for a FREE piece of
> > software. One of the first things we did however, was to completely
> > read all txt and readme files that we could get our hands on. This
> > explained much about how to "tweak" the app for best performance. We
> > are using Pentium PCs with 16mb RAM and Sound Blaster 16 cards, with a
> > Connectix QuickCam. We are very pleased with the product, think that
> > the developers have done packaged a great deal in a very lightweight
> > product. For those of us with shrinking budgets, this is great stuff!
> >
> > Jim LeVerso
> > U.S. General Services Admin
> > Boston, Ma.