Speaking at the UK launch of the Claris CAD 2.0 and the Filemaker Pro (CI No 1,406), Claris’ vice-president for product development Yogen Dalal gave his reaction to Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 calling it impressive. Dalal said that the Windows graphics were attractive and admitted that there would probably be some great applications written for it, although there are not many as yet. Comparing Windows 3.0 with the Macintosh environment, Dalal outlined what he sees as Macintosh advantages over Windows, namely the interface, integration and price. The Windows interface uses pull down menus and more keyboard commands than the Mac – something that Dalal questioned for graphically minded users. He said that Windows has no desktop metaphor – Claris products are written specifically for the Macintosh, one machine which comes with known capa-bilities such as built-in networking facilities. And on price, Dalal maintained that although Macin-tosh software is not particularly cheap, prices for Windows applications are even higher, even as a percentage price of hardware. On the recurring question of Claris’ complete independence from Apple – Apple still owns 82% of the company – Dalal said that Claris was willing and able to become independent, but that the ball was now in Apple’s court. Claris will continue to concentrate on improving its existing products, taking advantage of XTND architecture and the System 7 release of the Mac operating system, which will enable applications to be hooked together. Dalal reckons that users want products that focus on a particular task, which they perform well and in-depth, rather than software that has lots of different functions. Breadth can be achieved through hooking applications together. An example of this would be to link the Claris CAD 2.0, to Claris’ Filemaker, so that, for example, files are automatically updated when graphical designs are changed. The exchange of data between applications is something that Dalal believes could give Apple a strategic advantage over Microsoft, another being lower cost Macintoshes. The Claris CAD 2.0 and Filemaker Pro will be available in the UK in the summer. UK price for the Filemaker Pro is UKP225 and for CAD 2.0 is UKP675.
