The question is more: how does this page still show up on apple.com in 2019?

As of sometime in the last 48 minutes, it doesn't.

Somewhere at Apple, a sysadmin noticed a suspicious amount of traffic to a dusty forgotten Xserve G4 in the corner of a datacenter at the old One Infinite Loop campus and finally pulled the plug, thus ending what was possibly world's highest-uptime instance of a Mac OS X Server 10.4 / WebObjects stack.

I wonder to what extent open source desktop applications have affected the commercial market. 20-ish years ago a lot of people were predicting OpenOffice, and other OSS apps would take over the world (running on desktop Linux). That didn't happen, but I wonder if that's the case because they pushed down the price of consumer shrink-wrap* apps? Or was it just increased competition between the commercial apps?

* It's been a long time since I've used that term.

It’s because most people don’t want to spend their time learning how to install, troubleshoot, and organize their computers.

Shifting everything online and through the browser makes it very easy for the user, all they have to worry about is an internet connection and having enough RAM. They don’t have to worry about compatible devices, just open a website or app on macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, it all works. Clearly the value of this convenience is extremely high.

> Or was it just increased competition between the commercial apps?

What commercial office apps are there? There is MS Office and ...? Google docs maybe counts, but is more in competition with the feature-reduced office365 stuff.

Same question for Adobe products.

I am seeing much more of a monoculture than competition.

On the Office front at least I suspect that Google Docs did more to push down prices than OpenOffice ever did

For me, it's merely because the Office is easier to use than the OpenOffice. Companies behind commercial software can put more resource into their products to get them more polished, while open source projects can only depend on volunteer developers.

Wow, huge nostalgia rush. I remember sitting in the Apple store with my dad while he got his first MbP, and using the emacs for kids and opening onto this page.

Apparently BBEdit used to cost $269, now it's $49.99. Some things have gotten cheaper over the years.

I still use BBEdit, purchased back when it would have cost about that, and still pay from upgrades. I wonder how they stay in business? It's a great editor but they have so much competition now.

Maybe you could answer that yourself. Why do you use it and still pay for it?

Selling it at $49 seems it would be untenable. I assume they have other business, to not worry that this isn't the main income.

Yeah Logic Pro 7 was $1000, then version 8 was $500, now Logic Pro X is $199

269 Canadian dollars, so a bit less. Also iWork and iLife are now free.

I was wondering why the only other language they appear to have the store in is "en français", which you can change to at the bottom.

Then saw in the URL that it's their Canadian store so makes sense.

The Apple store used to have an actual physical software media section with Mac games and such. Seems quaint now.

This page now 404's

The good ole days

email over the Web!