Pointcast dumps Net news service for Macs

Internet service provider to broadcast on Windows platform.

Apple's internet capabilities have been hit following Pointcast's decision to drop the Macintosh version of its internet news service next month to focus on Windows.

David Williams, client product manager at Pointcast, claimed that the firm could no longer justify the extra cost of broadcasting to the Mac platform. 'Parallel development for Windows and Macintosh is resource-intensive,' he said.

The extra cost was caused by Pointcast's delay in releasing its Mac client.

While the Windows NT, 95, 98 and 3.x versions have already moved to the Pointcast 2.x format, the Mac release is still based on the Pointcast 1.x client, launched three years ago. This uses a different format for sending and receiving information.

From 1 December, Pointcast stopped broadcasting news to users of 1.x clients, effectively cutting Mac customers off and forcing Windows users to upgrade.

An Apple representative said: 'This does not affect a lot of our customers. Apple previously bundled Pointcast with the Mac OS, but stopped in the past year due to lack of customer interest. This is not a huge issue for us and certainly not for our customer base.'

He added that of 25 million Mac users worldwide, less than 20,000 used Pointcast and denied that the move indicated a trend among software developers to drop Mac support.

Williams conceded Pointcast had no ongoing development plans for the ActiveChannel client, which plugs into Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

He added that any decision to axe the product would be based on shipments and was not related to the firm's financial situation. The company recently dropped plans to file an Initial Public Offering and is now seeking an investment partner.

Although Williams refused to confirm how many of Pointcast's 1.2 million users were connected to its service via the ActiveChannel, he claimed it was only a small proportion.

ActiveChannel was a prominent feature of version 4.0 of Internet Explorer and many analysts expected it to supersede proprietary 'push' clients such as Pointcast. But the technology never caught on and is not a central feature of Internet Explorer 5.0.