Once again, the rumors proved correct--Claris is no more. Apple has just reabsorbed most of the products of its consistently-profitable wholly-owned subsidiary, leaving Claris with only the immensely successful FileMaker Pro and Claris Home Page. With this change comes a new moniker: Claris is now FileMaker, Inc. and will focus exclusively on the growth and development of the award-winning database product. You can read Apple's press release for more information.

Returning to the Apple fold are all other Claris products, such as Em@iler, ClarisImpact, ClarisDraw, and Claris Organizer, as well as the Swiss-Army-knife-style ClarisWorks suite and Mac OS 8. Claris Home Page will likely be integrated into FileMaker Pro. Apple presumably hopes that adding Claris' revenues to its own plate will bolster its bottom line in this traditionally weak second quarter (you know, kind of like how eating the brain of your slain enemy gives you strength), though the costs of the reorganization will surely dampen the effect.

But what would this story be without at least a little dirt? According to MacWEEK, Apple planned not to transform Claris into FileMaker, Inc., but rather to sell the database program and reabsorb the company entirely. However, potential customers such as Oracle and Microsoft weren't buying, so they moved to plan B. Personally, we can't believe any reasonably solvent company would pass on a chance to buy FileMaker, but who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Apparently, news about the upcoming sub-$1000 Mac for the home market isn't the most closely-guarded secret over at Apple these days. Rumors about the machine's specs have now filtered down into the "legitimate" Mac press. MacUser UK has what they call "exclusive" details on the low-cost G3 system, code-named Artemis.

According to MacUser's sources, Artemis is currently in beta testing. Contrary to some reports which had it morphing into a 6500-style tower system to be bundled with a monitor, Artemis is reportedly remaining faithful to its original all-in-one specification, which, in its current incarnation, houses a 16" Trinitron monitor and packs 32MB of RAM, an IDE hard drive of unspecified capacity, and the now-ubiquitous 24x CD-ROM drive. Thankfully, the sinful ugliness of the original Artemis case design has been reworked into something described as "very Mac-like," but with some unusual touches like transparent bits and a distinctive wavy back.

Of course, for MacUser to call their information "exclusive" is dubious, at best. The Mac rumors sites have had most of this data for weeks, if not months. And the more we read the description of the case, the more we wonder if MacUser actually got to see one of the old cases instead; that bit about the "wavy look" is evocative of the unpleasant lumps of the initial model, which was scrapped when Apple found that most users would rather jab a fork into each eye and learn to use an abacus by touch rather than have to look at the thing for more than a few seconds at a time. But as the release date creeps ever closer (the machine is said to debut at MacWorld Expo Boston in July), the info about Artemis is sure to intensify; stay tuned for the latest (and ugliest) developments.

It's official: In the home market, Microsoft is planning to migrate away from the Windows 95/98 code base in favor of a "consumerized" future version of Windows NT. A Business Wire report has the details; first some home-type features like games acceleration will be added to Windows NT 5, and then a full-fledged "Windows NT Consumer" will ship after the year 2000.

While this news surprises very few people, it's relevant in that it confirms just how spookily similar Microsoft's and Apple's OS strategies really are. For one thing, the dual-OS strategy for general and high-end/server use is in full effect on both sides of the fence: Microsoft has Windows 95/98 for the general user, and NT for the power user and servers; likewise, Apple has repeatedly talked up the importance of the Mac OS as its general-use OS, while it readies Rhapsody for the folks who need the heavy-duty power. And just as Apple has said that several years from now, Rhapsody will trickle down and supplant the Mac OS as the general-user OS, now Microsoft confirms that it's planning to ditch the ancient and kludgy underpinnings of Windows 95/98 in favor of the much newer, shinier, and stabler kludges that make up Windows NT. Most importantly, both companies seem almost willing to admit that their current general-use operating systems leave a lot to be desired, at least as far as modern OS features go. (So is it that great minds think alike, or is someone being just an eentsy little bit of a copycat?)

While these strategies are very sound and make a lot of sense, we can't help but feel there's something ironically quaint about little Johnny only ever using his NT system to play Quake III, or his mom running Rhapsody to balance her checkbook and send AOL email to Grandma. Creeping featuritis seems to have taken hold in the operating system world, just as it left us an applications world in which probably more than half of the people who use Excel in the workplace only use it to make tables. Oh, it is to laugh...