The other day I was explaining to my SO that marketing guys (including Sculley) had a
really hard time grasping the importance of standards. After all, I told her, most
markets do not have a standard. <
You've totally lost me. Breakfast cereals, as a rule, fit inside a cereal bowl and interface well with milk and are generally eaten in the morning. Is that what you mean by a standard?
>Consumer electronics and computers have standards. If you buy a radio or a CD player
it works with any other manufacturer equipment. <
I use the same 3.5" floppy disk as you. With adapters, the same monitor, printer and printers. I can get online and post online just as you can.
>Nice interfaces and low cost of maintenance are nice ... <
You can't slip this by. Lost work due to longer training time costs money. Adding support providers costs money. Last I heard, corporations and individuals try to save it rather than waste it.
>for individuals the most important consideration for purchasing a PC is to be able to
run at home the same programs that run at school/work.<
Many people come into the store asking if they can take their PC work home with them. I tell them in 95% of the cases they can without spending another penny.
The exceptions are if they have to run a proprietary piece of software that exists only in Dos/Windows. In which case SoftWindows, VirtualPC or a PC board are options.
>I said it before and I'll say it again. At this time the only way out for Apple is to sell
Macs that are *out*of*the*box* Win95 compatible.<
You're misrepresenting the MacOs's capabilities.
If you give me a PC disk, I can insert it; open virtually any word processing database, spreadsheet or graphicsfile; instantly translate them into a Clarisworks (etc.) file; work on it; save it as a PC file and give it back to you.
A customer once gave us a Word for Windows disk containing her masters' thesis, which she had inadvertantly left on a loudspeaker. After a PC consultant gave up on it as unsalvageable, I was not only able to load it but open it; save the 80% that was undamaged; and save it in PC, Mac and text formats.
Bottom-line, Macs are already more versatile and plug-and-play *out*of*the*box* than their PC counterparts.
Those that buy Macs *know* they're purchasing a minority platform with a deluge of negative press, yet they value the ease of use, long term cost savings, convenience and sheer coolness of superior engineering. Without those advantages, Macs would have disappeared five years ago.
In short, they (I) choose excellence over conformity.
soup |
