Don't understand why you would say this. Global Village makes, as far as I know, the best modems for the Mac platform. The merger makes perfect sense in light of Apples concentration on thin client machine. Besides we don't know what goodies Global Village has hidden away.
Well, I don't have a very strong opinion on it, but a company's good products are not enough of a reason to buy the company. They might even be a reason against buying it.
A modem is not exactly a high-tech product. Just license the appropriate Rockwell or Lucent chips, throw in a few support chips and maybe even an ASIC, and you have a state-of-the-art modem. In fact, I'd venture that a modem is a commodity. So why buy the best manufacturer of a commodity product? If anything, it seems you'd be better off buying the worst, because with GVIL you're paying top dollar for name cachet that could vanish next week.
Take Dell. I think their only proprietary "technology" is a custom BIOS chip, the monitor nameplate, and the Dell case. Result: in 1996 they bundle U.S. Robotics modems; 1997 Hayes; 1998 Motorola, and maybe next week they'll bundle some unknown brand that gives the best price-performance ratio. Dell lets other companies assume the risk of manufacturing the best of a commodity product. And Dell always offers the very best products in its packages, and as long as it stays with the same manufacturing model, it always will.
I guess what I'm saying is sure, Apple wants to own cutting-edge technology, but geez, the modem is not the battle it should be fighting.
Now, if Apple bought a company that owned patents to manufacturing $300 active-matrix 17" desktop LCD displays, that would be another matter. Same with software that understood conversational English.
But an external modem with a nice case and fax software that usually works smoothly? That's a lot closer to owning a patent on the VERY BEST POWER SWITCH IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.
Why not just build an industry-standard bus into the thin client, let some other saps fight the modem war, and bundle the Modem Of The Week with the Apple NC? |
