Two years ago Apple was at risk, factually, not just a perception. Today Apple is not at risk, factually, not perceptively.
This is very true. Apple is in a much better position than they were 2 years ago. However, if they weren't, we probably wouldn't be here talking today since the alternative was for Apple to go bankrupt.
I think the views being expressed by Doren and myself (in my case, I was concentrating on the hardware issue earlier, but I also have my own gripes about software) are intended to raise questions about the longer term future for Apple.
Where will they be 3 years from now?
I would agree with Doren that the professional base is slowly being eroded. The high end software appears first on Windows, and then slowly, if ever, on the Mac side. For example, how many daytrading software packages can you find on the Mac side? Where are the statistics packages going? What about the integrated VAR packages for professionals like dentists, doctors, small business owners (QuickBooks anyone?)? Where are the software development environments? What appears to have happened is that the Mac software market has evolved to just one serious product in each of these professional markets (e.g. Microsoft, Adobe, Quicken, Metrowerks), while the PC side still has at least two or three major players battling it out in each area. In the analogy with evolution, this means that the PC side is still seeing faster development and better products, while the Mac side tends to languish because the major players have no competition (where are the Wingz, Lotus Jazz, WordPerfect, WriteNow, Nisus Writer, Omnis, Think C/Pascal to keep the dominant makers honest?).
This stagnation in the business market means that Apple will rely more and more on the consumer market for their continued success. My concern here is that this has been a suicidal path for computer companies to take in the past. The Ataris, the Colecos, the Commodores, the Mattels that all tried to sell computers to the consumer market in the 80s were wiped out. Why? Well, one of the primary reasons is that when you rely on the consumer market you are more suspectible to downturns in the general economy, whereas with a business market you can weather the cycles more easily. We are at the peak of an economic cycle now. What will happen to the iMac and iBook markets when we start to turn down?
The other reason then, which is possibly changing now, is that people wanted to have the same computer at home as they used at work. It meant no problems with taking files home from the office. You could copy software from work and use it at home (yes, illegal, but you would be a fool to try and say that this doesn't happen). It was just too cost-prohibitive to buy different software, different peripherals, and go through all those compatibility hassles when the head of the household was working on an IBM PC XT or Mac Plus at work.
The reason why I say that this may not be so applicable today is we have been shown the promise of OS-independent software with Java and the World Wide Web. That's why it is so sad that Apple has dragged their feet on Java support. Already there are a lot of sites with Java applets which will only work reliably on Windows.
The web browsers have their own problems. IE 5.0 on the PC stomps all over IE 4.5 on the Mac in terms of speed, features and W3C standards support. And poor old Netscape is struggling to survive. If you have downloaded a Mozilla build lately, you'll see that they have abandoned any pretense at trying to use Mac-style controls/buttons/text fields. They have had to build their own because Apple's native widgets cannot support the W3C CSS/HTML 4.0 standards. I personally believe that Mozilla is going to be a disaster on the Macintosh side, and that we will be left with just Internet Explorer as the only browser that has a Mac look and feel and implements reasonable standards compliance.
If the stock value came as a result of going overboard on the consumer thing I hope Jobs keeps going overboard.
Perhaps this is all part of Jobs' master plan to craft Apple into a consumer computer company where style rules over substance (e.g. Quicktime 4.0 interface), but I still believe that the time is too early to do this. The business market is still critical to any computer company's success, and Apple's lack of attention to it will come back to hurt them in the long run IMO.
The transition to Mac OS X is an absolutely critical turning point in Apple's future. If they are successful, and the business software developers who have abandoned Mac OS 8/9 for WinNT in the past 3 years flock back to the Macintosh with a stable, modern operating system, then Apple will flourish. If Mac OS X turns out to be a failure and the business developers stay away, Apple is in for a very rough time.
Either way, we should know 3 years from now. |
