Hi Scott, re: The State of the Mac
Well, many of your points are interesting even if I
don't necessarily agree with a few of them. But we do
agree on the Mac and that's not so bad.
Specifically, I agree that Apple, the corporation,
has been its own worst enemy. They've been great at
the engineering, but management and marketing have been
tied for first place in my assessment of their woes.
I'm not sure I buy the East vs. West argument. First,
I have yet to see 'outstanding' software dev from Asia,
(but they do the hardware thing pretty well), I'm seeing
more and more great software dev coming from Europe; Germany
in particular. And if Apple turned into a software dev company,
(as some industry prognosticators predict) I'm not sure it
would bother me in the least. Their engineering proves that
they would be the best in the biz. To be honest, I have a Power
Computing box. As long as I can use MacOS, I'm happy, no matter
what the box is. (Although I should say I'm not very happy with
their idea of CD-ROM implementation).
Let me qualify that. The CD-ROM implementation is just
problematic enough that if I buy a new machine, I'll probably
consider an Apple Mac more than a Power Computing Mac. Still,
at the time my budget was 'X'. Now my budget is 'XX' so I can
afford to think that way. When I get a little bit irritated at
the CD-ROM implementation, I consider that I paid $1195 for my
Powerbase, and I use it in my consulting biz to generate -- well,
this week, $2000. Last week $1500. So I'm pretty happy.
Regarding Detroit, welllll, the business model is a stretch
to correlate to Apple, but I get your point. And I don't think
we've lost the software market. Still, I respect the fact that
you have had a long history of seeing the difference in practice
of Wintel business vs. the Apple version of it. Apple ain't
dying, but don't get too upset if you see a major transformation.
-MrB |
