Souper(man).
Here is my take on the Apple Scenario, and I go back to day one when I met the trio at the 1977? Atlanta Hamfest with their first product for sale at a booth(Apple I). I was with my old friend John Ramsey of Ramsey Electronics. It was set up time and I walked by the Apple booth and looked in, they had problems, as they had blown some bus driver chips by inadvertently pulling out a card under power. As luck would have it Ramsey was selling TTL chips, and I grabbed a few 74366/367?, I forget the part number?, and donated them to the trio, along with a soldering iron. They fixed the board and the rest is history.( Anyone who knows Jobs etc can confirm this anecdote).
My take is that Apple went to the tight hold extreme, very proprietary, no licensing, all parts from Apple. IBM went the other extreme, all parts standard from industry, and so anyone could make a legal clone, and the clonemakers went ahead and did it, made them even better and faster than IBM did when new chips came out, and even IBM was left way behind, and survives on name only and not performance(and the fact they have a chip foundry, and capture all the Intel margin internally). IBM tried to be proprietary with the microchannel bus, and it bit the dust big time. A friend of mine said the time and fees and lawyers and crosslicence agreements to license the microchannel bus could easily consume a year. Every company that licenced the microchannel regretted it and lost enormous money on it, as did IBM.
I think both extremes are wrong.
If you look at the allegory of the CPU being the heart, and the operating system being the soul and software being the mind, Apple wanted to control all three, and extract huge margins from their monopoly position. And along came Gates and windows(courtesy of Xerox, look and feel, as Apples lawyers found out) and Intel. IBM was history, relegated to a shattered fragment of the market they started, and the Wintel platform in essence won, with the spoils going to the victors, Intel and Microsoft, and ashes to Apple and IBM.(IBM is now healthier than Apple due to it being larger and more diversified, but it was dealt a body blow by the Microchannel fiasco.)
So they key is to give a fee level of access to the heart and the soul of the computer. A reasonable fee with no strings at all. Anyone can buy a Pentium, and anyone can buy win 95, so Apple should charge a fee for the CPU, and a fee for the operating system and sell them over the counter through their retail stores with no strings attached. A clone maker just buys a CPU and an operating system, and he can make a clone. Money from each clone then flows to Apple from the CPU and from the OS sale, and to each dealer to help them. As long as the fee is reasonable legal clones would exist, with no legal documents to encumber it other then the usual shrinkwrap agreement. The flow of fees back to Apple would mitigate the loss of share, and $300-600 would be reasonable as a retail price for the two parts. Of that 20% is dealer, and the rest is for OS and CPU. (it depends on CPU speed, complexity etc, as an Intel like repertoire of prices would be there for different CPU's speeds, etc. The OS would be fixed price, like win 95)
This method would allow a free clone market, with money to Apple, and a market expansion to allow for software to be developed for it. and enough market space for a clone to compete and sell for 15-40% less than Apple, with all the fees.(I would expect there to be Taiwan clones(real cheap) and Compaq Apple clones, Dell Apple clones, all at different market tiers.
This concept might be viable if implemented right now with no delays.(It might be already too late, Apple may be in an irreversible decline, fated to become an adjunct to some other company)
It should have come into being 10 years ago(or more), but Apple was so busy stamping out clones that they nearly stamped out them selves
(and may yet, if they fail to do what I suggest)
In the clone days of 1981-5 the Apple market expanded greatly for accessories, software, etc, about 50% of it illegal clone based, and then they shut down Franklin and all the rest, and doomed Apple to a long term decline.
Bill |
