Anyone,
More about NT and PowerComputing.
I was talking for a friend who works for a huge aerospace corporation. His division upgraded to Windows 95 on the desktop 6 months ago. He reports numerous freezes and crashes and says this has led to general disillusionment. There are so many problems system people cringe at requests for help. His boss says that he has been unable to plan since the changeover. They cannot install simple software on their new $30,000 server. The division is now looking for a new MIS manager. Who said nobody got fired for buying Windows? He says most of the systems guys who work for this company are Mac users at home. I know from my recruiting days that this company has an enormous IBM/Cobol legacy system.
They are in trouble and looking for answers. A UNIX, Rhapsody, Oracle, network computer fix would fit right into this scenario. Many of the engineers at this company are diehard Mac fans.
The PowerComputing fight is not JUST about PowerComputing. Since Ed Access decided to fire Apple and hire PowerComputing one can see why Apple is upset with both companies. Apple is suffering in these two core markets. By playing hardball with PowerComputing Apple has nothing to loose but much to gain. If PowerComputing goes under Apple gets the profitable high end market back, and also stands to regain much of the potentially lost educational market. There would still be 69+ companies (like UMAX) to market clones. This would be better for Apple than actually licensing PowerComputing. There would be an increase in apparent market share (as the news always reports Apple's falling 4% share rather than the growing 11% Mac OS share). This perception would further propel reports of Apple's revival and alleviate people's fears about the demise of Apple. Therefor more Macs would be sold.
Apple has wisely decided to avoid the low profit, high volume, low end market. This is an area where the mass production business of the cloners makes sense, and an area that Apple really doesn't have time to concentrate on, and has not done well in the past (Performa). For Apple the future lies in the high profit high end Server/Workstation (Graphic) area AND, AND network computers which would solve the problem my friend's company is having and work wonderfully at schools. These two areas (servers/network computers) are naturally linked together like coffee and doughnuts. Makes sense. Additionally, PowerBooks are most often used in this (business) area. Who stands to loose in this area? Sun and SGI surely (and maybe MicroSoft). The effects in the movie "Spawn" were done ENTIRELY on Macs.
Selling Servers & Graphic Workstations directly also makes more sense and fits into this scenario, eliminate the middleman in the sure bet market. Let retailers handle the mass produced home computer market, since a considerable amount of these purchases are impulse buys.
Amilio seemed like a nice guy, maybe thats what Apple needed during the tightening up period. And maybe now a more cut-throat approach is better. It seems to me that the ship has righted itself and the sails are filling.
Doren |
