Apple comment:
Published on August 18, 1997
COMPUTERS AND YOU: YAEL
LI-RON
Microsoft is real winner in Apple bailout
Bill Gates is not a popular man. He knows that, and everybody in
Microsoft knows that. Which is why, at the same time his $150 million
Apple bailout was announced at MacWorld Expo, he was booed by
dozens of Mac fans.
The man can't win. Well, you know what I mean.
I want to use this incident to illustrate why I still think Apple doesn't
stand a chance. Mac fans are just too juvenile to be taken seriously.
Serious business people don't boo. They vote with their budgets: They
either buy or don't buy a product.
Corporate America isn't particularly infatuated with Gates. These people
are certainly fascinated with Microsoft and with its chairman, but they
don't get emotional over hardware and software.
So as far as I'm concerned, Steve Jobs just pulled a rabbit out of a hat
and managed to give the Apple stock a temporary boost. But that
doesn't change the fact that people who buy Apple hardware and
software are too few -- no matter how you spin this rabbit, there aren't
enough fanatics to sustain Apple into the next century.
The real winner
Let me do some spinning of my own: The real winner in this "generous"
bailout is Microsoft, and the unsuspecting bystander who's going to
suffer the most painful blow is Netscape. What's $150 million to a
company that shows a $3 billion annual profit (according to a recent
issue of Business Week magazine)?
So Microsoft spares some change, and achieves the following: The Feds
will get off its back for a while, because nobody can accuse them of
unfair competition when they're bailing out a competitor (Apple
competes with Microsoft in the operating systems arena); and no less
importantly, in a reciprocal deal, Apple has announced that Microsoft's
Internet Explorer browser will become the standard browser for the
Mac.
Mac users have long been a stronghold of Netscape's sales, because
Navigator and Communicator promise the best "cross-platform" solution
for mixed environments (PCs and Macs). Add to that the Mac
community's tendency to support the underdog -- in this case, Netscape
-- and its general dislike of all things Microsoft, and you're looking at a
throbbing marketing and public relations headache for Gates and his
people.
But for a mere $150 million, the Mac crowd is wowed by IE, and
Netscape will need to figure out an aggressive rebuttal if it wants to stay
in business.
Strange Mac bedfellows
A few days before the bailout announcement was made public, a related
and equally surprising bit of news illustrated how little we know about
the inner-workings of corporate America.
My own employer, IDG, which publishes PC World, InfoWorld and
other magazines, announced a joint business deal with Ziff-Davis, which
publishes PC Magazine, Computer Shopper and others.
These two fiercely-competitive publishers have for the longest time
refused to admit that their Mac magazines, MacWorld and MacUser,
respectively, were losing a hopeless battle. The Mac market just can't
support two whole monthly magazines.
So the two companies, having failed to make the competition blink, and
though still separate and very competitive against each other, decided to
merge the two publications, and run them together.
Never a dull moment on the Mac front. As Luis Camus, PC World's
managing editor, said when he heard of these two events: "Well, I guess
hell finally froze over."
Yael Li-Ron is a senior online editor at PC World magazine. Her
column appears in this space every Sunday. Contact her via her
Web page at dnai.com, or send her e-mail at
yael@dnai.com. Send letters to the Times, P.O. Box 8099, Walnut
Creek, CA 94596. |
