"The Apple is well designed as an Appliance for all to run. The strengths of Apple are its weakness as well. If Apple did such a good job, and is so well engineered, what happaned? Obviously it was not financially engineered very well, and it lost the market on price alone, as the high price overcame the good engineering."
Bill,
If a Mac is an "appliance," what is a PC?
To me an appliance is a well engineered piece of equipment, reliable and easy to use. This description is less applicable to the PC.
I suppose that, if your estimate of the value of a piece of equipment is the effort required to master it, you could argue that the PC is more valuable. If you feel that just getting useful things done with the equipment as opposed to, say, always having to fiddle with the controls, then the Mac is more valuable.
Unfortunately, this rationale was at least partly responsible for Apple keeping prices high for so long. This did adversely affect market share. On this we agree.
But that's really only part of it. The other part was pure marketing. The PC world did it very well, selling the public on the notion that putting silk socks on a hog made it into a ballerina, and Apple didn't. It had the "ballerina" but didn't realize until very late that it needed some good choreography (software) to show her off.
The issue now is, "is it too late?" I don't think so. You probably hope so since the PC would seem to be your bread and butter. We'll have a much better idea a year from now. By then we'll know more about Rhapsody and whether better marketing can raise Apples' market share.
Bob
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