Herb, I am in favor of Apple, but get aggravated at the inaction. Apple seems to be grooming itself as a permanent niche player. In that case profits and not share rule. By giving up all pretemce of playing on the wider field Apple can concentrate on serving it's declining niche quite well. The decline is only share based. The Apple market might grown at 5% annually and so will Apple's profits.
A cut like Apple did to get the bottom line in shape is OK as a one timer. Apple has done it several times under assorted goofs.
The best strategy would be the clone licensing coupled with exploitation of the markets Apple is good at. The Newton needs to go to a de-facto standard, like WIN CE or Palm OS, or it will vanish soon. Others have taken the product and functionally cloned it. Apple needs to pick the best path for Newton, and if that is WIN CE, do it
(do you all wince?). The proper strategy is to adapt and live. excessive clinging to a failed strategy has been Apples downfall in the past.
I am quite analytical in my approach and examine each aspect of a situation because solving a problem consists of breaking it up into a series of small steps and optimising each of thos to get an optimal path. I will not automatically accept an error by anyone, even Jobs can and has been attacked. He is in the habit of making sweeping statements of the "we will all live happily everafter" kind. This tells me he has not detailed solution pathway, and is floundering. Cutting fat is the easy part. Cutting the good parts you decide to throw away is harder, as you must look into the future as best you can and decide that this one will die in 5 years anyway, no matter what we do, and that one can be saved with some work and effort. Like medical triage you must make life/death decisions about products/divisions that are still alive, but 'snake bit, and doomed to die' well before the product/division actually dies. Managing a dying market can be quite profitable as long as you match the market decline with your own departure from the market profitable so that at the end you have a pile of money and not a pile of dead inventory and parts and employees in anguish.
Bill
Bill |
