A major sea change will be when PC Magazine acknowledges Apple as a competitor to Wintel. In the
June issue, a perspective on 2001 computing in the 3rd paragraph they write off Apple. "The assault
of the RISC chips is essentially over after years of struggle. The Power PC chip is limited to Apple's
Mac and the Mac's market share is down to 3%." PC Magazine comments on the Alpha, Sun and SGI
systems but rarely if ever acknowledges Apple. Another interesting perspective is to browse the Intel
thread. Even during the period of the 6th thru the WWDC not one comment was made on Apple, yet
AMD and National are constantly discussed. The vast majority of the industry still consider Apple
dying. Therein lies our opportunity but also the frustration. Rich
I wouldn't worry about the Intel board. I am an active participant over there (as an INTC stockholder). The fact is National Semi and AMD are far more relevent to Intel as business concerns than Apple.
I actually think that most of the industry now deems Apple as not dying, but living on the periphery. Apple will need to demonstrate compelling products for years before this will change, with no typical Apple gaffes.
PC Magazine is drawing the wrong conclusions, however. The PowerPC and Macintosh will continue to set the standard for authoring and publishing.
5 years ago I discussed with my friend how the workstation business was going to slowly evaporate as desktop PCs caught up in price. We determined then that Apple should lead this charge since with PowerPC processors they could more quickly assume the role of SGI & Sun for graphics workstations.
Unfortunately, the past 3 years OS gaffes and business planning have left the "workstation-conversion" market to Win NT. However, the game is not up, and if Apple can bring forth Mac OS X with good OpenGL support, they can still get a sizeable portion of this market.
The scenario: Many graphics houses run with Macs, with workstations, either Sun, SGI (usually), or HPs. Now, they are starting to buy NT machines to replace the workstations. This is bad for Apple because the fact is WinXX clients will always be a better match for NT servers, and it creates conversion threats.
However, with a Unix-class OS running Mac software, Apple could seize a lot of this market: at the expense of current workstations and future NT machines. This is a high margin area, and a place where performance matters more than conformity.
I'd like to see Apple take at least 50% of the digital media workstation market. It is possible given Apple's current share of digital media clients and mindshare in the industry.
We shall see. |
