Apple should abandon the hardware business.
>>Clones are moving in quickly, does Apple have any strategies to expand MAC market rather than eating up its own share?<<
Too little too late is the keyword for Apple's licencing policy. It was meant to help the Mac to a bigger market share, but it is cannibalising Apple's sales in favour of the cloners without establishing the MacOS as an industry standard matching Wintel (IBM, which is a much more resourceful company than Apple lost such its battle with MSFT despite the - in many ways superior - OS/2).
The bottom line is that the MacOS cannot compete with Wintel (it could and should have in the late 80's and even in the early 90's via broad licencing), simply because the MacOS is no more superior to MSFT's OSs (as Netscape's Navigator is no more superior to MSFT's Explorer).
Middleware (QT, QTVR, QuickDraw 3D) could be the key to success but only if Apple abandons hardware and focuses on software, leaning heavily towards the dominating Wintel platform (i.e. writing middleware and apps for Windows 95 and Windows NT). This seems to be out of question as it would be too radical, and so I guess that Apple will continue its blind and fruitless pursuit of higher OS market share. Doing so it will spread its (scarce) resources among several segments of the hardware and software markets (Mac, Newton, the defunct Pippin, MacOS, Claris' portfolio of applications, OpenDoc, CyberDog etc.)instead of focusing them on its core strenght (broadly speaking - graphics). Downsizing and focusing on highly profitable software solutions in which Apple is the standard (eg. QT) could be the way out of the current misery. NeXT will change nothing, neither would Be.
I was deliberately provocative and I really am looking forward to your comments.
MK |
