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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (72572)	9/20/1999 6:19:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 1575920

Ted, Apple has been a bubble for a while. They have sold more stuff at lower margins, but their growth is smaller than the Wintel growth rate so they are getting to be a smaller and smaller(% share) profitable player....that cannot sustain large multiples. Killing clones killed their only shot at a parallel market to the Wintel market. If Apple had licenced the BIOS and the OS for sale in a few basic configurations so their sale price would vary from smaller to larger systems you would be able to buy mobos, cases, keyboards, etc at similar prices to the Wintels and also yo buy Apple made systems. Apple would need to scale the OS and BIOS licence fee to the end mobo and CPU speed so it would allow a clone maker to make a system from 15-20% less than Apple and their market would epxlode. I recall the early APple clone days, which Apple litigated to death, thus knifing themselves almost to death as they then priced themselves out of competition. Apple products are very cheaply made internally (not junk...just cost effective manufacturing) and so they would be able to compete and grow on sales as well as royalties. Their early clone strategy was flawed as the flat rate fee made the cloners make high end systems only and took those from Apple and they made no low end systems at all, leaving them all to APple. A middle ground with a scaled fee and a varied BIOS would allow the cloners to make cheapos with a small ryalty and big fast ones with a large royalty. Of course, will Apple do this?, no they know better...HAH. Bill