To: Alan Buckley who wrote (15482 ) 12/24/1997 2:01:00 AM From: Keith Hankin Respond to
Interesting article. But I think that it misses some important points while overemphasizing others. For example, it blames the failure of Apple on them having a monopolist attitude. While there is lots of truth to this, this partially overstates the case, and is only part of the picture. The overstating is done through the fact that Apple did not act like a monopolist with regards to application software, which was a key to its success. It could not survive only with MacPaint, MacDraw and whatever its own engineers could dream up. It understood that it needed 3rd party support for its platform, and encouraged 3rd party software developers to come up with useful and innovative products. And it generally did not compete with those vendors like MSFT did. Moreover, I believe that the prices of the apps to run on the Mac were in line with PC software prices. Thus the overall cost or TCO for a Mac was probably not really that much. And the ease-of-use and clamoring by end-users for Apple helped sway many into the fold. The key thing that swung people to the PC is that which is not discussed at all in this article, and that is that the PC was backed by IBM. As a matter of fact, in the early years of the PC, there was no clone market and the hardware was only built by one vendor, just like the Apple. But the PC was not only more difficult to use but also more expensive. Despite this, the market chose the PC over the Apple computer in droves because of the IBM name. No one got fired for buying IBM. Sure, Apple could have done a better job at focusing on the business market. But it would be difficult to out-flank a company such as IBM. And they would not have had the desktop publishing and educational markets to retreat to if they were busy fighting IBM head-on. Damned if they did, damned if they didn't.
