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Technology Stocks : Apple Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fernando Saldanha who wrote (7503)	1/9/1998 5:57:00 PM
From: Mark Palmberg	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213173

From the end of paragraph three at: news.com "But most of all, Svengali Steve made them forget the Mac's plummeting market share." I thought we had established that, although not dominating by any means, Apple's market share was no longer plummeting. Something cannot rise and plummet at the same time, no? And as far as looking for a reason to be bullish on Apple, repeat this line until you hear it in your sleep: QUALITY SELLS ITSELF. The actions of the last few weeks are evidence that a lot of folks out there have been awaiting any excuse to hop back on the Apple cart. If I were a betting man I suppose I could've made a couple hundred bucks off some of the folks in here by speculating that AAPL would receive UPGRADES in the next six months. But of course hindsight is 20/20, right? Eric: 9 MB and 4 MB SCSI hard drive options for G3 minitowers?! Saint Steve has heard our prayers! And good luck with the OS8.1 download. How long do you think Apple's Web servers are going to hold up under that strain? Have a great weekend, everyone. And good luck next week. Mark

To: Fernando Saldanha who wrote (7503)	1/9/1998 6:57:00 PM
From: Eric Yang	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Fernado, I read Jai's Perspective this morning. I thought his review of the current situation is somewhat off. So I wrote him an email -------------------------------------------------------------------- Jai, Margie, Here are some of my thoughts regarding Jai's Perspective article "Think!". I wrote this in a hurry so excuse me for the grammatical errors, typos..etc. But I hope the points are clear. Marketshare... In the last few days I've see too many analysts points to the $1.575 billion dollar revenue, compare it with the $1.6 billion last quarter, and conclude that maketshare is down again. Sure $1.575 billion is lower than we all had hoped but what people often forgets is that the current Macs (especially after the introduction of G3s) are priced much lower than before. Since the average unit price is 20-30% lower even a flat revenue can mean an increase in marketshare. There are many evidence that Apple's marketshare is improving. For example: abcnews.com:80/sections/business/apple0101/index.html cites an 1% improvement in market share from 4.9 to 5.9%. And that was for the month of Oct 97! If these numbers are accurate, we'd expect the marketshare to go much higher during Nov and Dec after G3s have shipped. I guess we'll know the details in a few days when the financial results are released. As for Jobs not mentioning Rhapsody... for background: mackido.com Rhapsody is the foundation for the YellowBox (or what used to be called OpenStep). This is Steve Jobs baby. Just because it was not mentioned during the Expo doesn't mean the project has no relevence. It simply wasn't time for Jobs to hype Rhapsody yet. What we did hear is that ORCL will be porting its applications to JAVA...and the Rhapsody runs JAVA like there is no tomorrow. Rhapsody won't be embraced by the average Mac user's desktop for another year or so (OS 8 is the consumer OS,for now) but we will see a lot of support from NeXT, UNIX, and even Wintel developers. It's simply a kick-ass development platform. It will be hyped when the time comes. The CEO search... Everyday that Jobs stays as the Intrim CEO, AAPL investors are getting great return on their $430 million investment. Jobs is practically working for free these days. And he's working harder than any Apple CEO in recent memory. Apple is not your typical company and it Apple does everything differently. Call him an 'advisor' call him 'intrim CEO' whatever...Steve Jobs is the de facto CEO . Sure, sooner or later we'll need to name a CEO but for now only outsiders who don't really understand Apple sweat about not having an offical CEO. Analysis... Any tech company needs to do three things to thrive. 1) technology 2) marketing 3) production capacity For example it's no secret among the more technically oriented that Intel's technology is sometimes questionable but its strength in marketing and production capacity allows it to dominate the market. What about Apple? Apple has great technoloy and the ability to innovate. But if that was all that matters, everyone would be using Macs we wouldn't be having this discussion now. I dont' have to mention the blunder of Apple's Performa strategy or repeat issue about the quality control problems with the Powerbook 5300 to point out that there were problems in Apple's production and marketing. These blunders cost millions alone. Executives responded by reorganization costing even more. Cost cutting was in order but I believe the execution was poor and Apple's image was ravaged. Sales dropped like a rock. This is all ancient history... BUT, Sometimes we forget that just a couple years ago Apple was a thriving company. Okay..so it may only have had a %12 marketshare but it was making money. In fact prior to the series of production and marketing blunders Apple just had a quarter with record sales! So where are we now.. Technology- System 8, Rhapsody, NC, G3, QT 3.0, let us not forget that Apple currently makes the fastest single processor desktop, laptop and palmtop personal computers in the world. Marketing- Think Different campaign, CompUSA deal, AppleStore. Always needs improvment in this area but we've seen Apple make major strides in marketing in the last 2 months alone. Apple will have more $ for it's ad campaign starting Jan 1 because of the lowered "Apple dollars" given to resellers. Production- No major G3 bugs, availability is high, cost is down margin is up. Better product line strategy no more waiting 4 weeks for the 8600/300 while the 8500/200 piles up. More industry standard parts. ATX motherboard, ZIF socketed CPU, SDRAM, PCI bus, and even EIDE drives when applicable. Judging by these three criterias Apple is healthier today than just a few months ago. Changes will continue to be made at Apple and the good news about the profit this quarter will make it just that much easier. (I think the so called non-G3 inventory problem so many analyst made reference to was vastly exaggerated. It was a convenient way for analysts to explain the projected loss in Q1 98. Now that we know AAPL will be in the black we don't hear much about that now do we? I've asked around, there are plenty of people who prefer the 8600/300 over the G3/266 MT. While these two are somewhat comparable in both price and performance (G3/266 is about 15% faster) most hardcore Mac users know that it doesn't mean that the 8600/300 has been displaced by the G3. The 8600/300 has a significant edge in terms of expansion and upgradability and will find homes in the segment of the market that demand these features. I just bought a G3/266 MT and my buddy got a 8600/300. Both are powerful machines and one can't go wrong with either one. I'd be just as happy if I had bought a 8600/300 but since my friend already got the 8600/300 first, I thought I'd just be 'different') Best regards Eric Yang MacEvolution primenet.com