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

To: rhet0ric who wrote (8100)	1/31/1998 6:23:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213173

rhet; IBM had the ultimate bad clone strategy, it made not a penny from all the clones. Intel sold the CPUs. and MSFT sold the OS. IBMs pathetic attempt with the microchannel to make a private world died aborning. Apples clone strategy was not thought out properly. It should have encouraged a common platform(like the Wintel standard case, power supply etc), but made sure AAPL made money on each OS and on each CPU. With a sloping fee for different speeds etc. In stead they had a flat fee, and so the cloners made the most exppensive systems, where they were the most cheaper than AAPL, and the fee was the smallest % of the sales price. Of course they made high end stuff. The fee was too high for them to make low end stuff, and too low for high end stuff. It was designed for a middle system. With a progressive fee they(cloners) would have made all the systems and the higher fee on big systems would have reduced the perceived saving over AAPL originals in the same manner as the low and middle. And AAPL would have made $ on every one and spread the installed base. What is needed is a standard clone, etc etc,(I have said it on prior posts) to get the installed base increasing. Forget AAPL doing that. They need a massiv parellel approach to catch the 20% per annum increase in Wintels. recent press showing AAPL at 6.3 % was price based. On a box base they are under 4% as each AAPL box costs more. As for running on Wintels, I would like to try it and see how it runs. Bill

To: rhet0ric who wrote (8100)	2/1/1998 2:59:00 PM
From: Alomex	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 213173

Me:I still think the "clone killing" was the wrong decision. rhetOric: I think this is a contradiction of your earlier statement that you believe Apple may have turned the corner. Killing the clones and turning a profit were part of the same game plan. Not at all. Even while Apple can be overall moving in the right direction this does not stop them from making the occasional mistake. The clone decision was one of them. I don't know how familiar you are with the NeXT story, but Jobs made the very same mistakes with the black cube as with the original Mac. He showed and proved that he was so arrogant that he could learn nothing from his past experiences. I have no wish to discuss NeXT further, but I'd suggest you get acquainted with the NeXT story to see how wrong (at times) can Jobs be. Jobs is not even 1/10th as good a salesman as Gates, something that can easily be attested by their fortunes and market prowess. Jobs strengths lay elsewhere: guts, vision, leadership.