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

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (8102)	1/31/1998 10:04:00 PM
From: rhet0ric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Apples clone strategy was not thought out properly. [...] With a sloping fee for different speeds etc. You might be right that a different fee structure would have worked better, and that's what they were headed towards before Jobs pulled the plug. Ultimately, though, I don't think "better" would have been enough. Apple and the cloners were carving up smaller and smaller pieces of a shrinking pie. In that situation, there is no right clone strategy. Also, the cloners were damaging Apple in other ways. For instance, before cloning, Apple had a policy of not pre-announcing new boxes, because that would cut into sales of current inventory. Computer buyers are notorious for waiting, because boxes continually get better and cheaper. The cloners, though, were constantly pre-announcing their next great box, and so people stopped buying old Apple inventory. I'm convinced that most of Apple's inventory problems in the last two years were caused by the difficulty of predicting demand in a clone marketplace. My theory is that low-end buyers bought cheap high-end clones instead of cheap low-end Apples, which is why Apple's inventory problems were in the low end. I'm equally convinced that we won't see inventory problems going forward (at least, unless Apple enters into the Intel market as a box maker--if they can make it in that market, then they've really grown up). In a closed market, Apple can always clear the channel before announcing new systems. So Apple should be okay in the short run. In the long run, Apple has to change the game. Start selling NCs and servers. Enter new markets (e.g. the enterprise). Catch the next wave (e.g. the Internet). Build a Windows-compatible OS for Intel. Thanks to Jobs et al, they are doing all of these things. rhet0ric

To: Bill Jackson who wrote (8102)	2/3/1998 12:03:00 PM
From: HerbVic	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213173

Excellent take on the X-clone issue Bill! My view of the horizon is Apple as an OS licensor with Rhapsody while maintaining its hardware business with continued evolution of Mac OS. This would allow Apple to penetrate the non-Apple OS installed base with an OS that supports all OS's. This would compete with Unix, NT, etc... while supporting them as well. The comment by Ellison that "OS 8 was the future of Apple, not Rhapsody" is a contraindication. However, Apple is not yet ready to play up its advantages with the multiplatform OS either. Good hunting, HerbVic