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

To: Tom Caruthers who wrote (8156)	2/3/1998 6:49:00 AM
From: John Guild	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

Apple pulls out of national retail stores >NEW YORK - Apple Computer, hammered by falling sales, on Monday said it would pull its Macintosh computers from major national retailers to focus on CompUSA, the biggest U.S. chain devoted to PCs.< >With its once-dominant share of the PC market shrinking to 3.1% as of the end of last September, Apple had little choice but to cut back, analysts said.< >Apple sold 25% fewer computers last year, or 2.66 million units, even as overall sales of personal computers surged, according to Computer Intelligence. The industry research firm expects Apple's sales to drop an additional 10% in 1998 as customers continue to choose less expensive PCs that run on Microsoft's Windows operating system. < >Others said the pullback further relegates Apple to the status of niche player, selling to a limited market of graphic artists, educators and other consumers.< >"If I was an Apple owner, I would be very disappointed right now there wasn't a place (in my area) I could go to get Mac products. That doesn't give me any choice as a consumer," said David Goldstein, president of Channel Marketing, a Dallas-based research and consultant firm.< Looks like Apple continues its slow death. When will AAPL reach single numbers? -jg

To: Tom Caruthers who wrote (8156)	2/3/1998 8:37:00 AM
From: rhet0ric	Respond to of 213176

Rhapsody was going to revitalize the consumer/business/education markets I don't believe that there has been any change in Apple's plans for deploying Rhapsody. The only change I see is in the way it is being marketed. Someone at Apple was smart enough to realize that there is no point in hyping a product that isn't for sale, especially when it will depress sales of an existing product (MacOS). And even when Rhapsody ships, it will take a long time before it has enough applications to be a client OS. Hence the initial focus as a server. What none of these articles seem to point out is that, with Rhapsody as a server, Apple will suddenly have some great new markets. The first will be as a file/database server for Mac NCs. The second will be as a Web server. Note that Apache, the most-used Web server out there, has already been ported. The nice thing about these new markets is that they not only don't cannibalize Apple's existing MacOS sales, they increase them. Most Web shops use Macs for design and UNIX boxes, usually from Sun, for development and hosting. With Rhapsody, Apple has the ability to capture the whole shop. And judging from Ellison's remarks, Apple plans to sell MacNCs + Rhapsody as a bundle. The article you cited also quoted an Apple rep as saying: "Over time, it may make sense to converge the two." That to me sounds like the most likely scenario. They are talking about putting the MacOS on top of a kernel, presumably the same used by Rhapsody, in the next major release. If they did, convergence would be the obvious next step. So, Apple isn't dropping the ball at all. For once, they not only have a workable strategy, but they're actually executing it in an intelligent way. rhet0ric