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

To: HerbVic who wrote (8502)	2/13/1998 5:34:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Respond to of 213177

Herbvic, I guess I missed Scully. You are correct, the first clones did have some problems, but the BIOSes were soon fine, and you sellers eagerly provided update BIOSes for that purpose. I never saw any other than 5.25" drives at the beginning. SOme were single sided, some double, but IBM did that too as they went from single to double and you had to get a new BIOS.There were even shady guys selling real IBM BIOSes on copied onto EPROMS(the clone boards had some jumpers to select EPROM/MASK ROM), and they never looked back. If only Scully had lowered the price when he could he would have avoided the severe share erosion that occurred. Of course he was a bit blinded by the huge niche profits, and never did the right thing. But he fell in love with the niches and did not see the huge 50% annual growths of IBM and compatibles as those guys were no so stupid as to say what the sales were. IBM sales were low compared to the totals of IBM other stuff sales, and they rapidly plateaued and fell when the Zeniths, Compaqs and Taiwan clones came along and they gave out no sales figures. So Scully got a distorted market view and only woke up when it was too late and Apples were already far behind. The Apple figures still had them at a far higher share that was real, and it was only when Apples sales began to fall in total thet they realised the problem, and found out about the huge under-reported sales of IBM clones(really faster and better than IBMs, and not really clones). They then went from what they thought was 60% of the market to about 20% all at once when they measured that missed market share and fell from there to the current 3%.(you must remember it was in the cloners interest to conceal their real share and they did, and there was no law to deny them that right) One fine day do you think Sun or IBM will come out with a win2000 clone in for free/cheap? OS-2 had potential but IBM wasted their chance. They should have developed it further and then sold it real cheap, along with Lotus and Word perfect(which they should have bought). Too bad. Bill