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

To: Sam Scrutchins who wrote (10497)	3/30/1998 10:52:00 PM
From: FR1	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 213176

"ask what all the entities with the DR1 are doing? Seems to me that at least some of them might be out fairly quickly with some products once CR1 is released???" In my opinion, the whole Rhapsody product line will be a somewhat slow train as far as the average consumer is concerned (ie next year). But for Wall Street and the developers the time is now - and it is exciting! Mid May is a big release date because at the developers conference Apple has promised to deliver a fairly complete and strong DR2 (and possibly CR1). It is on this product that a lot of Wall Street speculation will probably occur (we may be seeing some of it now). What will CR1 be used for first? Server functions immediately. Particularly Web server functions. Also, individual Mac users will find much more OS stability. You can bet there will be a real gold rush (starting now) to port all the neat UNIX programs over - molecular modeling, stress analysis, etc, etc. Everybody will come over because we scale from the desktop to the mainframe with parallel processing a natural fit. And everything developed is cross platform. It can still be screwed up big time by Apple if Jobs decides to play keep away by pricing a "CR1/WebObjects" bundle out of the market (as Apple has been known to do so many times in the past). The upcoming price is critical. Part of the squeeze is that NeXT used to charge many thousands of dollars for products that they are now under pressure to sell in the low hundreds of dollars. What are you going to tell your customers that paid the big bucks (and they are big customers)? After talking to some of the Apple developers, I know they are aware of the problem. One told me they were thinking of some kind of "Rhapsody/WebObjects-lite" bundle. Maybe stripping out some of the more elaborate ODBC stuff. That would work! In short, the job of getting a entry level price for the whole Apple product is ultra-critical and nobody knows if Apple will be able to answer the bell on this one. I think this is the last big hurdle and it is what is keeping some major investors from jumping in with both feet. If you want a army of developers you have to put your whole OS out in the $100 - $250 range. Without an army you lose the battle. It's exciting - it's a Big Future and this one's hard for even wall street to miss.

To: Sam Scrutchins who wrote (10497)	3/31/1998 2:16:00 PM
From: Randy Tidd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

> I hear what you are saying here, and I'm sure you are right. My > only addition is to ask what all the entities with the DR1 are > doing? Seems to me that at least some of them might be out > fairly quickly with some products once CR1 is released??? My company (Blacksmith, Inc.) got on the list for the DR1 release of Rhapsody. Part of it was to get a jump start developing tools and products for Rhapsody, and another part of it was just because it's cool. However it's difficult for us to begin serious development on a product until we know what Apple's marketing message for Rhapsody is going to be. The way that they target the market(s) will determine what kind of products we will work on, but so far we're getting mixed messages from them. So even though we have the software in house, we're in limbo waiting for a strong marketing direction from Apple. Randy Tidd Blacksmith, Inc.