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

To: SteveHC who wrote (11808)	4/19/1998 5:05:00 AM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

Steve, I agree, it is unlikely to have abandoned it's roots, and the larger market engendered by properly managed cloning would have been far better for APple than what it now has. Of course, can you have "controlled freedom". In a way the Wintel market was absolutely unrestricted and free to mave and adapt. The only thing each maker had to do was pay $60 for an OS per system, no matter how powerful. How much would Apple have charged? would they kill the goose that lays the golden egg? In one way they did kill it. The next two years will write the future for Apple. Either onwards or downwards. I am curious to see what Jobs has under his hat. Bill

To: SteveHC who wrote (11808)	4/19/1998 10:04:00 AM
From: Randy Tidd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213176

> I doubt this, Bill. Reason: Apple's corporate mission was always > as a computer company, not (just) software co. But I will say > that if Apple had gone ahead re: OS licensing and cloning, it > might ultimately have produced even better hardware. I have been wondering about this... at NeXT, Steverino eventually realized that making his software work across many platforms was the way to go. So in 1992, NeXT suddenly decided to "shoot the hardware division in the head" (Steve's words) and stop making hardware and port their software to other platforms (at the time, it was Intel, Motorola 68K and 88K, and HP). Many people suggest that this is what Apple should do -- let a bunch of clone makers worry about the hardware, and focus on the software instead. If Apple had a MacOS product that ran on Intel hardware and was priced along the same lines of Win/95, they could compete directly with MicroSoft for the PC desktop. From a technical point of view, however, this would be a huge mistake. One of the reasons I hate using PC's is that the hardware is totally nonstandard and all the add-ons are similar yet different. So getting a machine put together is actually fairly difficult. And writing software for these machines can also get very complicated because you'll never know what kind of hardware is beneath you. Randy