Did Apple computers fail in the 1980's because of Price?

[MisterMe]

Ok, after reading everything you wrote, I still don't see your explanation as to why Apple lost out on the marketshare back in the 80s.

Now you have switched from claiming Apple was doomed in the 1980's to claiming that it lost marketshare. That is not quite the same thing.

Apple was on the verge of oblivion. Hindsight is 20/20 and it's very easy to take your assessment as a glass-half-full scenario when looking at Apple's success today, but to compare it to the realities that the company was dealing with at the time, you're way off the wall. The company was almost doomed with the release with Copland. It wasn't until Jobs came back and turned things around by hitting a home run with money-makers like the iMac that Apple starting seeing sunny days again.

On the verge of oblivion is not the same as falling into oblivion. As for Copland, this was an issue for the mid-1990's. This thread was originally about the 1980's. If you want to start a thread about the 1990's, feel free to do so.

Sigh...Ok, here's a fact for you to swallow: Apple's got below 5% marketshare in the industry today. Better yet, Microsoft controls around 90% marketshare. Can you spend some time enlightening us as to why that's so? And by that, can you point to where Apple missed the boat badly, because it seems to me no one around here gets their "facts straight" except for you, and we see that in how you tear up everybody's argument but fail to offer your own insight.

Apple has 5% marketshare, but it is 5% and growing. It is a profitable 5% and growing.

If you want me to do your research for you, I won't do that. However, I will get you started on your own research. David K. Every is not unbiased, but he is knowledgeable. Every has a second site with more recent information. You may also try the excellent Apple History site.

 

[DaveP]

I can't speak too much about Apple's past, but as an old Atari ST user I can speak of IBM/MS overtaking and killing off or nearly killing off other companies in the late 80's and early 90's. My take is that it mostly boils down to bad marketing and ignorant users. IBM had this aura of the premier technology machine company and for serious work. The other companies, such as Apple, who had superior products were not able to successfully convince enough users that they were being duped into blindly buying inferior stuff, albeit from a "superior company." MS rode in on IBM's coat tails and was clever enough to see the power of software and licensing OS's. Just my take.

 

[IJ Reilly]

DIdn't the IBM PC with DOS come out after Apple released the Mac?

IBM rush released it because of stellar Mac sales and Microsoft were willing to creata an OS in no time at all to meet a deadline.

No! As explained previously, the IBM-PC came out in 1981. The first clones arrived in 1983 (from Compaq). The Mac, as we know, came out in 1984. The PC was rushed into production because IBM needed something to compete with the Apple II, which was at the time proving the market for desktop computers, a market IBM would very much have liked to wish away in favor of the big iron where they made their money traditionally. The PC was designed essentially as a throw-away product. They used off-the-shelf technology to build it and farmed out the OS. When Compaq cracked the PC's ROM-BIOS, this was the beginning of the end for the IBM-PC and a huge gift to Microsoft. This obviously wasn't how IBM planned it; but then, IBM didn't plan it very well.

Apple's biggest strategic error (IMO) was not understanding that their real competition during the '80s was Microsoft, not IBM.

Also, lest we forget, the late '80s - early '90s timeframe was very profitable for Apple. The Mac's market share was in the middle teens during this time. It only dropped precipitously after the clone fiasco, and never did recover.

 

[miloblithe]

In the 80s there were so many systems that it seems unrealistic to paint the entire competition as Mac-PC. There were the Atari 800s and STs, Amigas, Apple IIs, Commodore 64s/128s... Didn't Radio Shack have its own line of computers well into the 80s? Where they CP/M? I'm sure there are a bunch of things I'm not mentioning. What were higher-end workstations running like Sun and Apollo? When did 0S/2 come out? I think that given the competition, most strategists didn't figure that one system would come to dominate nearly the entire market. So let IBM have business. Mac will do desktop publishing and university, Apple II will be for K-12 education, Amigas for video, and so on.

Wasn't it only by the early 1990s that it became clear that it was MS-PC vrs Mac and all the others would go out of buisiness?

 

[MisterMe]

In the 80s there were so many systems that it seems unrealistic to paint the entire competition as Mac-PC. There were the Atari 800s and STs, Amigas, Apple IIs, Commodore 64s/128s... Didn't Radio Shack have its own line of computers well into the 80s? Where they CP/M? I'm sure there are a bunch of things I'm not mentioning. What were higher-end workstations running like Sun and Apollo? When did 0S/2 come out? I think that given the competition, most strategists didn't figure that one system would come to dominate nearly the entire market. So let IBM have business. Mac will do desktop publishing and university, Apple II will be for K-12 education, Amigas for video, and so on.

Wasn't it only by the early 1990s that it became clear that it was MS-PC vrs Mac and all the others would go out of buisiness?

You are correct. The world was a very different place in the 1980's than it was in the 1990's. Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 Model I in 1977. It introduded the TRS-80 Model II in 1978, IIRC. There were other TRS-80 models, including the Model 12, which had a Z-80 and a 68000. It ran both TRS-DOS, Radio Shack's OS, and Xenix, Microsoft's version of Unix. There were several companies--some of them with big names--which played significant roles in the development of the personal computer industry. One of the fundamental sillinesses of this thread is that Apple is really the lone survivor among the pioneering personal computer hardware companies. Yet you have people here trying to explain why the company was "doomed."

 

[IJ Reilly]

Wasn't it only by the early 1990s that it became clear that it was MS-PC vrs Mac and all the others would go out of buisiness?

The "standardization" mentality had taken a firm hold by the late '80s. Back then, and for a long time afterwards, hardly anyone understood then the value of a diverse computer market, or the dangers of handing overwhelming market power to one of the players. The general feeling -- and you could read this in the tech press every day -- was that one standard had to "win" and the others had to "lose," or the result would be confusion amongst consumers and market chaos in general. A lot of people believe this exceptionally foolish idea even to this day. The rationale is/was the illogical extension of the "beta vs. VHS" analogy.

 

[calyxman]

Apple's biggest strategic error (IMO) was not understanding that their real competition during the '80s was Microsoft, not IBM.

Thank you!

 

[snkTab]

Sometimes things just don't happen. Leadership is important, and we know Apple didn't have good leadership through the tough times. Apple really didn't have anything to offer special to the market during the bad times. What I mean is Apple positioned itself, just like it is now, to be a high quality brand, to be a computer that's akin to a bmw rather than a your average car. However, OS and software developments stalled in creativity and hardware was going nowhere.

In the end, Apple wasn't ambitious. And that that extent, they wouldn't take the risk to create anything spectacular. Which is why Job's second coming is great. Hardware development shifted gears... and I mean from park to drive, the abandonment of classic in favor of OS X, notwithstanding OS X as a better operating system, it sparked a lot of creativity inter-company, software like iLife, the production suite, and of course the iPod.

Sometimes it’s better to just reinvent the wheel. For one, it makes people rethink instead of accepting the status-quo. When you have to fix your program ever time Apple updates its OS =) , you might have thought about something else to add, something you would have to reengineer a good part of the code to do, which you wouldn’t have done if your application still worked.

Which is what I think is wrong with Microsoft. They just add to windows. The heap is just so big now it’s hard to handle. Developers don’t do anything creative anymore, they don’t get to make stuff, and they do is extend and append. Have you seen the screenshots from Longhorn, it looks nice, but they you see the “other screenshots”, the ones with win98’s style, and you have to think to yourself, they aren’t making an operating system!!! They are just adding stuff to older windows. Don’t believe it when they say they are reengineering windows cause they just aren’t. Just like how they said Window’s XP was built almost from scratch, except the scratch materials happened to include windows 98 and 2000’s code.