Apple Strategy
I don't see the eMac as being an Apple offensive. Instead, I see it as a defensive reaction to increasing aggression on the part of Dell and others on Apple's stronghold, the education market.
The eMac is a very low-margin computer, relative to the rest of the line, except maybe the old iMac.
The eMac may, however, serve another strategic purpose. The more volume the eMac can generate, the more value Apple is to Motorola. Hence, more volume with Apple motivates Motorola to work harder, devote more resources towards developing semiconductors that serve Apple's interests.
While I don't lose sleep, but one issue that worries me somewhat is the prospect of too many little soldiers taking on the evil giant Microsoft.
For those of you that remember the dawn of the x86 computer age, IBM not only licensed DOS from Microsoft but from two other providers as well. Microsoft practically gave it away to establish a market share beach head that rapidly grew to a network externality that squeezed the other two out. The same thing later happened to MacOS: to play in corporateland and elsewhere, one must employ a Microsoft OS.
So, how does this apply now? There are two viable OS's hoping to steal market share from Microsoft. Obviously, MacOS is far in the way the leading challenger. But, there is a movement to make a worthy Linux desktop for consumers. If MS is forced to license Office to other OS developers, it would serve MS's interests to have Linux and other OS's do well enough to dilute Apple's budding network externality. So, Apple needs to find a way so that Application development on Linux can very, very easily work on MacOS X with not only no quality loss but a quality increase!!!
Linux does not seem like a threat to Apple now. But if we're talking strategy as opposed to tactics, Apple damn well better be thinking about this.
As far as the merit of targeting the education market goes, it hasn't done squat to help Apple except provide a floor in terms of market share for Apple to stand on and not fall into oblivion.
Now, however, with MacOS X, a Unix variant, the education strategy has radically more merit. Linux grew legs in the universities. With MacOS X, computer geeks get not only a credible Unix variant but a credible office desktop with MS Office, top-notch multimedia software, and many, many mainstream software applications.
Apple is a long, long way from being positioned to target the desktop of the average employee in an enterprise. However, there are a lot of technical employees that employ some flavor of Unix in their jobs. These individuals often have another desktop machine with a Windows environment so that they can collaborate/communicate with the rest of the company, particularly dependent upon MS Office.
Apple MacOS X and Office X enable corporations to consolidate from two desktops to one for each of these employees. These employees generally have greater freedom from the network administrators that have and continue to keep Apple out of their networks. With a foothold, not a beach head because the number of such employees is not great enough, network administrators and senior management will become increasingly familiar and comfortable with Apple's being in their offices, with buying Apple's for employees.
Another thing that can work in Apple's favor would be very cheap Internet and network bandwidth for the enterprise. When this is so, desktop video conferencing can thrive more so than it does today. Also, there needs to be some further solidification of open standards on MPLS, DiffServ, and QoS.
Because Apple engineers both the software and the hardware, it has a distinct advantage and opportunity to make desktop video conferencing far superior to that of MS misguided PC's. This could be very important to the enterprise.
But corporations won't buy Mac's just because of superior desktop video conferencing. They need to be more comfortable and confident in its productivity in the office. More and more Unix applications are porting to MacOS X. Perhaps more and more technical employees will use Apple desktops. With these two factors, Apple would have a much stronger hand in the corporate world. But even so, it won't be easy.
Well, this post is getting awfully long. It's nearly time for bed so I'd better take my Zoloft; where the **** is that goddamn G5 and super motherboard?
Eirik