XP 1984, X.1 the future.

[kiwi_the_iwik]

The majority of macs are purchased via mail order, or online. The positive side to that is prices are relatively low (although more expensive than our US counterparts), because of low overheads. The negative side is that we occasionally have a hell of a time when trying to deal with them re. repairs or warranty help.

It's a shame; because when you do go to a department store, the poor Mac corner looks positively dire. I feel an obligation to go and tidy it up, straightening up the desktops, starting the demo videos, and even playing around with iMovie - especially when someone's looking over my shoulder. The assistants even learn a thing or two. I think that I must've sold a few computers on their behalf.

 

[Conspiracy theory]

Apple reputation

Apple actually is getting the idea that sales people at most computer stores don't really know much, if anything at all about there products, and have started to put there own apple trained people at different locations.
The one thing that Apple still has to compete against, and we all know this is how to convince an average user that a 500mhz Imac at 799, is a better than a 1.4ghz P4 for a hundred or so more. Maybe apple should try a new scheme like AMD and name there chips in a different format not just in mhz, or ghz as the case maybe the case in a few months.

 

[kiwi_the_iwik]

Good Idea...

I like that - don't subscribe to the clock cycle battle - name a chip. Call it "Daphne", or "Rupert". Make it appeal to the wider audience.

I'm bamboozled by the whole "gigahertz war" thingy. I know that a G4 887Mhz is as fast as a 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 because I've seen the spec sheets. I know that a RISC chip uses different and less complicated pipelines to that of its competitor, the CISC chip. I don't get the comparison between G3 or G4 chips, though. In general, the whole thing just annoys the hell out of me.

People don't need to know the speeds of the chips - the focus should be on its speed in programs, like Photoshop, or 3D rendering - or even games (usually a big selling point).

 

[jefhatfield]

tech sales people

i learned a lot working at office depot and was working my way to being a "competant" salesman until a microsoft guy recruited me out of the store, the guy who replaced me in sales also went into high tech teaching A+ theory and then became a WAN tech, and the guy after that is working on his redhat RHCE certification and might enter the IT field...and all this in 2 years

so this is the continuing problem with high tech salespeople because they see other people who are techs who make a lot more money and they get hungry for a piece of the pie

the sales field will never retain the best if they pay so low compared to actual technicians in the IT field...it may cost the store more in the short run but good knowledgeable salespeople could eventually boost sales to the point of more than covering their higher salary

in silicon valley, i say pay the salespeople $35,000/USD a year and leave out commission to avoid selling the wrong stuff to uneducated customers...the average first year network engineer makes over 40K a year starting salary with 2 years experience (visual basic magazine) and an experienced A+ tech could garner as much as 59K

this 10-12k a year business of paying high tech salespeople is a joke!

in my other business, landscaping, i pay my people top dollar, let them run themselves and not worry about them, and guess what...they do a great job!

 

[oldMac]

Getting Apple back to 10%...

So what will it take to get Apple back to a 10% market share?

The answer is simple, they need to sell 2-3 times as many machines as they currently do, for at least 2 years.

Let's face facts, folks. This is only going to happen if Apple can do the following.

1) Increase the professional customer base.

- This means selling more machines to professional users including graphic artists, publishers, photo professionals and other creative folks.

This is unique market in that they tend to care less about the price of a machine and more about the value / performance it can provide.

Keys to making this happen:

a) Offer more powerful machines (quad G4's w/DDR)
b) Make Mac/Windows networking seamless
c) Bundle high-end applications w/ high-end machines (Final Cut Pro, Quicktime Pro, DVD Studio)
d) Offer more professional software (aggressively purchase strategic software companies)

2) Increase the home-user customer base.

- These folks want to browse the web, play games, hook up all their digital toys, send email to grandma and communicate better with their roomate/significant other's PC.

- AND - They WANT IT CHEAP!

Here are the keys to winning these customers.

a) Make the iMac cheaper.
b) Make Mac/Windows networking seamless
c) Bundle more applications and games.
d) Improve AppleWorks Word doc compatibility and advertise that feature.
e) Advertise the iMac (a lot more)

3) Create new markets

- There are some very solid markets out there that Apple needs to aggressively pursue.

a) Serious Servers
b) Professional Film production
c) CAD

---------------------------------------------
Long term strategies...

It's the software, stupid.

The PC market is much more about software than it is about hardware! With each passing year, hardware is more and more of a commodity.

Apple should be creating software to do 3 things...

1) Increase the inherent value of the Macintosh.
- Executing well with consumer titles (iMovie, iTunes)
- Executing poorly with professional titles (FCP,QT)

2) Provide smooth transitions to future hardware changes and increase platform compatibility.
- Mac OS X / Darwin helps here
- Altivec does not help here
- Apple should be building PPC emulators in R&D
- Apple should be building x86 emulators in R&D
- Apple should be forking the WINE project
- Apple should be working on compilers that take advantage of Altivec without burdening the programmer

3) Make the Mac platform the easiest platform to program for professionals and amateurs.
- It's better with Mac OS X than it was before
- It still needs lots of improvement
- Hardware catching up with Java will help a lot
- The entire industry is doing a crappy job, imho
- Need a modern replacement for hypercard
- Apple should create "port kits" for Unix apps
- Apple should support X-Windows
- Apple should participate more in open source projects where it obviously benefits them (or hurts competitors 🙂)






[Edited by oldMac on 11-09-2001 at 06:38 PM]

 

[jefhatfield]

everything sounds logical

...but how is a 4 billion dollar cash reserve going to fund all these changes for a major silicon valley company like apple when the stock is down?

4 bil is great for a giant bill gates style house in the woods, but how do you turn around an entire coporation where the coporate culture has been legendarily unbusinesslike ( i bought my last mac from an apple accountant)

the unflattering comments made against apple by almost every business publication in the 1990s only sounded like history put behind it when apple gave the market a top selling imac follwed by a top selling ibook in '98 and '99, but the so called "curse" of apple dropping the ball came true the following two years in a way that even the book "infinite loop" would not dare predict

i believe steve jobs is better for apple than gil emilio was but maybe no one could bring apple back to 10 percent with the likes of dell ravaging the market, especially in the education sector where they quadrupled their market share!

but you are so right in assessing that the home user market wants their machines cheap and your outline is the most intelligent thing i have seen on these posts in a long time

[Edited by jefhatfield on 11-09-2001 at 07:15 PM]

 

[oldMac]

how to pay for it...

Having to pay salaries and such always puts a damper on things, doesn't it? 🙂

First, I would argue (and many people will disagree with me here), that NOW is NOT the time to attempt to increase Apple's consumer marketshare by doing anything that would hurt short-term revenues.

All the strategic thinking in the world won't help Apple if they can't pay their bills in the short-term.

The key to the transition is (re) focusing resources. Apple has had a lot of very talented programmers working on OS X during the past year. While much work will continue to go into OS X, they probably don't need *all* of those folks on the project right now.

Obviously, there aren't going to be enough resources to do *everything* right now. But you can probably pick a couple from the list. And a couple of those will probably put you in a financial position to do a couple more later.

Steve Jobs has got one thing really right -- It's all about focus. You can't do something right if you're not dedicated and committed to finishing it. And when you've made a mistake, dump it (Cube) and start over (?).

For as many *cool* things that Apple did during the Sculley/Spindler/Amelio years, they typically tried to do too many at one time and generally never finished what they started.

As a result we ended up with a lot of potentially cool stuff (opendoc, Copland, prep, chrp, newton, quickdraw 3-d, quicktime VR, dylan, pippin, geoport, firewire, etc. ) that was never finished, half-assed or simply missed the mark.

Credit where credit is due...

Yeah, yeah... so they finally finished firewire. But think of how nice it would have been if they'd brought it to market when they invented it... in 1987.

There is one thing we really do need to give Apple's old guard credit for: The 68K to PowerPC transition was one of the most well-executed, remarkable projects in Apple's history.

That was NOT an easy thing to do, but they made it look easy. Had they figured out a way to emulate the math coprocessor, I think they could have shipped the PPC boxes and a new compiler (thank Metrowerks, ironically now part of Motorola) without 99% of users knowing the difference.

 

[jefhatfield]

bill g

oldmac,

let's say if bill gates owns between 15 to 30 percent of apple, the actual figure is not known, why can't he pitch in to apple's development since he gets to sell all those office:mac softwares to us...unless he is already investing in apple (i guess we will never know)

any companies' highest expense 2 to 1 over anything else is the wages and salaries, which apple could definitely boost -especially compared to the other IT companies in the silicon valley

the fact that apple is even around at all is an amazing thing so "breakthroughs" that we expect will come at a slower pace in this now sluggish economy and many of us will probably be asking apple why things are moving so slow

the conservative approach now seen in IT is due to the uncertain times and the 9-11 tragedy probably had little to do with it since the slowdown started more than a year ago with the drop of the dot.coms which brought an amazing amount of money to high tech as much as i hate to admit it

i have been seeing more cautious predictions of a short necked CRT flat screen iMac as a product over a full on LCD iMac...maybe the LCD thing isn't slated for another year and maybe apple will give us speed bumped G4s for another year before releasing the rumored G5

r and d costs big money and the progress of apple has to fit their budget because faster computers no longer seem to woo the masses like it once did...i noticed this at the advent of the 1 GHz more than a year ago

 

[sparkleytone]

from what i understand bill g not only has a mac at his house, but its his favorite machine. i thought the person who told me this was kidding but apparently its true. i mean dammit who wouldnt love it?

 

[MasterX (OSiX)]

Bill G (Dr. Evil reincarnate?)

Bill gates is the most evil mac user. Things he stole recetly:

Visual GUI: Hey this looks cool, I want it.
Desktop Video Editing
Pippin: Xbox (haha, it's a stretch)
MacOS X: XP

The problem w/MS's new campaign, is that to better "understand" the consumer. But they market the wrong ppl, for XP they probably looked toward ppl w/o computers. What they NEEDED to do was look at ppl who hate their WinBox. With XBox MS found the cords were too shart, Nintendo saw the saeme thing. Bottom line: XBox has a 10' wire. Gamecube has an optional wireless controler. XBox is a PC, Gamecube is a more succesfull G4 Cube (both are Risc, have a DVD drive, run a UNIX-based OS, and have ATi Graphics GPUs)